article

Anish Kapoor’s Dance With Illusion

Dr. Gerry Coulter

Scale (from the very small to the very large), colour (especially vivid reds), and form (mysterious passageways), are vital to Anish Kapoor’s dance with illusion. His gigantic works challenge and overwhelm us as bodily presences and his smaller delicate works draw us into their mysterious points of disappearance. Many of his stronger works of the past quarter century disappear out of the space they occupy pointing us toward a place we cannot (physically) follow. If these disappearances have a destination it is as a gesture towards the infinite, the unknowable, the eternal which we can ever only grasp in thought for an instant. more...

article

Is it Art? In London You Can Ask the Police

Victoria Z. Alexander

Recently we have witnessed one of the most chilling events in recent art history as Directors of the Tate Modern in Britain pulled Richard Prince’s Spiritual America (which includes a nude image of 10 year old Brooke Shields) from the Pop-Life Exhibition. The original image is a photograph taken by Gary Gross which Prince appropriated for his work because he thought it captured some troubling aspects of contemporary society. Do you think it is child pornography? Until the Tate show it hung unproblematically in galleries and museums around the world for almost three decades. After a visit from London’s Metropolitan Police (Obscene Publications Unit) the work was pulled from the Pop-Life show because police told the Tate administration that it might break obscenity laws. more...

Art Work

Substop: A short film about a guy with a pen (one minute).

Realized by Denis Leo Hegic and Thuan Te

Synopsis:An average person spends 2.6 minutes per hour / 62 minutes per day / 5 years of life waiting for things.Through contemporary technology gadgets waiting time is in the process of transformation into "useful" time. But is waiting really such a waste? Waiting has also a sweetness. Waiting is a time when thoughts are recollected. Waiting is a time when ideas are born. Time when sparks are made. Patience is a virtue of the clever ones. Substop is a short film showing that waiting can be a creative process itself - as long as you are listening to the silent ideas in your head. Good things come to those who wait. more...

FOUND OBJECT

Cornelia Parker at the V&A

Video, Duration:3:06 min

Cornelia Ann Parker OBE (born 1956; Cheshire, UK) is an English sculptor and installation artist. Parker studied at Gloucestershire College of Art and Design (1974–75) and Wolverhampton Polytechnic (1975–78). She received her MFA from Reading University in 1982, an honorary doctorate from the University of Wolverhampton in 2000 and the University of Birmingham (2005). In 1997, she was shortlisted for the Turner Prize along with Christine Borland, Angela Bulloch, and Gillian Wearing (who won the prize). Cornelia Parker worked as a Professor of Conceptual Art at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, where she conducts with Klaus Ottmann intensive summer seminars. more...

FOUND OBJECT

Francis Bacon - Documentary part 1/6

Video, Duration:9:37 min

Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount of St. Alban, KC (22 January 1561 – 9 April 1626) was an English philosopher, statesman, scientist, lawyer, jurist and author. He served both as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England. Although his political career ended in disgrace, he remained extremely influential through his works, especially as philosophical advocate and practitioner of the scientific revolution. His works established and popularized deductive methodologies for scientific inquiry, often called the Baconian method or simply, the scientific method. His demand for a planned procedure of investigating all things natural marked a new turn in the rhetorical and theoretical framework for science, much of which still surrounds conceptions of proper methodology today. more...

FOUND OBJECT

I. M. Pei on Louis I. Kahn

Video, Duration:3:17 min

Ieoh Ming Pei was born in China in 1917, the son of a prominent banker. At age 17 he came to the United States to study architecture, and received a Bachelor of Architecture degree from MIT in 1940. Upon graduation he was awarded the Alpha Rho Chi Medal, the MIT Traveling Fellowship, and the AIA Gold Medal. In 1942, Pei enrolled in the Harvard Graduate School of Design where he studied under Walter Gropius; six months later, he volunteered his services to the National Defense Research Committee in Princeton. Pei returned to Harvard in 1944 and completed his M.Arch in 1946, simultaneously teaching on the faculty as an assistant professor (1945–48). Awarded the Wheelwright Traveling Fellowship by Harvard in 1951, he traveled extensively in England, France, Italy and Greece. more...

