<h1>Archives</h1>
    aggregation, contemporary art

    Found Objects 02/01/13

    January 2, 2013

    A focussed set of Found Objects this week as it proves time to crank up the blog again after an extended holiday season. Good to be back.

    • Brighton might be the UK piercing capital, but even we would look twice at these Thai festival goers. Check out the gallery by Guillaume Megevand on Beautiful Decay.
    • Another collection of photos got flagged up on Twitter over the last fortnight. This time, it’s female Russian museum guards by Andy Freeberg on Slate (via @rosieclarke).
    • More photos! These are from the Tokyo Times and represent that paper’s pick of its published pics from 2012
    • Here’s a longread from photography blog American Suburb X: not photos but a republished interview with filmmaker Sergio Leone.
    • Steve Bell looks back at the year in cartoons on the Guardian website. A must for anyone with an interest in UK politics.
    • The same paper meanwhile donates a few hundred words to Grayson Perry, who talks about his earliest stabs at making art (his uncannyily clairvoyant art, one might add)
    • Art Fag City link to a film about Olaf Breuning. His 1%/99% piece looks like a suitably unsettling comment on our unsettling times.
    • On a lighter note: some insane graffiti writers from Animal New York. And the Onion reports on a boring conversation on a plane (thanks Adrian Hyland).
    • Finally Richard Moss, Editor at Culture24, has compiled an exhaustive look ahead to the exxhibtions taking place in Britain this year.: just. can’t. wait.

    artists' studios, Brighton, campaigns

    Save APEC Studios

    December 19, 2012

    apec_splash

    Industrial House in Conway Street Hove looks just as workmanlike as its name would suggest. If I was a councillor presented with the chance to knock it down, I just might.

    But having been inside the office-like space, the industry seems to be altogether more interesting than, say, just the embroidery of sports logos. Inside they are making art.

    So perhaps the resident sportswear business should have taken over the whole building. Chances are that way all talk of demolition could be avoided. Logos have clear social value.

    Art, as usual, is viewed as a marginal, obsolete activity. But there are 18 diverse artists currently working in APEC studios, housed in this building for almost 10 years.

    They range in age from 23 to more than 70. They are players in a city art scene which already suffers from lack of galleries and affordable space in which to make art.

    Now they face eviction. Shame that grants were once secured in good faith to set up APEC. Money donated by Arts Council England and Co-operative Finance, counts for nought.

    That’s not to mention the contributions of founding members, many of whom gave up their time and skills to transform the interior into workable units of creative space.

    Good news is, since this is Christmas, you can help. APEC need just 1250 signatures to prompt a debate on this matter in a full council meeting.

    “Workshops, office space, studios, storage and other premises remain affordable, appropriate and available for use,” said the council. Can’t put it much better than that.

    Please take a moment to sign the APEC petition by Friday at the latest. We can and should hold Brighton Council to their word on this.

    17th century, painting

    Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane by Andrew Graham-Dixon

    December 16, 2012

    caravaggio book

    Of the half a dozen mass market art paperbacks you might find in your local good book store, there may be at least two biographies of Michaelangelo Caravaggio.

    In addition to this, the latest, there may be another recent account by Peter Robb. That book, called M, emulates the passions of the painter’s life with a lyrical, some might say hysterical, tone.

    So plaudits should go to Graham-Dixon’s balanced account. Whether digging up period documents or looking closely at the paintings themselves it is a better read.

    Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane debunks the conspiracy theories surrounding the painter’s tempestuous life. Not assassinated, he quite likely died of a heart attack.

    Of course some circumstances remain mysterious. However the artist escaped from a dungeon on Malta, thrown there by the island’s Knights, is to this day a riddle.

    Likewise, there will always be something shadowy about Caravaggio’s nocturnal activities in Rome. Graham-Dixon suggests he was a pimp, one of the book‘s shocks

    Another topic of wonder concerns the painter‘s craft. He appears to be self-taught. He never bothered to draw. And yet, he became one of Europe‘s most influential talents.

