Hayward gallery’s Shrigley exhibition next year will have one foot in the art world and the other in popular culture
David Shrigley’s Pumpkin will be one of the works on display for his retrospective at the Hayward gallery next year.
Tag: artworks
Art imitating life … Hiromi Tango, who is eight months pregnant, with her portable womb, made from materials including plastic flowers and dolls for the Primavera exhibition. Photo: Lee BesfordFor Hiromi Tango, home is not just where the art is – the art is a home. The heavily pregnant artist has built a cubby house-like construction so she can feel just like the baby she is due to deliver in a fortnight.
”It’s my womb,” the Japanese-Australian artist said of Hiromi Hotel: Mixed Blood, made of twine, wool, letters, plastic flowers, dolls, personal effects, a bed and all sorts else. The colourful refuge, in which viewers will be encouraged to sit or lie down while soft music plays, is among more than 30 artworks in the Museum of Contemporary Art’s annual Primavera exhibition of work from Australian artists aged 35 and under, opening today.
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Ryan Gander: Locked Room Scenario – Artangel
30 Aug 2011 to 23 Oct 2011, By apointment only
1-3 Wenlock Road, , Hackney , London, N1 7SL. UK
Phone: 020 7713 1400
info: info@artangel.org.uk,
Website: www.artangel.org.uk/
Gander, often described as a storyteller, has here gone one step further, casting the viewer in the lead role, and obliging them to take part in an uncertain but definitely sinister plot: are you the detective piecing together the available clues to solve the mystery, or are you in fact the hapless victim? At every moment it feels like a scenario with the potential to slide into the realm of b-movie horror – a sort of 28 Day Later meets the Saatchi gallery.
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Consciousness is a slippery word, so slippery it babbles in your mouth as you divulge its contents, its directionless-ness. Viewed with cynicism because of its slippery foundations it becomes for most, an untenable subject matter. However, it has been the subject matter of philosophy dating back to the father of modern Philosophical thinking, Descartes; who noted that consciousness is the most indubitable thing there is… The question then arises; why seek to further understand the incomprehensible?
The answer is simple, because humans are curious animals; we wish to further our knowledge of the world that surrounds us. This investigation runs from our infantile selves that needed to touch and taste everything, then as sensations grow and expectation builds our maps that we create for the world start to form. We build a knowledge of ourselves in relation to objects, which then evolves into our relationship with others. Our developments of theories of mind educate us in our understanding of others, and ourselves and to understand that others have beliefs, desires and intentions that are different from one’s own. The communities that we grow up in corral us, delivering us into the ever-increasing world/map that we are expected to cope with easily. We do this through communication and the comprehension of rules and formulae for interaction and action.
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Title: Rethinking curating: art after new media
- Publisher: The MIT Press; First Edition edition (February 5, 2010)
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9780262013888
- US$ 25.99
As curator Steve Dietz has observed, new media art is like contemporary art—but different. New media art involves interactivity, networks, and computation and is often about process rather than objects. New media artworks, difficult to classify according to the traditional art museum categories determined by medium, geography, and chronology, present the curator with novel challenges involving interpretation, exhibition, and dissemination. This book views these challenges as opportunities to rethink curatorial practice. It helps curators of new media art develop a set of flexible tools for working in this fast-moving field, and it offers useful lessons from curators and artists for those working in such other areas of art as distributive and participatory systems.
Rethinking Curating explores the characteristics distinctive to new media art, including its immateriality and its questioning of time and space, and relates them to such contemporary art forms as video art, conceptual art, socially engaged art, and performance art. The authors, both of whom have extensive experience as curators, offer numerous examples of artworks and exhibitions to illustrate how the roles of curators and audiences can be redefined in light of new media art’s characteristics. They discuss modes of curating, from the familiar default mode of the museum, through parallels with publishing, broadcasting, festivals, and labs, to more recent hybrid ways of working online and off, including collaboration and social networking. Rethinking Curating offers curators a route through the hype around platforms and autonomous zones by following the lead of current artists’ practice.
MONACO MAGAZINE issue 2.5
a special on-line edition for No Layout
with contributions by Jennifer Bailey, Censor, Babak Ghazi,
Alexander Haßenpflug, Eddie Peake and Gordon Shrigley
edited by Katie Guggenheim
cover design by Babak Ghazi
Monaco Magazine is a publication, a website and a programme of events. The format of a periodical magazine is used as an organisational structure to produce content across three platforms. Instead of reviewing or previewing, the magazine is devoted to sharing ideas and information about things that haven’t happened, and maybe never will (artworks that are impossible to realise, projects that haven’t got off the ground, the beginnings of ideas, or research that is still ongoing). The aim is not to catalogue or archive these projects, instead they are considered as starting points.
