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Tuesday, 30 March 2010
Next 5 Days - Your Guide to Openings in London
Tony Cragg - Lisson Gallery
Tony Cragg
52-54 Bell Street
London NW1 5DA
United Kingdom
London NW1 5DA
United Kingdom
March 17th - April 17th
Tony Cragg's abiding interest is in the dynamic potential of matter to assume form. At the Lisson, he will present five large new sculptures, a series of smaller works and a number of related drawings. The selection demonstrates the consistency with which Cragg has pursued his sculptural explorations, particularly since he moved from his early assemblages to casting sculptures in the mid-1980s; it also demonstrates the range and ambition of those explorations. Cragg, an unashamed materialist, is nevertheless a magician of matter, taking an essentially simple image like the human profile or the hollowness of many natural forms and subjecting them to extreme extrapolation. This often takes place around an active axial structure: Cragg has said that in these works 'there is no longer a straight axis, the axis bends and re-orients itself compressing the volumes around it. Obviously, the forms associated with these kinds of variable axis infer an energetic dynamic, the kind of constant material condition found in the whirlings of tornadoes...' (quoted in 'Tony Cragg, Signs of Life,' 2003). In his new exhibition, Tony Cragg works with wood, fibreglass, cast and constructed steel, in each case taking his interest in material beyond the conventional constraints and processes of fabrication or imagination. His drawings add another dimension to the work, often zooming in to microscopic detail or out to macrocosmic form.
Monday, 29 March 2010
Artist Of The Week - Idris Khan
Music and mystery ... Idris Khan's Seven Times (2010) is a reference to Islamic worship. Photograph courtesy of the artist and Victoria Miro gallery
You'd be forgiven for not realising Idris Khan's photos were actually photos at all. With their accretions of smudgy black marks, they look more like hand-rendered charcoal drawings than flat snaps realised at the push of a button. Get up close, though, and the thick black lines dissolve into a spore-like buildup of words or musical notes. His images are composites built from layered sheets of music, book pages, paintings or other photographs that seem to squeeze journeys in time – like reading or hearing music – into a single picture.
Every … Stave of Frederick Chopin's Nocturnes For the Piano (2004), for instance, is just what its title claims. The music sheets are photographed and manipulated on a computer by Khan to become a lone image whose blurred hieroglyphs seem to convulse. It's as if each rendition of Chopin's music could be seen rather than heard, experienced in one visual cacophony. In Sigmund Freud's … the Uncanny (2006), Khan uses the same technique on the psychoanalyst's landmark essay on eerie recurrences. In the artist's image, the crease at the book's centre is built into a menacing well of darkness, like a trauma waiting to surface.
In fact, although the 31-year-old London-based artist was awarded the Photographer's Gallery prize in 2004, he doesn't consider himself a photographer. The camera was simply the tool he turned to as an aspiring art student who longed to paint or play music but couldn't. His first composite images stemmed from photos taken while travelling in 2002, such as Every … Photograph Taken in Portugal With My Ex-Girlfriend. From these experiments in compressed memories, Khan went on to tackle iconic photographic works – including books by theorists Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes – to high culture's greatest hits, such as Beethoven's sonatas and Rembrandt's self-portraits.
Though Khan stopped practising Islam at the age of 14, he remains fascinated by the rituals and devotion of his parent's faith. He has said it underscores the repetition and obsessive production processes behind his work; each image takes several months to complete. Yet he is not shy of addressing religion directly, as with a recent sculpture work, entitled Seven Times, which fuses references to minimalism and the Kaaba, the cubic shrine in Mecca that Muslims must try to visit once in their lifetime. Here, steel cubes echoing the proportions of the shrine are laid out in the arrangement of Carl Andre's 144 Graphite Silence. Sandblasted with lines of prayer, the overlying strings of Arabic script recall the five daily prayers uttered by Muslims all over the world.