    Graham-Dixon even tracks his influence as far as modern day Hollywood, as we learn that Mean Streets (1973) by Martin Scorcese owes its urban sensibility and lighting to the painter.

    But what to make of his argumentativeness, his ever present sword and dagger. He even went so far as to sleep fully armed in Sicily, a man on the run.

    That image too, is a gift to cinema or literature, but has there ever been an artist in fiction with quite as much violence and passion as this real archetype, possibly not.

    Incidentally, while still reading this book I came across reference to a 1994 exhibition in Floria Brown Gallery, Woody Creek, Colorado called Two Guys With Guns Making Art.

    Those two “guys” were William S Burroughs and Hunter S Thompson, neither primarily known for the plastic arts, but unwitting heirs of Caravaggio all the same.

    This book can be found in your nearest good bookshop or, if you must, Amazon, along with a deluge of titles devoted to the life of Caravaggio.

    aggregation, contemporary art

    Found Objects 10/12/12

    December 10, 2012

    It’s been a huge week in art, if you live in Miami. On these shores it was the Turner Prize. And there was no escaping either.

    • My favourite coverage of the aforementioned Prize came from music journalist Alexis Petridis writing in the Guardian. Second fave bit of coverage came from the good folk at Pipe
    • Meanwhile the Art Newspaper pulled together a compendium of opinions on the parlous state of the art (fair) world
    • Art Info also posted a slideshow that could make you despair to not have a million or two reserved for such occasions
    • News abounded this week. From The Independent: two men were jailed for stealing a Henry Moore and selling it for £46. And a Raphael sketch went for considerably more
    • RIP Oscar Niemeyer, curve-loving architect responsible for Brazilia. He had a good innings, designing a 2003 Serpentine Pavilion in his 90s
    • The Telegraph interviewed Chuck Close. “Very often women seem to love me” – not my words
    • A Hyperallergic review of Phyllida Barlow suggests a transatlantic continuation of the form she hit last year at Hauser & Wirth Picadilly
    • Can’t wait for this British Museum show of ice age art. 40,000 years in the making, etc. The Guardian reports
    • Art Wednesday pose a Q&A with the winner of the 2012 Jerwood Drawing Prize: Karolina Glusiec
    • Finally the film of the book of the artist Robert Motherwell. That’s a gift idea you can have for free.

    20th century, abstract painting

    Bill Henderson, Funky Black and Catch Me, 1978

    December 5, 2012

    This painting reaches back through the years to a teenage in the 80s. This spiky pattern would have bowled me over and indeed still does. Perhaps I once had a duvet cover like it.

    What makes Henderson’s painting, dare it be said, boyish are the preponderance of dynamic angles and bold colours, complete with moody blacks and cool greys.

    But while its colour scheme is striking, its composition is absorbing. There’s a picture-book level of detail, with fifty discrete banded painted studies within this one large scale canvas.

    Talking about another of his paintings, Henderson describes the way he builds an extensive series of ‘activities’ into a single all-consuming work.

    “The ‘activities’ within the paintings can be seen as a constantly shifting series of events, each one a more or less separate entity, but perhaps sometimes related,” he has said.

    The blurred edges give his plentiful bands a near holographic presence and together they hold the same fascination as an encyclopaedia page full of, say, flags (Pre-Wikipedia.)

    On the left they create effortless depth, and assemble into three dimensions. This is a psychedelic take on what could be a form by Caro or a trippy, possibly illegal, bit of constructivism.

    But the right is a repository of materials, a supply of colours and combinations which appears inexhaustible. If you read the painting from left to right, there’s no way out of this jam.

    To be sure, regression leads you nowhere, and indeed this probably wasn’t Henderson’s intention in making the work. But if in 1978 he was just predicting the decade to come, he got it fairly spot on.

    This painting can be seen in New Possibilities: Abstract Paintings from the Seventies at The Piper
    Gallery, London, until December 21 2012.

