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

    Found Objects 16/07/12

    July 16, 2012

    Greetings art lovers. Have some links from the week just gone:

    • Having once left Facebook and been lured back, my hat goes off to Man Bartlett who turned his departure into performance art
    • Few writers have ever got to grips with evil like author of The Kindly Ones, Jonathan Littell. Now he’s doing journalism in Syria.
    • Tyler Green interviews the sloganeering Barbara Kruger on the Modern Art Notes podcast.
    • Jayson Musson will soon be as famous as his alter ego Hennessy Youngman. Animal reports from his recent show of paintings of sorts.
    • While not that impressed with her retrospective at Hayward, I have to say Tracey Emin’s show at Turner Contemporary sounds swoonsome.
    • This on the other hand is gnarly: a film by Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn which I came across this week in the course of research
    • The next best thing to having been at Documenta? Why, there’s this longread review from Paris Review, who do that kind of thing inimicably.
    • Graffiti writer and filmaker Tom Oswald writes a brilliant piece in the Guardian about the waning of tube art. Check it out.
    • There should be more of this sort of thing. Vintage cultural programming from Art Fag City with Mike Wallace on op art.

    contemporary art, fluxus, installation art, relational aesthetics

    Yoko Ono, HELMETS (2001/2012)

    July 13, 2012

    Visitors to the Yoko Ono show in London may well come away with a piece of debt to the redoubtable artist. To be precise that would be a jigsaw piece of debt.

    Early in her show at Serpentine hang some half a dozen WWII helmets filled with segments of a giant puzzle. You can guess the overall picture from a glance at any one of them.

    Were these pieces fit together again, the pattern to emerge would be blue and fluffy bits of white. It’s an invitation to think of a line by Yoko’s husband, “above us only sky”.

    Gallery notes indicate that the artist hopes her visitors will get together with their individual pieces and recreate this map of the heavens. That is really blue sky thinking.

    But we won’t of course, not in this life. Our single pieces now serve only to remind us of how atomised and unknown to one another we remain.

    The ironic twist is that military uniforms bring people together a lot more definitively than exercises in what you might call relational aesthetics.

    Nevertheless, the broken blue pieces and the grim metal lids make for a poetic juxtaposition. The same quality of patience is perhaps required to do a puzzle and to negotiate a truce.

    On the back of each piece are the artist’s inititals. You may now feel you own an orginal Yoko Ono artwork, but you don’t of course. This is very much an indefinite loan.

    Yoko Ono: To the Light can be seen at Serpentine, London, until September 9 2012. See gallery website for more details. It is a good show IMO but that won’t stop you from enjoying this savaging in the Independent.

    aggregation, contemporary art

    Found Objects 09/07/12

    July 9, 2012

    Apologies to anyone who checked in last week, I was on a break. Back on it now:

    • So, Londoners, are you pro or anti the Shard? I only ask because nothing can compete with the wrath of Simon Jenkins in the Guardian.
    • The same paper reports on a 5 year old abstract art prodigy from India. God knows how he came up with his process.
    • For a man best known for working with corpses, Joel-Peter Witkin is a right natty dresser and cheerful interviewee (video).
    • New York Magazine profiles Yayoi Kusama. Worth a look, even if you feel you’ve already had too much of the spot-loving Japanese artist.
    • Dilligent Chloé Nelkin shares photos and impressions of Verona and Padua. That’s what you call a working holiday.
    • Not sure this is a genuine flashmob, but it’s still great. An orchestra appears out of nowhere to gig in a Spanish town square. Thanks to Edward Winkleman.
    • Art Fag City pop up in Belgium to review the latest Manifesta. The 2012 theme for the roving Biennial is coalmining.
    • What with Jeff Koon’s suspended steam train and Richard Wilson’s balancing bus, this kind off thing is having a moment. (from Beautiful/Decay).
    • As remote as the Tea Party seems from these shores, a spoof art manifesto is immediate and funny. See Hyperallergic.
    • This post on blissblog hit an unlikely musical spot. Simon Reynolds curates mainstream black pop from The Whispers to The Commodores.

    18th century, appropriation, contemporary art, portraiture

    Shawn Huckins: Dorothy Quincy, Don’t You Realize That I Only Text You When I’m Drunk (2012)

    July 7, 2012

    This is a work of many layers, the earliest one being a portrait of Dorothy Quincy by American realist painter John Singleton Copley.

    Quincy was the wife of the first man to sign the Declaration of Independence. So her portrait is also a slice of history, nevermind art history.

    Shawn Huckins has reproduced this grave example of canvas-based nation building, using the poppier medium of acryllic rather than oil.

    And the results gets fresher still as he overlays a frequently used piece of textspeak. This makes the 18th century piece of artwork look like a 21st century meme.