Why we like him: The Creation (2009) is derived from the oratorio that took composer Joseph Haydn years to realise. From a distance, the bold grey-black bars of Khan's huge image recall the calming abstractions of an Agnes Martin painting. Up close, however, the myriad notes seem to hum with creative struggle and the energy of religious and artistic faith.
All about my mother: It was Khan's late mother who first stoked his passion for classical music. His recent work Black Horizon uses one of her favourite piano pieces, a Bach melody.
Where can I see him? Khan's solo exhibition is at Victoria Miro gallery, London, until 24 April 2010.
www.victoria-miro.com
Quilts 1700-2010 V&A, London
Natasha Kerr's At the End of the Day, 2007, part of Quilts 1700-2010 at the V&A. Photograph: Richard Davis
The soldier looks peaceful but alarmingly pale. He has a metal plate lodged in his head. They've patched him up at the military hospital and even given him something to keep his mind off the horrors of the Crimea. He is sitting up in his nightshirt stitching the most startling quilt.
The triangles alternate black and white, black and red, red and yellow in fierce chevron stripes. It is a terrific piece of op-art geometry. The painting that commemorates Private Walker's labours shows not only the quilt and exactly how it is done, right down to the difficulty of keeping each fiddly little triangle from curling up as you stitch it to another, but something else too.
There on the bed lies Walker's uniform, complete with medal. The quilt turns out to be made of his regimental colours, almost literally – a piecing together of the torn clothes, if not the bodies, of the dead.
Are all quilts an act of commemoration, more or less public or private? It seems so from this tremendous exhibition. Quilts 1700-2010 has had more advance bookings than any other at the V&A, with visitors due to fly in from all round the world. It deserves its enormous success.
For what it shows is an art form that takes scraps of the real world and transforms them into visions and images, that shores up the fragments of the past while making something new (and warm) for the future. This is not quilting as commonly imagined – Laura Ashley pre-cut squares machined together for the guest room – but something infinitely more imaginative, idiosyncratic, personal; another way of drawing or painting, another form of narrative or expression.
Look at the unknown 18th-century woman who has stitched her entire world into a coverlet, beginning with the clock at the centre that measures time and life, radiating out through the day's objects – comb, thimble, scissors, the very needle she is using right now – to the emblems of her home and the garden beyond, where the spring birds arrive, then depart for the winter sun. It feels like the whole of an existence, circumscribed, confined and yet rich in the mind, condensed to the visual equivalent of a sonnet.
Look at James Williams's anthology of wonders – a camel, an elephant, a Chinese pagoda, the whale swallowing Jonah; to which he has proudly added a perfect cloth reprise of Thomas Telford's miraculous suspension bridge in Menai. Williams was a Welsh tailor. It took him a decade to piece the quilt together after work, and no wonder, for each vignette is united in a web of tiny shifting mosaics that feels like a dream adrift in the mind.
Ten years, 40 years: the curators have been able to determine from the fabrics themselves how long some of these quilts were under the needle – picked up and abandoned and picked up again. Each quilt is the measure of its own making. And as time passes, relationships and events are both implicit and explicit in the work. The death of a husband is felt in darkening tone and sombre embroidery; the length of a pregnancy apparent as the baby's name is eventually added after the relief of a safe birth. Quilts reflect family history as much as private lives.
Some of these histories turn out to be dark or sorrowful. Miss Nixon's quilt, made in the 1870s, and known as a strippy piece for its bold stripes of turkey-red and white cotton, was stitched in poverty at a miner's quilting club in Northumbria. The painstaking art is all in the patterning of diamonds, roses and leaves described with infinitely small stitches, perhaps compensating in this case for the lack of affordable cloth with which to vary the design.
Even an inexperienced eye can gauge how many long months of patience, skill and eyestrain were involved just by examining a single inch. But such quilts earned for Miss Nixon and her friends nothing more than the equivalent of a miner's wage for a fortnight.