    Uncategorized

    Found Objects 03/12/12

    December 3, 2012

    Ignoring the three hour old news about the Turner Prize, here are a week’s worth of high quality links:

    • You live by the market, you die by the market. Business Week reports that Damien Hirst has officially jumped the shark
    • Guest on this week’s Modern Art Podcast is Sophie Calle. Find out where she plans to be buried and savour the French artist’s unlikely sense of humour
    • This is just plain awesome: a part ruined, part working, fully faithful reconstruction of the Colosseum in Rome; and it’s all made out of Lego
    • Tower Hamlet resident Lizzie Homersham puts her blog to good use with a letter to the Mayor, with regards to the impending sale of a valuable Henry Moore
    • It’s now cool to slag off art. So does that mean that slagging off art will soon become just as uncool as art. We need to know, meanwhile there’s this piece in Slate
    • If you haven’t seen John Hinde’s Butlin’s photos, you need to. If you have seen them, you’ll know they’re great for the holiday season. American Suburb X carries a gallery
    • The L-Magazine sets out to discover what might be the most suitable day job for an artist. Essential reading for anyone at a career crossroads
    • Jon Ronson, one of the most readable journalists around, chronicles his encounter with Bryan Saunders, an artist working his way through a range of narcotic art materials
    • This film reminded me how good she is. Art 21 carry an exclusive interview and scenes from the new Tabaimo animation Dolefullhouse
    • If you have any time at all left after this week’s links, consider spending it on the drawing, painting, sculpture  archive from the Foundation Giacometti. A fantastic resource.

    conceptual art, contemporary art, sculpture

    Jochem Hendricks, Warlord, 2009-2010

    November 26, 2012

    You cannot see them, but you believe them to be there. Sewn into the lining of this greatcoat are hundreds of coins. They give it both physical and metaphorical weight.

    But were it not art, the monetary value would still not amount to much. Gallery notes reveal the coinage to be nickels and dimes. Not even pounds. Not even dollars.

    This is exactly the sort of small change you would pick up on a battlefield, or at least that is the take out from Hendricks’ sculpture. His warlord is a cheap customer.

    But the sculpture has presence. It looms over the visitor from a gibbet placed high on the gallery wall, its darkness an implacable reminder of endless US-sponsored wars.

    You cannot see the money with which this absent (dead?) warlord has lined his coat. As with much of the work by this German artist, you need to exercise faith.

    Or should that be cynicism? People profit from wars every day in manners we cannot see. You might well find yourself on a bus or train with a warlord like this.

    However, the sculpture competes for credibility with counted grains of sand, diamonds made from dead birds, and drawings done by the artist’s very eyeballs.

    So as you can see, the current show in Southampton collects some pretty wild projects together. It stretches credibility in a way that, perhaps, art always should.

    Earlier talents in earlier times might ask you to believe in a resurrection, an annunciation, or an assumption. All Hendricks insists upon is a lining of dirty coins.

    But Warlord is no less powerful for all that. As a reminder of the shabby opportunism of our ongoing campaigns around the world, few other works come close.

    So just what is this warlord’s jurisdiction? By the looks of it, he reigns over you and me and to do so costs him very little indeed. He may even get arts funding. The horror, the horror.

    Warlord can be seen in Jochem Hendricks at John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, until 20 December 2012. See gallery website for more details.

    community art, contemporary art, video

    Andrea Slater, If You Can Spass With Yoghurt You Can Spass With Caviar (2012)

    November 21, 2012

    Few sights can be as alienating as a group of healthy grown adults spassing out in imitation of the most retarded members of our wider society.

    Such scenes are the enduring images of a 1999 film by Lars Von Trier called The Idiots. The Danish director’s community of spass-ers act out one mentally backwards flashmob after another.

    Parallels can be drawn with a group art show, such as the one at CAC in Brighton, in which five artists are presented at one remove through a spassed up film by Andrea Slater.

    The Idiots du jour, who occupy the subterranean gallery for just four days are, in no order, Mike Stoakes, Huw Bartlett, Daniella Norton, Josh Uvieghara and Lou Allison.

