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    aggregation, contemporary art

    Found Objects 12/08/11

    August 12, 2011

    After an unplanned hiatus, this blog returns with another selection of links: items from the last seven days in descending order of topicality…

    • Nevermind the stock cupboards of Footlocker, etc. Lucy Inglis in the Guardian laments the Victorian architecture which suffered at the hands of rioters in Tottenham.
    • Tattooist Louis Molloy is another victim of the last week’s disorder. Among other questions raised by the Independent is why mass murderer Harold Shipman had no body art.
    • Ai Weiwei speaks out, again. Artinfo dissects an interview which the recently imprisoned Chinese artist gave to the country’s Global Times.
    • Queues have been forming for Alexander McQueen’s show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The New York Times offers this sketch of the fashion designer’s fans.
    • And here’s another fashion story which went viral. Der Spiegel reports that Neo Nazis were this week tricked into taking home anti-fascist t-shirts.
    • It’s 100 years since the Mona Lisa was stolen and 50 years since the theft of Goya’s Duke of Wellington. The latter event makes for an amazing tale by Sandy Nairne in the Guardian.
    • Harold Shipman crops up again in this well-argued piece by Tom Jeffreys in Spoonfed. Which just demonstrates that tricky questions face those condemning corporate sponsorship of the arts.
    • Artists reading might be inspired by this story in Art Fag City. Nate Hill reveals how his trips to NY’s Chinatown fish market came to hook the art world media.
    • Hyperallergic sets a playful example for anyone faced with a dauntingly large art museum.
    • If you haven’t yet been to the De La Warr Pavilion, here’s the next best thing.
    • Finally, I’ve been enjoying this Spotify playlist based on the novel Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon.

    aggregation, contemporary art

    Found Objects 23/07/11

    July 23, 2011

    Posting early links this week, due to weekend commitments. So, erm, click while you’re ahead:

    • Lucian Freud appears not to have liked social conventions, but I hope he would not mind the odd tribute or two. Martyn Gayford’s close, measured and warm recollections in the Telegraph are well worth a read.
    • An Xiao’s piece in Hyperallergic makes recent debates in social media about social media art seem much less fuzzy. It’s a more serious business than the self-referential mise en abyme might suggest.
    • A Google software engineer conveys the excitement of turning a Calder sculpture into the day’s much-liked animated doodle. But try to imagine explaining it to an artist who died in 1976 and the mind boggles.
    • Author Mark Fisher is cropping up two weeks in a row, but he has written a very involving piece on philosopher Nick Lands (also via @frieze_magazine).
    • A Kick Up The Arts has been busy this week. Check out their incisive review of The Shape of Things to Come at The Saatchi Gallery.
    • After reading Calvin Tomkin’s excellent book Lives of the Artists, I’m hooked on the long-read artist profile. This fine example on Miranda July by Katrina Onstad delivers on all six pages of its NY Times slot.
    • A slide show of psychedelic artwork from 60s design team Hapshash and the Coloured Coat from Kathy Kavan at Another Design Blog.
    • This 15-minute documentary on Street Photography is a real must. Takes you to a dark and paranoid place and then, well, I won’t spoil it.

    abstract expressionism, contemporary art, hackgate, media art, textiles

    The art of Hackgate

    July 19, 2011

    At about 12.30 last night a widely-published cartoonist had his email and password broadcast on Twitter. Mark Wood’s only connection to #hackgate is that he has also worked for The Sun.

    If his characters are anything to go by, Wood is a likeable sort. His client list suggests he’s hard-working. And indeed a web listing makes clear he “will draw anything for anybody”.

    Someone must have pointed out his innocence, because the offending tweet has been removed. But sadly a few journalists and techies still have mobile numbers, etc, in the public domain.

    Disclosure of these details was the fairly shabby denouement to an otherwise spectacular assault on the servers of News International by a crew of hackers known as Lulzsec.

    Lulz boast repeatedly about providing “high-quality entertainment”. But the fake death notice they posted on Sun online was not in and of itself all that funny or entertaining.

    But what was gripping was the hacking procedural drama in which they played central characters and the metaphorical panache with which they suggest they operate from an incorporeal longship.

    So when @Lulzsec tweeted about sailing over to NI and wrecking it, the image of vikings at Wapping coupled with that of geeks tapping away at laptops was a potent mix.

    Elsewhere you can see what they’ve done with code. In their exaggerated reports of Rupert Murdoch’s demise, the group reported a body found in the mogul’s “famous topiary garden”.

    Topiary, as has been mentioned in the Guardian, is also the handle of a prominent member of the group. Monocles also feature in both fake news stories and Twitter avatars.

    With these in-jokes, Lulzsec hint at vast depths. It’s an informational chiaroscuro. If Stockhausen got in hot water for comparing 9/11 to a work of art, he might have waited for something like this.

    Art has played a further role in the story this afternoon when Murdoch and his son took their seats before the Select Committee of ten MPs asking interesting questions on behalf of the DCMS.

    This was, up to a point, a more polite drama. And behind the action on the far wall of the Wilson Room was a no less polite painting. I was told this was an Untitled work by Kate Blee.

    The epic scale and red/brown colour scheme brought to mind certain Rothkos. Although the macho excesses of abstract expressionism were here trimmed by the employment of, I think, painted linen.

    But when it was Murdoch’s turn to be attacked in person, we cut to this contemplative work. At that point art came across like the wilful blindness of which James Murdoch was indirectly accused.

    As for that incident with the custard pie, it certainly wasn’t a very good performance piece. There’s a time and a place for that sort of thing and it ain’t on the “most humble day” of anyone’s life.

    If you haven’t already, check out this post by Jonathan Jones in the Guardian in which he talks up the art factor in a widely circulated photo of Rebekah Brooks.

    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.