Other quilts tell of lost children, unfaithful husbands, imprisonment and poverty, of persecuted Baptists and women convicts transported to Van Diemen's Land. One of the most dynamic – and vitality, not weakness, remains the dominant characteristic – is the so-called George III coverlet which shows the monarch reviewing his troops in the middle. But this formality is surrounded, and nearly upstaged, by a wonderful border in which official portraits of soldiers alternate with unofficial portraits of women: talking, writing, painting, laughing, walking and – of course – making quilts. There is no sense of Penelope sadly spinning away the war years; this is Homer revised, with women rising to the moment, refusing to waste either life or time.
This coverlet includes fragments of regency petticoat. The condition of life is materially apparent, so to speak, in a quilt. A tiny piece of expensive brocade, a circle of Indian fabric illegally imported during the 19th century trade ban, the lace from a Victorian wedding dress: what's prized is presented like a jewel in the ordinary cloth.
There are quilts made entirely from striped pyjamas, blankets, old coats, black-out curtains. Ingenuity is underpinned by frugality. The curators of this show had their ears to the ground when they first began to gather quilts five years ago, for this is an art that speaks more clearly than ever to our make-and-mend era.
And it does feel like speech. The most obvious (and commonly drawn) analogy is with abstract art: primary shapes, blocked colours, modular non-representational arrangements. Quilts have the shape and form of paintings; museums and collectors like to hang them on the walls. The great Amish quilts look like precursors to the minimalism of Sol Lewitt, Joseph Albers and Frank Stella.
But this is an exhibition of British quilts, and though there is one stunning abstraction, mute in its glowing cobalt and red, the sense is far more of representation, of the power of quilts to make a direct address.
Which is precisely the subject of a piece by Sara Impey, one of 10 works specially commissioned for this show. Impey found a letter in a drawer after her mother's death that breathed a hint of lost love; she has preserved it, like scented air in a bottle, in a most beautiful quilt in which phrases and half-phrases are stitched into the spectral surface of the fabric in broken lines that both imitate the patterns of speech and the motion of sewing itself, piercing the cloth, then drawing the thread slowly away.
We are all familiar with quilts that anthologise a family's old clothes, or commemorate its story through births or marriages; with quilts as complex pixellations of colour, tone and shape, patterned in jockey's cap or sawtooth star. But what this show reveals is the sheer originality that can thrive within such precise parameters. It is a show to enthral and inspire in equal measure, not least because there is such a sense of order in this hardwon art, this creation of a world out of scraps. It is all there in the portrait of Thomas Walker in his bed: the strange peace of making a quilt.
Sunday, 28 March 2010
Exhibitions Pick of The Week
Tomory Dodge, London
While LA-based painter Tomory Dodge has plunged into abstract territory, his dense tangles of paint still retain something of the chaotic wildernesses depicted in earlier works. Smears and blocks of luminous pigments amass like a flurry of city lights. In new diptychs and large-scale paintings he explores symmetry, with the frame divided in two to create mirror worlds of curiously balanced frenzy.
Alison Jacques, W1, to 24 Apr
Ron Terada and Susan Collis, Birmingham
Ron Terada's neon works stand like deadpan provocations for road-movie reveries. A towering aluminium sign reading Entering City of Vancouver is set against a series of posters for group exhibitions by local artists. A neon Big Star sign is directly lifted from the logo of the cult rock band of the same name, who in turn lifted it from a supermarket chain. Susan Collins's installations initially appear to be in process of construction. On closer observation, however, we see that the old table spattered with paint is inlaid with pearls and opals; the paint-stained dust sheet is painstakingly embroidered; and there are nails of gold and silver. Enchanting stuff, playing at the age-old art of making magic of the mundane.
