art blog since 2009
A 24-hour recording of ambient city noise is, on the face of it, boring. Few people will ever sit through all of the 1999 Giorgio Sadotti piece currently on show at Milton Keynes Gallery. Behind the soundtrack, however, is an amazing story. Sadotti flew from London to New York, stayed overnight, and came home the …
August 6, 2010
Canary Wharf underground station offers the best and the worst opportunity an artist could hope for. “There are 45 million people who will travel through that station per annum, which is extraordinary. There’s no gallery in the world which could even boast a fraction of that kind of potential audience,” says John Gerrard. “But of …
August 5, 2010
Here’s a round up of work for Culture24 in the last week or so. Feel free to peruse: Preview: The The Thing Is (For 3) at Milton Keynes Gallery Preview: Harry Hammond – Halfway to Paradise, Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum Preview: Luna Park and An Unreachable Country. A Long Way To Go, Aspex …
August 5, 2010
This installation is an open invitation to skeptics. The materials are literally rubbish. There is no apparent order to the display. If this work was collected up and put in a skip we would walk past without a second glance. So Takahashi’s work can seem a byword for mischief. She takes the world’s least valuable …
August 1, 2010
Fifteen years after its inception, Antony Gormley has revived the piece Critical Mass for the roof of De La Warr Pavilion. Since then his life-size casts of the human form have conquered London, New York and even Crosby Beach near Liverpool. They are contemporary icons. An inestimable number of people have seen these works first …
July 30, 2010
Skill and accomplishment are at the forefront of this unusual work. But instead of technique with a brush or a chisel, we are treated to the novel and maybe useless vocal imitation of 32 typewriters. This is representational art of the highest order. Each sequence of hammer strikes does sound, it must be said, just …
July 25, 2010
Here’s the first of a series of new features in which artists talk about their own work. This is what Oliver Beer had to say about his film Deep and Meaningful: “For some time I had been quite fascinated by the structure of hidden architectural spaces, but also I read about these urban explorers. They …
July 24, 2010
The work invites you to walk around it, to weave a path between its fragile legs. The viewer cannot grasp it until having gazed from both ends and upwards at points between. A Fine Line by Frederic Geurts is another work about space and the human form. It there any other subject? We take spatial …
July 23, 2010
Three locations are evoked by the film Deep and Meaningful by Oliver Beer: the sewer in which the original choral performance was filmed; the type of church where you might expect to hear such a thing; and the gallery environment in which it might end up. The correspondence between church and art gallery is self-evident. …
July 12, 2010
Here’s another round up of stories written in the past week for Culture24: Preview: Diane Arbus – Artist Rooms, Nottingham Contemporary Preview: Chicks on Speed – Don’t Art, Fashion, Music, Dundee Contemporary Arts Preview: Arabicity: Such a Near East, the Bluecoat Culture24’s art must sees for July
July 11, 2010