FOUND OBJECT

Helen van Meene

Video, Duration:2:13 min

The young women in Hellen van Meene's extraordinary colour portraits are friends and acquaintances, people she has grown up with or encountered in her home town of Alkmaar in Holland. Children, pre-pubescents, teenagers and twenty-somethings: van Meene's subjects range in age. Sometimes a girl is photographed over time, and we see her growing up in front of the camera. There are curious, underlying tensions in the portraits - between vulnerability and composure, awkwardness and grace, intimacy and detachment, naturalness and artifice. The scene of each picture is set very carefully by the artist, as she chooses location and clothing, make-up and mise en sc?ne. These staged scenarios then contrast powerfully with the frank realism with which the girls are pictured. more...

FOUND OBJECT

Jenny Holzer on Meret Oppenheim’s “Object [lunch in fur]” (1936)

Video, Duration:2:00 min

A Swiss painter, sculptor, and photographer who came to Paris in the 1930s, Meret Oppenheim was regarded in artistic circles as the ideal Surrealist woman--a so-called femme-enfant whose lack of inhibitions and subversive behavior made her as much an object of desire and a muse as she was an artist in her own right. First exhibiting with the other Surrealists at the Salon des Surindépendants in Paris of 1933, Oppenheim is today best known for her sculpture Object (Le Déjeuner en fourrure) (1936), in which she covered a cup and saucer in fur. The result of a casual conversation with Picasso in which he noted that more...

FOUND OBJECT

Janaina Tschäpe

Since 1997, Janaina Tschäpe has employed the female body as her muse, creating universes of polymorphous landscapes, embryonic forms and ambiguous characters. Tschäpe's drawings, photographs, films and installations seek to give form to the trance of art making, portraying not a dream world, but the sensation of being in one. Personal myths and memories are transformed into surreal images that escape rational explanation yet are universally identifiable. For her Graphicstudio print projects and her video installation Blood, Sea at the USFCAM, Tschäpe worked with the professional mermaids at the Florida attraction, Weeki Wachee Springs. more...

FOUND OBJECT

J. G. Ballard (1994)

This videointerview was recorded on the 10th may 1994 in Shepperton at JG Ballard's home by me, E. "Gomma" Guarneri, from Milano, and Matthew Fuller, londoner. As, with my publishing cooperative ShaKe, I had published the italian edition of "Re/Search JGB", I had the idea to
pick up the phone, call JGB and ask him: "Can we come to see you?". That was the first time I talked with him. And he said yes, come now! In 30 minutes we took the train from Victoria and reached Shepperton. The first thing he did was to offer us a big glass of whisky. more...

FOUND OBJECT

John Cage “In A Landscape"

John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer, philosopher, poet, music theorist, artist, printmaker, and amateur mycologist and mushroom collector. A pioneer of chance music, electronic music and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde. Critics have lauded him as one of the most influential American composers of the 20th century. He was also instrumental in the development of modern dance, mostly through his association with choreographer Merce Cunningham, who was also Cage's romantic partner for most of their lives. more...

FOUND OBJECT

Marcel Duchamp “I don’t care about the world art…”

Marcel Duchamp (28 July 1887 – 2 October 1968) was a French/American artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art. He advised modern art collectors, such as Peggy Guggenheim and other prominent figures, thereby helping to shape the tastes of Western art during this period.Marcel Duchamp interviewed by Joan Bakewell. Originally produced as television broadcast by the BBC TV for the program 'Late Night Line Up' on 5 June 1968, on the occasion of Arturo Schwarz's lecture at the ICA, London. more...