Ikon, Wed to 16 May
Robert Clark
Anna Maria Maiolino, London
Sao Paulo-based artist Anna Maria Maiolino is hand-rolling several thousand kilos of clay into hundreds of balls, which will be left to dry out and crumble, bearing the marks of kneading fingers like a stigmata to artistic industry. As physically impressive as the project promises to be, though, Maiolino seems more interested in the act of making, rather than any final result. The mass of sculptures allude to social structures, and the interplay between individuals and culture. Like peers Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, her work has developed through the object-suspicious ethos of feminism and conceptual art. While she has worked with clay since 1989, several of her films included in this show reveal her as a polymorphous artist.
Camden Arts Centre, NW3, Fri to 30 May
Vertical Thoughts, Dublin
Subtitled Morton Feldman and the Visual Arts, this show charts the influence of the American composer on some of the most innovative visual artists of the 1960s and 70s, and vice versa. Feldman's "indeterminate" music has more in common with the open-ended colour fields of abstract painting than it does with the melodic linear structures of more traditional composers of the time. The show includes works by such pioneering visual art colleagues as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly. It's an engrossing reminder of one of the most exciting concentrations of artistic talent in the 20th century.
Irish Museum of Modern Art, Wed to 27 Jun
Robert Clark
Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, London
It's not hard to tell from Ilya Kabakov's work that he came of age in Soviet-era Russia. In his installations, impossible wishes are piled optimistically high, tempered by a hollow foreboding of failure. He has collaborated with his wife, Emilia, since 1989 on projects such as Palace for Projects (1998) and House of Dreams (2005). But the Kabakovs also work on a smaller scale, as demonstrated in the Malevich-inspired Flying Paintings on show here. Slanting geometric shapes contain happy, idealised scenes of outdoor gatherings and homely repose that threaten to slide off the canvas.
Sprovieri Gallery, W1, Tue to 29 May
Skye Sherwin
Francis Bacon, Compton Verney
Francis Bacon: In Camera sets unforgettable paintings from 1944 to 1989 against the photographs the artist so often used as catalytic source material. On loan from the archives of Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane, many of the images are soiled and distressed by the prevailing organised chaos of Bacon's studio. But the smooth surfaces of powerful photo-images by the likes of Eadweard Muybridge and John Deakin are further distorted and transformed by Bacon's messing with the oil paint. It's as if the artist needed the fixed certainties of the photographs to anchor his wayward, grotesque figures in real life. This, after all, is the thing Bacon was a master of: setting up poignant visual and psychological tensions between fierce passion and provocative restraint.
Compton Verney, Sat to 20 Jun
Tim Head, Cambridge
Back in 1977, when Tim Head was the first artist fellow at Kettle's Yard, he had been doing disorienting things with mirrors and projections. Gallery walls were transformed into uncertain shifting surfaces with little more than reflections and light. Now, Head returns to the gallery as one of Britain's foremost innovators of digital art. Having developed his fascination for space through the logos and gizmos of consumer culture, evolving media and new technology, he has turned his attention now to computer pixels. Typically blown up large and projected in changing constellations, his recent works are kaleidoscopic and mesmerising, as if a Jackson Pollock painting had been created by 2001's supercomputer Hal in introspective mood.
Kettle's Yard, to 9 May
Simon Faithfull, Preston
If Simon Faithfull's drawings and video installations are exploratory, it's because the process of exploration itself is being explored. A record of the artist's trip to the Arctic Circle, here viewed as a series of reflections captured in a human eye, includes a fascinating array of wild locations and complex scientific gadgetry. But the supposed object of the artist's exploration – the northern lights – are nowhere to be seen. Elsewhere, a lone figure is tracked by video camera as he uses a GPS device to follow the exact route of the Greenwich meridian from Peace Haven in Hampshire to Cleethorpes in Lincolnshire. Streams are waded through, windows and hedges climbed; but the point of it all is left up the air. There's an absurdist edge to all that Faithfull does, plus an obsessive and quixotic love of travel and random observation.