    The words and acronyms float between ourselves and the subject. Just as the internet can bestow attitude to cats and owls, it can do the same for historic personages.

    So viewed in a browser from the UK (owing to geographical limitations) Huckin’s work looks at first like a streetwise makeover for its targets.

    But since poor Quincy would have had limited access to a mobile phone, it seems that upon reflection this apologia for drunken texting belongs to the artist.

    And the title nails things down, addressing Quincy by name. Now the entire work can be seen as a drunken, and perhaps spurned, overture to realist portraiture.

    In this work and others like it in the series, it is as if some crude textese is the only language the unrequited Huckins can find for his haughty subject.

    Sure enough, the much maligned dialect of wired youth strips away the dignity and aspirations of America’s founding fathers. It lays pretension to waste.

    The original portrait and the latter day texts call to one another across the lifespan of a empire that now appears to be coming to an end in rofls.

    Work from Huckins’ American Revolution Revolution series can be seen in L2Kontemporary, Los Angeles, until August 18th. See his website or that of the gallery for more details.

    conceptual photography, contemporary art

    Salomé, Gérard Rancinan

    June 30, 2012

    The Disney Corporation is perhaps the most obvious of targets. Obvious because its saccharine values bear no relation to the harsh realities of life in late capitalist society.

    But taking on Disney is no easy matter. The values are promoted by one of the world’s most recognisable brands. The brand is protected by the world’s best lawyers.

    Anyone planning to get at Mickey and his pals may as well go the whole hog. And it is wonderfully clear quite how Gérard Rancinan has violated this anthropomorphic mouse.

    If the attack is not subtle, the details are still amusing. You would not expect a Disney character to wear a red star, so perhaps things have changed in the Magic Kingdom.

    Salome is also more political than you might think. An anarchy badge is pinned to her wristband and, in just such a spirit, she garnishes her trophy with dollar bills.

    To be honest, I’m not sure how much we should read into the biblical story. One shudders to think of the messiah who may or may not have been predicted by Mickey. Goofy perhaps.

    But God knows it must have been satisfying to drive that six inch nail into the lovable chap’s forehead. This violence and scorn seems to be the real meaning of the work.

    Such work is not great for brand Disney. Though you can’t help feel that a less direct approach might have worked as well, since most brands already have an ugly side.

    In 2009, Finnish artist Pilvi Takala was refused entry to a paranoid Disneyland Paris. Her crime was merely to be dressed as Snow White in order to comment on migration.

    This work is part of Gérard  Rancinan’s Wonderful World trilogy which showed at London Newcaste Project Space in June 2012.

    architecture, contemporary art, drawing

    Chris Agnew, Sacrifice (2012)

    June 28, 2012

    If superstition ran riot, might not every human casualty take on the complexion of a sacrifice. Every death would register as an appeasement of one of our many gods.

    Admittedly, that is wacko. But here Chris Agnew juxtaposes what must be the most rational system of government, communism, with one of the least, Mayan.

    In times of drought, enemy blood would have flowed atop of Chichen Itza pyramid in Mexico. Slower deaths may have been experienced in this Bucharest tower block.

    It is arguable that both civilisations fed on the blood of their enemies. Sorry, make that all civilisations. Agnew’s drawing hints we may all be irredeemably primitive.

    But no one can deny our talent for inspiring fear and wonder, through the monuments we construct or the or the artworks we hang on the wall.

    This drawing, for example, is a marvel of concentration and detail. Agnew has built his pyramid with perhaps as much slavery as art, brick by tiny brick.

    And it is terrifying to reflect that short of raising both pyramid and apartment block to the ground, we are bound to inherit something from them.

    Perhaps an architectural synthesis of left and right wing is what we need. Or perhaps it is what we already have. We live in polarising times.

    Sacrifice can be seen in Agnew’s solo show, The Pomp of Circumstances, at Nancy Victor Gallery, London, until July 6 2012. See gallery website for more details and check out the artist’s own website.

    aggregation, contemporary art

    Found Objects 27/06/12

    June 27, 2012

    Another plethora of destinations for your mice or mobiles:

    • Anish Kapoor proves fair game for the Occupy movement as several dozen rock up at one of his second homes.
    • Two French museums dedicated to Henri Matisse to share a newly discovered cache of colourful, but unfinished, paper cut-outs.
    • The 340-tonne boulder which travelled from rural California to LA has now been officially levitated. It’s a “Huh? Wow!” moment.
    • Not noticed one of these before. The Guardian deliver an interactive art audio tour of the new Turner Monet Twombly show at Tate Liverpool.
    • You can also enjoy a relatively lo-fi visit to the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, with stunning photos on The Exhibition List.
    • This is my favourite link of the week. Artists develop new ways to revive and sustain the Viennese tradition of hanging out in cafes.
    • Thanks to @danielyanezgonz  for sharing this via Facebook: a website hosting a gallery of polaroids by the director Tarkovsky. In Russian, but just click on the photo.
    • It might seem impossible to get excited about a group of staircases, but these could be to heaven (see what I did there?). This came via @jennycobelli.
    • Some new tracks have been released from the archives of Krautrock band CAN. Iain Forsythe and Jane Pollard have done the video.
    • This feels right. Some dedicated soul has shot a frame by frame version of blade runner using watercolours.
    • This feels wrong. Art Info curate the world’s 25 wackiest art gifs. Actually they’re not bad.

