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

    Found Objects 17/07/11

    July 17, 2011

    These links are from the past seven days. Feel free to enjoy as many as you like:

    • Jonathan Jones uses his Guardian column to link departing CEO of News International Rebekah Brooks to both the Damsel of the Holy Grail and Mick Jagger.
    • Legal news: a monkey takes a photo in the wild and back in civilisation the lawyers swing into action. Artinfo looks at the exciting new field of animal copyright.
    • By all accounts the Chapman Brothers have done it again, though some may wonder what makes them go to so much trouble. Slide show of their new White Cube show in Telegraph.
    • The Independent carries news of a whole new art form: conceptual gardening. Big shout out to any landscape critics reading.
    • It’s ingenious and painstaking. But you cannot dismiss a new show fashioned entirely from dollar bills. Hyperallergic reviews Mark Wagner in New York.
    • It looks as if Mark Leckey was lucky to get a word in edgewaysin this interview with Mark Fisher in Kaleidoscope. Interesting, all the same (via @frieze_magazine).
    • Der Spiegel carries a photographic slideshow with some poignant stories to go with: scenes from the anti-fascist protection wall by the guards employed to keep the non-fascists in.
    • The history of the German capital remains just as interesting with this chapter on Berlin’s street art by Simon Arms in Smashing Magazine (via @danielyanezgonz).
    • Art History Rag reblogged a recent list of the 50 greatest novels for art students. Hint: if you’re planning to spend your college days reading 50 novels, perhaps you should have taken English.
    • Dancers on the New York subway pre-empt a terrorist chemical attack in a disturbing music video on Animal NY blog.
    • Another music link which it would have been wrong to overlook. Have a free album by Wugazi. That’s two bands, Wu Tang Clan and Fugazi, for the price of none.

    contemporary art

    Jammie Nicholas, Surplus Perfumes (2010)

    July 15, 2011

    Don’t expect to find this in Duty-Free over the summer. Artist Jammie Nicholas has made a perfume from his own urine, faeces, sweat, hair and God knows what else.

    He is not the first artist to offer the public his own shit, but he may be the first to go to such lengths to make it smell good. And now it has a place in the system of exchange.

    You can purchase the aromatic results for £40 a bottle. But Nicholas has said that his branding was influenced by Georges Bataille, who wrote about the tribal gifting frenzy known as potlatch.

    We don’t really have that in my part of the world. Capitalist societies are happy to waste money on arms, but you won’t often catch us giving away more than we can afford to demonstrate largesse.

    And in terms of brands or indeed art, we won’t even give away the things which cost us nothing. If you want the essence of Nike or the magic of Warhol, you’ll need to pay.

    Nicholas is not dealing in the imagination. He really wants to sell you part of himself. The London artist has learned perfumery and distilled elements of his own body in a home made refinery.

    By doing so, he ironises the work of marketing departments and artists’ studios alike. So a bottle of Eau de Nicholas is too good to give away, or pour away. Though really that’s what it calls for.

    Nicholas has a studio at Arcadia Missa gallery, Peckham, where his work sometimes appears in collaborative group shows. For more on this artist visit his website.

    aboriginal art, outsider art, prisoner art

    International Prisoner Art Exhibit

    July 12, 2011

    Given a world prison population of some 10m, this short-lived exhibition in Toronto (too distant for me to see in person) might well have deserved a tour, or at least a run that outlasted a conference.

    The winning entry in their 2011 competition shows a powerful contrast between the finitude of captivity and the infinite reach of art. For some prisoners, clearly, painting provides an escape.

    Michael Connelly’s piece shows a journey by brush, imaginative journeys being the best available to those in the penal system, and this starts off simply enough with an idyllic beach scene.

    But the artist goes much further than this classic therapeutic image. He takes us beneath the waves where sharks swim along with dolphins, then takes us to a distant rocky shore.

    Here sit three aboriginal figures round a campfire. This camp echoes the circular from which the whole work begins. Perhaps this detail allows Connelly to somehow commune with the outside world.

    But it is difficult to speculate about someone else’s cosmology. What goes on upstream is not clear to me; that might be the purging fire of some kind of redemption. I hope so for everyone’s sake.

    On a more pragmatic level, it must have surely been refreshing for the 130 artists in this show to be judged for their art and not for their crimes. And for society to do the same makes a nice change for the rest of us as well.