    Having been sent works by all of the above, Slater appears to have displayed them in her home, then gone into a spasm of video art.

    The camera pans up down and around taking us on a dizzying id-driven gallery tour. We can all spass, like Slater who “saw the banality of her experience and loved it” (cf. gallery notes).

    Von Trier’s film provides the soundtrack, with quotations chosen to highlight the Utopian potential of this truly bad taste behaviour.

    And as things get nude in Von Trier’s film, so they do when Allison paints direct onto photos of the great and the good, including Sepp Blatter, Pope Benedict XVI, Nick Clegg.

    And then there is Stoakes’ collage Would You Adam and Eve It which brings in Massacio to reference the lost paradise. As if Eden was one big spassfest, which perhaps it was.

    Paradise is also shortlived at Community Arts Centre, Brighton, since this film, which opened Saturday closes later today (21/11/12).

    aggregation, contemporary art

    Found Objects 12/11/12

    November 12, 2012

    One major presidential election later . . . this blog brings you a largely indifferent set of links:

    • Obama’s uxoriousness may not be just what the world needs now. But this photo did the rounds and Phaidon has the story behind it. Seriously, it’s a relief.
    • Meanwhile in British politics, cash strapped councils are selling off historic artworks cf Tower Hamlets/Henry Moore
    • And then beyond politics altogether, we now have a trend for billionaires to hollow out their explensive plots of earth in West London: a must read.
    • A Grayson Perry interview with the Telegraph shows how far establishment have taken second best known transvestite to their hearts
    • Not news, per se, but an interesting way to pass three quarters of an hour. Hyperallergic makes the case for watching Jean Cocteau’s first feature
    • Beverley Knowles interviews Sam Belinfante and draws a startling conclusion from the current sound art show at Ikon Birmingham
    • We Make Money Not Art turns up another interesting artist. But Arnold Odermatti has a radical day job; he’s a policeman. See gallery of remarkable images
    • Daily Serving interviews William Powhida and finds a more approachable subject than you might expect from his twitter feed
    • Summer Nights is a 6-minute film by Alex Soth inspired by a monograph by Richard Adams. It captures a summer mood, which northerly readers may be missing already.

    contemporary art, installation art

    Joana Vasconcelos, Valkyrie Crown (2012)

    November 8, 2012

    Is it fair to say that a monarchist in Britain has an easier life? Certainly, they have a less paranoid one. They have got behind the head of church and state and can accept all that is bidden.

    It is, strangely, as easy for a contemporary artist. Your collectors are rich. The Queen is rich. And neither should have any problem with you celebrating Her Majesty.

    The occasional blogger calling suchwork into question is not even a fly in the ointment. As Warhol said, just measure the length of the text. Don’t worry about the content.

    QEII has been captured in many portraits, but she would surely be most hard pushed to see herself in the centrepiece of a current show at Haunch of Venison.

    Because this Valkyrie Crown, this metonym for the state, is really something monstrous and anarchic. A wealth of colour fabrics have been knitted, stuffed, stitched and patched.

    The Valkyrie series glorifies a Norse goddess who dishes out fates on the battlefield. And so the most shadowy conspiracy theories about earthly power have an origin in myth. This reassures.

    But hard to say whether this Portuguese artist would ascribe similar powers to our monarch; just note her tentacles trail the height and breadth of the two storey gallery.

    In a short time here (it is stressful to be this end of the Great Chain of Being) I noticed visitors make their way into the heart of the piece and ‘wear’ the outsize crown.

    Two staged positions were possible: loyal subject or omnipotent queen. The sprawling work leaves little room for citizens, republicans and other condemned beings. You have to watch your step.

    But on the way out, I check on the status another piece in the show: a flowerhead of steam irons. The gallery assistant confirms it is out of order that day. Not even royal decree could get it working.

    Valkyrie Crown can be seen at Haunch of Venison, New Bond Street, until 17 November 2012. See gallery website for more details.