Harris Museum and Art Gallery, to 5 Jun
Saturday, 27 March 2010
London Museum Shows
Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective
TATE MODERN
LONDON
Through May 3
Curated by Michael Taylor
When he took his own life in 1948 at age forty-four, Arshile Gorky was not only in the prime of his career but also in a sweet spot in the history of American art. No less a deft draftsman than a dazzling colorist, the artist had addressed advanced painting’s imperative at the time head-on: to work through the legacies of Picasso and Surrealism and arrive at a personal, abstract vernacular. The results, as they say, are history. Gorky’s large canvases, which remain emblematic of the New York School, will join sculptures, drawings, and prints in this 180-work retrospective, introducing to a new generation a seminal figure for whom painting’s stakes were a matter of life and death.
“Van Doesburg and the International Avant-Garde”
TATE MODERN
LONDON
Through May 16
Curated by Vicente Todolí, Gladys Fabre, and Doris Wintgens Hötte
A chief exponent of De Stijl, Theo van Doesburg was anything but doctrinaire. Like the elemental shapes that logically expanded from his canvases to the world itself, his activities reached out to involve such seemingly antithetical developments as the early Bauhaus and Dada. Organized in collaboration with the Stedelijk Museum De Lakenhal in Leiden, the Netherlands (where the show is on view through January 3), this exhibition comprises more than three hundred pieces by van Doesburg and some eighty of the artists he affected, from Mondrian to Schwitters. The curators have gathered works of painting, sculpture, typography, poetry, music, film, furniture, interior design, and architecture—including model reconstructions of the collaboratively designed Café Aubette in Strasbourg, France—making visible the range of van Doesburg’s influential practice.
Chris Ofili
TATE BRITAIN
LONDON
Through May 16
Curated by Judith Nesbitt
It takes guts to shed your clothes in public, but this, in effect, is what Chris Ofili has done in his paintings over the past five years. Layer by layer, he has peeled away the resin, glitter, and signature fecal excrescences that once made his canvases such dense and enthralling objects, laying bare the sinewy contours and flat fields of color that long served as hidden armatures. This shift makes all the more timely Ofili’s Tate retrospective of forty-five paintings (some never previously exhibited) and a selection of works on paper. Spanning from the mid-’90s until today, the show should illuminate the continuities and ruptures between Ofili’s recent and earlier output, as well as between media like drawing and painting, the former of which has gained new clarity and prominence in the latter’s domain.
TOP TEN Margaret Honda
Los Angeles–based artist Margaret Honda most recently exhibited her sculptures and photographs in group shows at S1F Gallery, Los Angeles, and Estación Tijuana, Mexico, and as part of the 2008 California Biennial. Currently she is constructing a full-scale paper rendition of a house that is being published and distributed piece by piece in publications such as North Drive Press and the Drawing Center’s Drawing Papers.
1
DAVID L. MACADAM COLOR SOLID, 1944
A color solid proposes to be a standardized representation of how color differences are perceived, and no such rendering is stranger and more beautiful than the one devised by MacAdam. Of course, if you’re doubtful that such a bizarre shape––which looks like a partially unwrapped burrito—can accomplish this feat, you’re not alone. In his 1981 book, Color Measurement, the scientist admitted the failure of his own attempt (and everyone else’s, too). Still, I’m grateful he tried.
Illustration from David L. MacAdam’s Color Measurement: Theme and Variations (Springer-Verlag, 1981).
2
CHARLES DARWIN, THE FORMATION OF VEGETABLE MOULD, THROUGH THE ACTION OF WORMS, WITH OBSERVATIONS ON THEIR HABITS (1881)
Darwin brings to this study of modest and overlooked creatures the same rigor that informs his better-known work, demonstrating the role earthworms play in forming topsoil, in the subsidence of the land and subsequent preservation of archaeological finds, and in the disintegration of rocks through chemical and mechanical processes. At the same time, he observes how worms pave their burrows with tiny stones to keep warm and dry, how their taste in food varies, and how they determine the best method for dragging paper triangles of different proportions. It is clear that Darwin finds his subject both charming and formidable, and in fact, we can describe his writing in those very terms.