    International Prisoner Art Exhibit was held at The Campbell House, Toronto, during the annual convocation of contest organisers the Prison Fellowship International.

    aggregation, contemporary art

    Found Objects 10/07/11

    July 10, 2011

    I struggled to find an art angle for the News of the World story, so here are the rest of the week’s most readables:

    • Cy Twombly, already in the news with a show at Dulwich Picture Gallery, made more headlines by dying. Sebastian Smee in the Boston Globe compares his work to 1,000-year old bedsheets, in a good way.
    • Poet Alex Galper’s visit to London was to be the “highlight of [his] life”, but the UK Border Agency had other ideas. The Guardian reports on a serious problem, mentioned on this blog last week.
    • Art should influence the people who influence the people in power, according to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Art Info assess his recent 40-page interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist.
    • Don’t expect to see Mr and Mrs Henk at a gallery near you any time soon. Frieze tells us the hypothetical couple are being used to launch a fierce attack on the arts in the Netherlands.
    • Why did Warhol paint soup cans? Christopher Knight appears to have built a theory on one quote from de Kooning. But I still want to believe his ingenious piece in the LA Times.
    • Mandatory second link to the Guardian: Ben Lewis on Charles Saatchi. Definitely worth a read.
    • Apparently the US secret services don’t like artistic interventions in Mac stores. Huffington Post is one of several blogs which carry the story of Kyle McDonald’s ill fated project.
    • Man steals Picasso without even the decency to put on socks. So reports the Independent. You’d have to steal a Giacometti bare-chested to top that.
    • Artist Dave Greber has a top tip: rub your eyes and you can watch a live feed from the cosmos. Alternatively you can watch his trippy video at Hyperallergic.
    • Finally, a letter from an 18-year olf Syd Barrett showed up on Twitter (via @alexispetridis). It’s been online since March so apologies if you’ve seen it, but it is quite endearing.

    contemporary art, time-based media

    Ruth Ewan, We Could Have Been Anything That We Wanted To Be (2011)

    July 7, 2011

    The clock face above Debenhams is one of the most mundane and predictable sights in any town. But Ruth Ewan has removed just two of the integers and the effect is hallucinatory.

    It may not slow traffic and find itself on TV idents in the way some public art has done over the years. But the decimal clock quietly does its work, one unsuspecting shopper at a time.

    The confusion and annoyance at finding only 10 hours in the day may be compounded by the discovery that nine other clocks in Folkestone are now running on French Republican Time.

    But this post-revolutionary invention was even too much for our rational neighbours in France. Decimal time persisted for two years from 1793, while a new decimal calendar lasted for 13.

    Some might wonder what was the point. Well, existing measures of week and month had just too much Christian and monarchical baggage. Weeks were stretched; Sundays, abolished.

    Meanwhile, the 100-minute hours which lasted for 144 of our present minutes allowed for more to happen in less time and reflected the ‘exciting’ pace of change in the turbulent French state.

    The limits of this art project may be Folkestone, but it does seem that more is happening by the hour in 2011 than at any time in recent history. At least social media makes it seem that way.

    So a case could be made for bringing in Republican time. (The current government is building a case to abolish May Day in the UK. Time is political, whether you look forward or back.)

    And as for those resistant shoppers, well surely they are part of the piece. Permanent revolution is as impossible as it is necessary even if, as the title of this piece hints, it may be too late.

    We Could Have Been Anything That We Wanted To Be is at Folkestone Triennial until 25 September 2011. I am grateful to Astrid Johnston’s fascinating essay in the booklet to go with this piece, The Clock Struck Ten. Copies available at Triennial visitor centre.

    artists' visas

    More artist visa embarrassment for UK

    July 5, 2011

    By the 18th July we may find out on what grounds the Algerian artist Zinedinne Bessaï was refused entry to the UK to attend the launch of a group show at Cornerhouse Manchester.

    This is not as a result of my earlier blog post on the subject, but rather the fact that crossbench peer the Earl of Clancarty has today submitted a written question in the House of Lords.

    He also asks about dancers Ismael Ludman, Maria Mondino, writer Patrick Mudekereza, and poet Alex Galper all of whom have been shut out of the country in recent weeks.

    Galper, who once made what must have been a risky escape from Russia to the US, had much less luck with immigration at Luton airport. All he wanted was to attend a poetry festival.

    Luton also happens to be where Russian artist Slava Mogutin was held over night in jail and then deported, even as his American partner/collaborator Brian Kenny waltzed into the UK.

