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Posts filed under contemporary
japanese ending
You say you’re Japanese, and you want to be an artist? Well then, I predict there are bright colours and bountiful circles in your future. It’s probably not relevant, but still, I’ve noticed lately that Japanese art, regardless of art movement, direction or starting point, embraces saturated, primary colours that are spun in geometric forms…. (read more)
found craft
There’s nothing that gets up the common man’s nose more than the “found object”. Stick a random stash of household items together, call it “Untitled 17″ and you can almost feel the money flow out of the public art fund. Since Duchamp first did it, the found object has symbolised the complete inability for artists… (read more)
Building Chatter
Buildings occupy such a large part of our physical and emotional world, so it’s no surprise they’re used as symbols for modernism; good or bad. Films like Batman, Blade Runner, The Italian Job, or any romCom shot in New York, often use cityscapes to dramatise the story, issuing viewers with a visual clue for anticipated… (read more)
photophobia found
Photography. What is it about the medium that puts fear in the hearts of artists and curators? You’d swear it’s the equivalent of a silver bullet to werewolves given the reasons why photography isn’t allowed in galleries. The backwards thinking of the art industry is one of self-destruction, with every opportunity to get the word… (read more)
clearly grim
John Salt is an English photo-realism painter, but instead of pursuing perfection, he chooses to focus attention on the destructed. We could use more painters like John Salt on British television. Just think of the possibilities of a dented X Factor or post-apocalyptic Eurovision. Heavy gloss just doesn’t carry the day in moments of pay… (read more)
keeping up
If you Google Huang Yong Ping + Bat Project, you’ll find news on Huang’s attempt to build and show a replica plane from a historical event, along with the news reports of the 2001 event itself. Funnily enough, you’ll also get the same data when you visit Huang’s work at the Nottingham Contemporary Gallery. It’s… (read more)
miro’s shoes
For anyone planning a visit to London this summer, two bits of news. First, the weather is cooperating immensely here, with the sun and warm weather arriving alarmingly early. The locals are going mental because they know this means one thing: it’ll be chilled and raining from May through August. It’s like spiders before earthquakes… (read more)
Boxed Light
Are light boxes sculptural, photographic, a combination of both, or a medium so little used there’s nowhere to put it? Liverpool’s Bluecoat Gallery is showing a Jyll Bradley survey of works, including units that are photographical, sign-like images that work best in the dark. She gets the idea from advertising light boxes, which of course… (read more)
marathon retrograde
Come Olympic time next year, will London art addicts be gritting teeth and holding cynical breaths as the endurance race begins? Chancing upon the line-up for Tate Modern in the next 18 months, I see five months of Saatchi showmanship will be placed firmly in front of international Olympic visitors in the form of a… (read more)
Feeding the Nile
The elephant in the room is literally a thick-ish magazine called Elephant that’s been jammed amongst other publications in my apartment for the last three months. I’ve finally gotten around to reading/addressing this Elephant (Issue 5, Winter 2010/2011), and found two parts of the book seemingly at odds with one another; both attempting to answer… (read more)
destroy creatively
Which would you rather have in your neighbourhood; a new Tesco, or a street full of newer, smaller, probably high-quality food (they’re new, so who knows) entrepreneurs popping up? On the one hand, Tesco gives you assurance and wide selection of safe goods, but the entrepreneurs potentially provide better quality, and make you feel socially… (read more)
future stuff
The first thing you think about when entering Robert Orchardson’s exhibition space at Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery is that someone’s left their geometry project out in the middle of the room. At first take, there’s nothing overwhelming or curious about any of the objects carefully positioned throughout the upper rooms at the Ikon Gallery, and in… (read more)
voices carry
If one were to come across Susan Hiller’s work in a gallery, without gallery notes, one might be inclined to describe her as bonkers, a complete nutter, one of those other-worldly types passing on hokus pokus theories of ghosts and spirits. In fact, at Tate Britain (until 15 May 2011), with minimal assistance from the… (read more)
yay!/oh no!
Yay! We have reason to celebrate in the world of art, albeit in the most mildest of manner. Thanks to Google Art Projects, more art is now available to more people. How righteously democratic. Just released online last week, Google, and a (very) short list of the world’s most well-attended galleries and museums, have made… (read more)
flux this
The old Fluxus art movement has been re-fluxed. A modern day British artist has seized the 1960′s sense of improvisation, along with the movement’s ease with technology, all from the angle of the 21st century. After visiting Nam June Paik’s show at Tate Liverpool, I put two and two together and thought of a contemporary… (read more)
statements questioned
Is it possibly to make a bicycle, more “bicycle-y”. Or an elevator lift more suffocating than it already is? Or a tyre that is more, well, tyre-ing? Gabriel Orozco focuses firmly on what a thing does, and then makes it more like itself; usually, with more of it. He finds a thing’s essence, then inflates,… (read more)
pyramid scheme
Another reminder at the British Art Show that our current, western culture is one of collecting random, possibly needless, objects, is Keith Wilson’s “Ziggurat” which itself is one of many pieces touring the country throughout 2011. A ziggurat of ziggurats, if you like. I had to look up the word “ziggurat” in my iPhone dictionary,… (read more)
back for seconds
Film is to artists, what books are to Paris Hilton: at one’s disposal, but hardly useful. Rarely is film a successful medium for artists, not because of film’s inherent limitations, but mostly from artists’ inability to produce a linear story in a time-based medium. Those that do attempt film or video demand that viewers leap… (read more)
collecting the country
If the British Art Show 7 is meant to describe the British art sensibility over the past five years, the message is clear: British-ness is about collecting many things, and sorting the pile into some sort of organisation: coherent or not. Zig zagging through the UK, BAS 7 woke up from its five-year slumber to… (read more)