3
ROBERT BRESSON, AU HASARD BALTHAZAR (1966)
Everything I love and admire about Bresson is encapsulated by just one minute of one scene in this masterpiece: The donkey Balthazar, pulling a hay cart through a circus menagerie, comes face-to-face with four animals in succession—a tiger, a polar bear, a chimpanzee, and an elephant. As Balthazar passes before each, the film cuts back and forth between his gaze and that of the other creature. Presumably, only a few feet separate them, but that distance is insurmountable. It’s a standard construction in film to use this technique when two human characters meet, revealing in the eyes of each something of their feelings and motivations. In Bresson’s film, however, these looks are exchanged by animals. He gives us their point of view, but no entry into their thoughts or feelings, and thus no entry into the moment of which we find ourselves a part. The sequence is entirely inscrutable and can only leave us spellbound.
ROBERT BRESSON, AU HASARD BALTHAZAR (1966)
Everything I love and admire about Bresson is encapsulated by just one minute of one scene in this masterpiece: The donkey Balthazar, pulling a hay cart through a circus menagerie, comes face-to-face with four animals in succession—a tiger, a polar bear, a chimpanzee, and an elephant. As Balthazar passes before each, the film cuts back and forth between his gaze and that of the other creature. Presumably, only a few feet separate them, but that distance is insurmountable. It’s a standard construction in film to use this technique when two human characters meet, revealing in the eyes of each something of their feelings and motivations. In Bresson’s film, however, these looks are exchanged by animals. He gives us their point of view, but no entry into their thoughts or feelings, and thus no entry into the moment of which we find ourselves a part. The sequence is entirely inscrutable and can only leave us spellbound.
Robert Bresson, Au Hasard Balthazar, 1966. (Excerpt)
4
CHARLOTTE POSENENSKE, “VIERKANTROHRE” (SQUARE TUBES), SERIES D AND DW, 1967
All of Posenenske’s work is amazing, but her square tubes of corrugated cardboard and sheet metal are a marvel. Her idea of producing modules in an unlimited quantity, pricing them at their production cost, letting other people install them according to their own criteria, and making them disposable was incredibly prescient and influential. The fact that you can see the screw holes at the exposed end of a tube means that more modules can be added and that the piece can go on forever, across space and over time. Lucky us.
5
MICHAEL ASHER, INSTALLATION MÜNSTER (CARAVAN), 1977, 1987, 1997, 2007
In this work the temporal and spatial ramifications of what you are seeing just melt together: For each of the four Skulptur Projekte exhibitions, Asher rented the same make and model trailer (Dodge Grand) and parked it in the same sequence of locations during the same time intervals. The project would be exactly repeatable, but for the world we live in. We see this quite plainly in the work’s photo-documentation, where a gap in the image sequence indicates that a given installation was not possible or the exhibition’s time frame had changed (or the photo wasn’t taken). I have seen this work only in 2007 but look forward to seeing it again in 2017, 2027, 2037, 2047, 2057 . . .
6
GIULIA LAMA (CA. 1685–1753)
I first learned of Lama in Venice, where I saw her Allegoria della Chiesa (Allegory of the Church) in the apse of Santa Maria Formosa, the church for the parish where she was born. Hooked, I’ve searched ever since for whatever else I could find by this painter who has barely escaped total obscurity; only a few works survive, but the power of their sketchlike assurance makes you wish there were many more. In Venice, you can also see the Crucifixion at San Vitale and Judith and Holofernes in the Accademia. Then there is The Martyrdom of St. Eurosia (probably a sketch) in the Ca’ Rezzonico: Even headless, Saint Eurosia appears to be pushing herself up, brazenly turning to deal with the smirking executioner behind her.