Art Blog

Joseph Nechvatal

Joseph Nechvatal has worked with ubiquitous electronic visual information and computer-robotics since 1986. His computer-robotic assisted paintings and computer animations are shown regularly in galleries and museums throughout the world. He has recently worked as artist in-resident at the Louis Pasteur studio and the Ledoux Foundation's computer lab in Arbois, France on 'The Computer Virus Project': an experiment with computer viruses as a creative stratagem. Dr. Nechvatal has exhibited his work widely in Europe and the United States, both in private and public venues. He is collected by the Los Angeles County Museum, the Moderna Musset in Stockholm, Sweden and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Dr. Nechvatal's work was included in Documenta 8. more...

Art Blog

New Art [vvoi – Poland]

"Maybe art, maybe some art, maybe this art, maybe some of this art, serves turning the absence opaque, that is, making it at once palpable and impenetrable, so we cannot go back, so we are stuck in the appreciation of this strange, utopic now, and any attempt to overcome it, to look for the actual empty space, meets the opacity of an object, an image, a substitute, substitute not of a reality, but of what ceased to be, of the void that hence remains beyond us, happily or unhappily, hard to say, replaced by the fundamentally meager and helplessly sublime moment of a hesitant, aesthetic, experience, too private to be credible, too credible to be intimate, and yet ours, because we want it to be, because we claim it as such, because we know we inherited it from the silence that came before." more...

art agenda

Paul Gauguin at TATE Modern, London

September 30, 2010 – January 16, 2011

Britain will soon host its first major Gauguin show in half a century. The artist who drew upon impressionism and symbolism perhaps better than any other (while contributing to a new expressionist colour palate) has, alongside of van Gogh, become a favourite of his generation. Along with van Gogh he possessed the gift of the painter who understood that colour could be sumptuous. He also held to a poetic theory of light which, unlike scientific theories, understands that light emanates from the object. Gauguin sought to escape the Europe which the Europeans had destroyed and in so doing participated in the destruction of the island cultures he so admired. The TATE is promising many iconic Gauguin’s more...

art agenda

Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective – LA MOCA

June 6 – September 20, 2010

Arshile Gorky (b. c.1902, Khorkom, Armenia; d. 1948 Sherman, Conn.) was a seminal figure in the movement toward abstraction that transformed American art in the middle of the 20th century. Born in an Armenian village on the eastern border of Ottoman Turkey, Gorky was a first-hand witness to the Turkish government's Armenian Genocide of 1915, which led the artist's family and thousands of others to flee. In 1920, Gorky emigrated to the United States and eventually settled in New York, where he became a largely self-taught artist. more...

art agenda

Where is Architecture? Seven Installations by Japanese Architects

National Museum of Modern Art – Tokyo, April 29 – August 8, 2010

The exhibition features installations by seven groups of Japanese architects. To create "architecture," architects are expected to deal with a variety of conditions. This requires a way of thinking that deftly balances logic, technique, and aesthetics. One might also argue that this profound sense of balance is what has led to the international recognition of Japanese architecture. In trying to determine the special characteristics of "architecture," therefore, examining where and in what form it arises seems more viable than simply addressing the question, "What is architecture? more...

art agenda

Gabriel Orozco – Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland

April 18 – August 8, 2010

In a major survey, the Kunstmuseum Basel will exhibit installations, sculptures, photographs, paintings, and drawings by the Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco, born in 1962. He is considered one of the most important artists of the present, and divides his time between New York, Paris, and Mexico City. His peripatetic lifestyle, and the principle of constant motion characteristic of his generation, is reflected in many ways in his work. This ranges in scope from a photographically recorded trace of breath on a piano, to a Citroën DS that more...

art agenda

Dreamlands – Centre Pompidou, Paris

May 5 –August 9, 2010

Dreamlands considers the question of how World's Fairs, international exhibitions, theme parks and kindred institutions have influenced ideas about the city. Duplicating and reduplicating reality through the creation of replicas, embracing an aesthetic of accumulation and collage that is often close to kitsch, these self-enclosed parallel worlds have frequently afforded inspiration to the artistic, architectural and urbanistic practices of the twentieth century, and may even be said to have served as models for certain contemporary constructions. more...