A magazine is light and malleable, but it also presents an opportunity for continuity or permanence–more so than an exhibition, or even a book–because a magazine repeats regularly. This degree of perpetuity allows contributions to unfold gradually over several issues as readers become contributors and contributors become readers.
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come and see the artworks, especially ‘Tent’ that the OK collective have put in.
Starry Night, The Sleeping Gypsy, and a painting blurred for its own protection.
The big story this week is Google’s singlehanded revitalization of the social power of art – or at least that’s what you’d gather from the coverage of Google Art Project. It’s an extension of Streetview inside some of the world’s fancy-schmanciest art museums – MoMA, Tate, the Uffizi, and the Hermitage, among others – with navigable 3D spaces and gigapixel images. As Kyle over at Hyperallergic documents, it’s an interesting and well-made piece of tech. As anything beyond that, though? I’m suspicious.
The flood of reportage on Art Project gives the rough impression that art died and was resurrected. Art Project is getting a lot of credit for opening museums up and making their collections accessible, which of course is something major museums have been doing prominently since the dawn of the internet; if Google had a hand in allowing us to find images of artworks, it was back when they came up with image search. What’s new here isn’t the individual works, but rather the preservation and dissemination of the curatorial selection and display that frame them. Honestly, this works: having never been, I really enjoyed looking at how the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow was hung, and it was nice to revisit Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Ambassadors in its surrounds at the National Gallery, because I remember thinking when I saw it that it was nicely hung. The reason this works, though, is that I’m an art nerd. Relatively few people are going to gain anything from seeing the works in their museum context other than a renewed appreciation for how important these museums are – which is, clearly, one of Art Project’s goals.
When they exist, the super-high-resolution images are relentlessly appealing. From Van Gogh’s “The Bedroom”.
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Karla Black, Given distance, what’s the difference 2010
Her meticulously rendered artworks are echoes of a time before language yet speak volumes.
So can Karla Black explain the method behind the magic?
There is a substance that clings to the sides of ancient caves called moonmilk. Because of its composition, a precipitate of limestone, it is permanently malleable and sludgy like cream cheese. It does not harden or turn to stone. In caves in south Australia there is moonmilk that, by its striated surface, shows that 20,000 years ago, someone dragged their fingers through it. The marks from those fingerprints will never dry.
Moonmilk is a substance that fascinates the Scottish artist Karla Black. So does another ancient relic, the first recorded piece of art, a scratched 77,000-year-old slab of South African ochre. Perhaps they interest Black because they are works of art, stabs of human consciousness, that are beyond words – made literally before language, as we know it, existed. They exist purely in the world of physical reality, where a human being reacts with the material in front of him. It would be a stretch, of course, to say that Black, born in Alexandria, West Dunbartonshire, in 1972, an internationally recognised artist living and working in Glasgow, operates in the same way as those nameless ancestors in Australia and Africa. But one facet is the same, and it is quite obvious in her massive, beguiling and sometimes baffling artworks: the material is the thing.
If you look for a message, or a meaning, you may be confounded. It may not even be there. Instead there are carefully rendered, sometimes beautifully detailed but abstract constructions of cellophane, topsoil, powder and paint. Previously Black has used lipstick, crushed chalk, nail varnish and body cream. In an early piece in 2000, she used Alka-Seltzer, leaving it to fizz in the rain. Sellotape and ribbon, plaster and spray paint, sugar paper and polystyrene are present too in her art. The sculptures – for that is what they are, not installations – are all named with telling words, or mysterious phrases. The titles – Motives Reached, Help Is Not Appealing, Eventually Benign – tempt you to look for meaning or a story in the sculpture, but you may get lost if you look too hard. Instead the works, which you have to see in the flesh to appreciate, have the visceral impact of the body and the natural world.
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Various artworks from TopArts 2010
THE national curriculum will devote as much time to media arts – which involves creating videos and online games – as it does to traditional arts subjects such as music and visual arts.
Every child from kindergarten to year 8 will be required to study two hours a week of media arts, drama, dance, music and visual arts under the next phase of the national curriculum. The draft arts curriculum ”shape paper”, to be released today, says students in years 9 to 12 will be able to specialise in one or more art forms.
The proposed changes were slammed by visual arts teachers, who warn it will ”dumb down” the curriculum and significantly downgrade the number of hours devoted to traditional arts subjects in schools. But chief executive of the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority Peter Hill said some students had missed out in the past because the curriculum had been focused on one or two art forms.
”The great benefit about this approach is that by the time students reach the point in their school career where they are given a choice about specialising in one particular art form, they can make an educated decision,” Dr Hill said.
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