7
JACK BROGAN’S SHOP, LOS ANGELES
Jack has fabricated work for Robert Irwin since the 1960s, for Lynda Benglis since the 1970s, and for artists of every generation since. In his studio, there are always major pieces being produced or conserved. But the objects that really catch my eye are the templates and tools he makes to make the art he constructs, each one usually with only a single function—whether it’s polishing or forming something or routing a single piece of material—so that the given step is done with absolute precision. Each jig is unique, uniformly handsome, and intriguing, reminding me what fabrication is all about.
JACK BROGAN’S SHOP, LOS ANGELES
Jack has fabricated work for Robert Irwin since the 1960s, for Lynda Benglis since the 1970s, and for artists of every generation since. In his studio, there are always major pieces being produced or conserved. But the objects that really catch my eye are the templates and tools he makes to make the art he constructs, each one usually with only a single function—whether it’s polishing or forming something or routing a single piece of material—so that the given step is done with absolute precision. Each jig is unique, uniformly handsome, and intriguing, reminding me what fabrication is all about.
8
CLOTHES INSIDE OUT
My mother was a couture dressmaker for the Hollywood designer Howard Greer. She summed up her deep knowledge and extreme standards as follows: A garment should be constructed well enough that you can wear it inside out.
Jacket made by the writer’s mother, Ruth Honda, ca. 1960, shown inside out. Photo: Margaret Honda.
9
WORTH FOUR-DOT TEST
Those of us who lack binocular vision need not miss out on 3-D media: We alone have the Worth four-dot test, a simple exam involving four lights and a pair of red-and-green-lensed glasses. Those with binocular vision who take the test see a standard combination of four red and green dots: Boring! Those without, on the other hand, are in for a treat: only green dots, only red dots, extra dots, shifting dots, dots that are half green and half red as in a painting by Gabriel Orozco. Because the anomalies are constructed in your brain, however, you realize, after taking the glasses off, that what you were looking at was, in fact, never there.
Those of us who lack binocular vision need not miss out on 3-D media: We alone have the Worth four-dot test, a simple exam involving four lights and a pair of red-and-green-lensed glasses. Those with binocular vision who take the test see a standard combination of four red and green dots: Boring! Those without, on the other hand, are in for a treat: only green dots, only red dots, extra dots, shifting dots, dots that are half green and half red as in a painting by Gabriel Orozco. Because the anomalies are constructed in your brain, however, you realize, after taking the glasses off, that what you were looking at was, in fact, never there.
Chart for Worth four-dot test.
10
KAMABOKO
The texture and flavor of this steamed fish cake define comfort food for me. But the main attraction is the piece of wood on which the kamaboko is made—and that, when a whole packaged loaf is bought, remains present as a kind of pedestal to which the treat is firmly attached. If kamaboko didn’t already exist in this form, I would have liked to have made it as a sculpture.
The texture and flavor of this steamed fish cake define comfort food for me. But the main attraction is the piece of wood on which the kamaboko is made—and that, when a whole packaged loaf is bought, remains present as a kind of pedestal to which the treat is firmly attached. If kamaboko didn’t already exist in this form, I would have liked to have made it as a sculpture.
Manray Hsu and Jun Yang
Left: The exterior of the Taipei Contemporary Art Center. Right: TCAC’s office.
After five months of intense preparation, the Taipei Contemporary Art Center, an independent initiative founded by artists, curators, critics, and cultural activists, opened on February 27. Here, two of the founders, curator Manray Hsu and artist Jun Yang, speak about the project’s beginnings and aspirations.
THE IDEA FOR THE SPACE stems from Jun’s work that was in the 2008 Taipei Biennial. He proposed a project that provoked questions about the conditions of exhibiting contemporary art. So, it began with the wall––who’s wall is that? Who is paying for it? Is it a private space, a governmental space, an alternative space, or an apartment? The project focused on Taipei, so the first step was to talk with the Taiwanese art community.