    books, contemporary art, installation art

    Jukhee Kwon: Being @ La Scatola

    June 23, 2012

    Treehuggers may well like this show in which paper from books is shredded line by line to form a copse of six or seven arboreal candidates for the sentient term Being.

    The pages now flow down from book shelves just underneath the ceiling. And you have to get within hugging distance to appreciate the painstaking quality of the work.

    Breathe against them gently and the lines of prose rustle like leaves. The delicacy of this site specific work bestows an aura of great preciousness on each piece.

    But these trees also whisper towards the opposite of the show’s title: knowing. After all, these volumes were once encyclopaedia and have now been rendered illegible.

    If this is a choice we all have to make between ontology and epistemology, it is clear that Jukhee Kwon chooses the former, almost attacking the latter.

    At the far end of the show is a pocket book which has been scraped clean of its ink. The residue now forms a dusty, but useless, booklike sculpture in its own right.

    And with the coming of ebooks and tablets, Kwon’s show feels like a nail in the coffin of the printed word. If you want to live, don’t read. If you want knowledge, stay online.

    Do not pluck it from a tree. This might not only be an original sin but also, given the density of text which streams through this exhibition, a growing impossibility.

    Being can be seen at La Scatola Gallery, until August 10 2012. See gallery website for more details.

    aggregation, contemporary art

    Found Objects 19/06/12

    June 19, 2012

    Another conglomeration of interest piquers for you:

    • Scientists have found the first suggestion that Neanderthals made cave art and tis strangely exciting.
    • Upon the realisation this review has two inclusions of the word “Thwunk!” it had to be included: Adrian Searle on Yoko Ono.
    • The iconic artist comes out somewhat better from this encounter with filmmaker Sam Taylor Wood.
    • C-Monster posts good pictures from a show of International Abstraction at the Guggenheim.
    • Against the odds, Lucie Davies pins down the globetrotting Jeff Koons for an interview in The Telegraph.
    • Art21 looks back on a time when artistic adventurers looked to absinthe for inspiration. Them were the days.
    • Here’s a simple trick to making it big in art from Phaidon, only you might not want to risk it.
    • Only Vice magazine would let an intern cover a trip to a theme park on acid. The intern’s girlfriend now surely deserves a job. (Thanks @hereisafantasy.)
    • Loving this report about an artist who managed to reboot her identity, as told in a review by Beverley Knowles.
    • Brian Dillon considers the maddening task of making art about the future. (It seems the future may now be a thing of the past.)
    • The internet is a great leveller and Russell Herron’s new website completely flattens the art world (via Grey Area on FB)

    contemporary art, installation art, relational aesthetics

    Louis Brown, MAKERZINE (2012)

    June 17, 2012

    The Pure Good of Theory is one of the most oft quoted poem titles around. Wallace Stevens seems to have nailed it, but are there more spheres of pure good?

    Visitors to Brighton University last week might think so. At a degree show, you could argue for the pure good of art education, which after all does entail plenty of theory.

    But my eye was caught by the clear benefits of MAKERZINE by Louis Brown, a digital printing press on which you could churn out your own copy of the eponymous zine.

    I’m sorry to report I picked up a pre-made copy, so cannot report on the experience of cueing up a new zine. But it was simple enough with the clearly chalked instructions.

    Reclaimed scaffolding boards and hessian wrapped benches gave the workstation a sense of rough and ready utility. You could forget this was a piece of sculpture.

    Louis Brown therefore succeeds in his aim to demystify the creative and fabricational process. This was a demonstration of the pure good of making.

    The zine itself contains recipes, homebrew instructions, tips on recycling scaffolding boards to make furniture and interviews with T-shirt designers.

    As manifestos go, it could not be more pragmatic, or more optimistic, or more realistic. Its spirit of ingenuity will serve us well when civilisation collapses, or may even avert that.

    Artists are often thought of as impractical souls, dreamers, romantics, fools. But this piece is a great testimony to a more contemporary spirit of art, certainly a more purposeful one.

    MAKERZINE could be found in the Brighton University Faculty of Arts Graduate Show 2012, in the Fine Art Sculpture BA(Hons) section.