    The list goes on: Alex Soth, Femi Kuti, Kristin Ostling, Grigory Sokolov, Abbas Kiarostami, and a little known rap act called the Wu-Tang Clan have also faced suspicion and obstruction.

    But it would be quite wrong to put all the blame on UK border officials who may or may not be anything like the hilarious Ian Foot from BBC comedy Come Fly With Me.

    More of the problem lies with a new points-based visa system. Non-EU artists are classified as temporary workers, but a 15-strong West African jazz band, say, would hardly make a killing.

    In fact, Les Amazones de Guinée paid £3,500 to apply for visas and were still denied. While executives in multinationals can afford to expedite such bureaucracy and jet in and out at will.

    And what do they bring to the cultural life of the British Isles? Not jazz, that’s for sure.

    Click here to read a letter in the Telegraph co-signed by more than 100 leading cultural figures, or here to read about this dubious law in more detail (Kamila Shamsie in the Guardian). The above YouTube clip was actually filmed at Glasgow airport!

     

     

    aggregation, contemporary art, Uncategorized

    Found Objects 03/07/11

    July 3, 2011

    Things which I have come across this week include:

    • Even as cuts cause pain elsewhere, last week’s auctions at Christie’s and Sotheby’s confirm that business is booming for blue-chip art. Check out this shrewd report from A Kick up the Arts.
    • In a video for the Guardian, Jonathan Glancey turns his somewhat intense gaze on the new Serpentine Pavilion from Swiss architect Peter Zumthor.
    • The paper also brings you a slideshow of some of the most arresting images from the Royal Academy’s new show on Hungarian photography.
    • Street artist Ron English has been arrested more than 30 times for liberating billboards and there’s a great interview in The Independent on Sunday. Surely putting them up is the real crime?
    • Mediocre middle-aged men beware, Laurel Nakadate has come to spread misery. The New Inquiry reviews the nymph-like artist’s provocative and charged show at MoMA PS1.
    • What!? Spanish designer Javier Mariscal has collaborated on an animated film. Thanks to this interview with director Fernando Trueba in Paris Review I aim to rent Chico and Rita today.
    • Sexologist Wilhelm Reich made his name theorising about orgasms. But his real legacy may, according to Peter D Kramer in Slate, be the erection, sorry election, of Barack Obama.
    • Found Objects has some infectious outro music this week courtesy of Off Modern blog. Click here to enjoy the Lee Scratch Perry mix of Mind Killa by Gang Gang Dance.

    contemporary art, migration, video installation

    Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen, Promised Land (2011)

    June 28, 2011

    Paddling naked, save for a life jacket, through the dark waters of a harbour is so difficult it seems comic. Since the swimmer is in a video piece, one really hopes this is a performance.

    But this is a real life moment in the life of a would-be migrant to Britain. Art is the last thing on his mind. And one can assume it is being filmed by a friend of his and not by Nikolaj B S Larsen.

    This inside footage is one of several rarely seen activities which the Danish artist has captured. And he has done so by handing over cameras to refugees with minimal interest in video art.

    So with little or no attempt to play with genre, other scenes come round out in which plans are sketched in the dirt (infiltration of a truckstop) and maps are drawn on scraps of paper (port security).

    Lovers of classic cinema will recognise this convention. It belongs to the heist movie, or better still that embodiment of British pluck, The Great Escape (1963). There are several ironies in this film.

    But the work is anchored by moving interviews with migrants sleeping rough in Calais. Professional footage shows sunset on the channel, convoys in the rain, finally the lights of Picadilly.

    The three-channel installation is panoramic, and the 55-minute piece immerses the viewer in lives otherwise hard to imagine. Larsen has brought out a sublime quality in the port by night.

    One imagines that seen penniless and paperless from a quayside, channel ferries always look like this. The vision in this film appears authentic, precisely because it is borrowed.