That work functioned like an office in a way; we put a flag on the top of a building that we occupied during the biennial, which read A CONTEMPORARY ART CENTER TAIPEI – A PROPOSAL. There was also a conference that brought together local art professionals to discuss what is going on today in Taiwan. Jun’s solo project grew into a collective project that tried to fulfill the hopes and wishes of everyone involved but it also took seriously claims of how it could act as a broader platform for discussion that is independent of political or economic influences.
The Taipei Contemporary Art Center is a more focused attempt by artists, curators, and critics who are really trying to think of how a space can be run and programmed. For the first phase of the project, we were given a space last summer from a real estate developer who had bought many buildings in the Ximen area in downtown Taipei. They gave us two connected four-story buildings. Of course we needed to raise funds for renovations, so our first show, which opened on February 27, features donated works by prominent Taiwanese artists––including Michael Lin, Chen Chieh-Jen, and Wu Mali––that will help generate operational funds for the space.
We want to do more discursive events like talks, lectures, or artist presentations. We’ll also have film screenings and performances. You can compare it to any alternative artist-run space but you can also compare it to any museum. This project is trying to reflect these different models but also trying to come up with its own model. We aren’t trying to reinvent the wheel but we are trying to speak to the specific local conditions in Taipei.
The first thing is that museums in Taiwan now respond less and less to the needs of the local art community. In this age of neo-liberalism everything is regulated––even the museum will organize a show to pump up visitation. We are creating a situation where the art community itself can produce its own exhibitions and can create its own discursive space. This is what museums should do, but in Taiwan, in general, the art community does not have this kind of solidarity. Second, there’s a lot of bureaucracy here. And the museums won’t organize conferences about this. These conversations about rules and regulations usually happen at small dinners or in a bar. But creating these platforms for discourse is one of the main necessities of the space we want to create. We will hold forums to talk about the production, distribution, reception, and politics of cultural production.
The third thing is that contemporary art from Taiwan is very marginalized. To counteract this, we are building an archive for artists and curators who have worked in the last few years on an international level and we have invited them to continuously update their files. Anyone can come and do research here.
Saturday, 30 May 2009
Tracey Emin - Those Who Suffer Love
Excitement filled the air as I scrambled through the crowds on thursday night for Tracey Emin's first london show in for years. Everyone turn out for the queen of the YBA's, from the cool art students to the well tailored collectors. As you enter the first room you are hit with a provocative projection of a headless women masturbating, it is made up of drawings of a naked women in high heels put together to give a continuously looping flick book film. This piece was intriguing and seemed to be reflecting of the the title, 'those who suffer love', the continuous pleasure of this women is contrasted with the deep loneliness of the none ending action. The show was very stripped back, linear and direct to the point, Tracey herself described it as her ' credit crunch show' and there was none of the pomp usually attached to white cube shows. Down stairs were a selection of note book drawings some from as long ago as 20 years, for these were the pieces that touched me as they showed a raw incite into Tracey's painful past. The Blankets with drawings stitched onto them were quite fabulous and was a interesting way to present the drawing threw the actually stitches. Definitely one to go and see and is on until 4 july.
Wednesday, 27 May 2009
Shaan Syed
Shaan Syed is a young contemporary artist from Canada. He creates some amazing eye catching pieces the stripe picture bellow, 'Bad Neighbour' , relates very closely to the work of Anselm Reyle but Syed used bright colours to create a brilliant exciting feeling to this piece. My favorite series has to be 'And when you're (really) High'. In these canvases Syed uses diagonally crossing stripes of colour on a black background crating an incredible image. The one bellow featured in a successfully show at Brown contemporary and was recently sold at Phillips de Pury. Although it didn't manage to reach its low estimate of $10,000 it eventually sold for %6,250. No doubt this lot was a casualty of the recession and at only $6,250 i think it has suffered from the market under valuing this incredible piece. Shaan Syed is definitely one too watch in the coming years.
2008
Shaan Syed
SYED_SHAAN And when you're (Really) high no.2, 2007
sold: May 15, 2009
sold: May 15, 2009
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