    Promised Land can be seen at Folkestone Triennial until 25 September 2011. See festival website for more details. You can also watch a pilot for the film on Larsen’s own site.

    aggregation, contemporary art

    Found Objects 25/06/11

    June 25, 2011

    Here are some links from the last seven days. Enjoy:

    • The good news, at least to some degree, is that Ai Weiwei has been released on bail. This deserves a televisual breaking news report, as sourced by Leg of Lamb blog.
    • Even more good news, yesterday a Picasso masterpiece went on show in the Palestinian territories. The Guardian is just one of the papers who, for obvious reasons, carry the story.
    • Frieze have got a remarkable portrait of Afghan artist Aman Mojadidi. It figures there are even more risky places to make art than China.
    • There is a great piece on Soviet product design by Justin McGuirk in the Guardian. Two words: boiling wand.
    • Meanwhile, The Moscow Times doesn’t rate new DTV drama Bailiffs. But all the same, the 20-part series looks unmissable.
    • At Animal blog you can watch the trailer to a new German movie about the DiY skate scene in the former GDR.
    • Staying with the onetime Bloc, Bad at Sports have posted an interview with Yael Bartana, the Israeli artist who represented Poland at Venice this year. This is audio, lasting 50 mins.
    • People say art is elitist, and The Telegraph has pictures from a show you won’t get to see unless you hold a diving qualification.
    • If you only read one list of summer beach books this year, make it this one from Tyler Green at Modern Art Notes.
    • Charlotte Young is now the web’s best known unknown artist, thanks to her spoof artist’s statement which went viral. Funny, in a miserable kind of way.

    Uncategorized

    Interview: Semiconductor

    June 23, 2011

    Semiconductor, Worlds in the Making (still), 2011

    In a town where one of the most risky things you can do is ride a log flume on a Grade-II listed pier, Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt are an anomaly. The Brighton duo known as Semiconductor have been to the real ends of the Earth to source material for their art.

    A new show at FACT is the product of three weeks on the Galapagos Islands and a month in the shadows of volcanic Ecuador. Some of the most otherworldly footage the pair have brought back shows the rarely-visited sulphur mines on Isla Isabella.

    “The whole trip was treacherous,” says Jarman. “It had been raining very heavily, so it was very muddy and we weren’t used to riding horses.”

    There are, it seems, few health and safety rules on remote archipelagos.

    “In any kind of Western country you probably wouldn’t have been able to get as close to the sulphur mines as we actually did there, because it was just us and the guide and it was the first time he’d ever taken anybody,” she adds.

    In addition to bemused guides, the pair worked with geologists in the National Park as well as capital Quito to understand their methods. Volcanology is, for obvious reasons, another distant concern in UK coastal towns.

    “A lot of scientists don’t specifically engage with people outside their field,” says Gerhardt. “It’s not like being an artist; they don’t need to find an audience. They just need to find a peer reviewer.

    “It takes us a while to gain their confidence,” he adds. One can see how his studious mien together with his partner’s affability could work like a charm.

    But volcanologists beware. The 25-minute video piece Worlds in the Making features interviews which, says Jarman, “kind of suggest the scientists are telling you what’s happening, but we’ve kind of slightly edited so it’s slightly nonsensical”.

    Gerhardt sees this as a reaction to conventional science documentaries: “It’s very taboo to play with the format, because in a way it’s supposed to be factual and reveal things as they are.

    “Really of course there’s as much fiction in telling a story as there is in a lot of fictional programmes. We’re interested in deconstructing that kind of genre.”

    So the hard science found in the show’s central video installation is interspersed with sinister animations. These purport to show mineral formation and a sea of prehistoric chaos, but probably do not.

    “We’ve got a generative computer script working with the seismic data and will make these landscapes of crystals and minerals,” explains Gerhardt.

    He goes on to point out that rocks, while appearing still, are awash with chemical processes. “So we’re trying to bring that to life, to animate things that you don’t normally think of as moving,” he says. “Time, you know, that becomes a kind of plastic form we can play with.”

    Jarman explains the sonic data is thought to come from lava moving beneath volcanoes, only too slow for the human ear. “I think what we really like about the sounds is they become really tangible,” she says.

    “You feel like you’re listening to rocks scraping and crunching underneath the earth. You start associating things with your imagination.”

    This plays out against an atmospheric guitar track by Oren Ambarchi from the band Sunn O))), in the show’s surround-sound three-channel installation.

    Semiconductor’s first major solo exhibition also features a second piece comprised of archive footage found at the Smithsonian Mineral Sciences Lab in Washington DC. A third work of animations based on the sound of melting ice rounds out the display.

    “You do get the sense in these places of the landscapes being very powerful and very humbling,” says Jarman of their recent voyage.

    And Gerhardt points out: “It’s actually the very dawn of the landscape, so it is literally at the edge of the land.”

    That does sound like a long way from a café in Brighton. It’s a tough gig, but someone has to go there.

    Semiconductor: Worlds in the Making is at FACT, Liverpool, from July 1 to September 11 2011. See gallery website for more details. Interview written for Culture24.