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Posts filed under Liverpool
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)
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)
turner: new irrelevancy
The Turner Prize, for those that are lucky enough not to hear the over-hype and follow-on grumble of this annual award at London’s Tate Museum, is announced this time of year. The 2010 Award is somewhat different. Not much grumbling, at least from the media, but large heaps of moaning from protesting art students lamenting… (read more)
Moores Better
When art is more inclusive, it’s always better. This might sound counter-intuitive to today’s media specific moments and our natural magnetism toward “vertical markets”. You wouldn’t, for example, want to follow everyone on Twitter, and while collecting millions of Face Book friends is an impressive feat, it doesn’t exactly mean anything. Exceptions occur, however, where… (read more)
new contemporaries
“Artists be crazy” I read on someone’s blog, or twitter – can’t remember where exactly. Somebody has to crown themselves the maddest of hatters, and I guess it might as well be artists. They seem to have a built-in, SatNav system to insanity-town. The trick for the contemporary artist, however, is sharing the experience (read:… (read more)
Insurrection Inc.
“Culture is capital”. So reads a stray billboard, and a mis-placed poster, and are probably not the only two locations in Liverpool where a Liverpool Biennial visitor would chance upon this logic statement. This simple mathematical equation is ripe for contemporary time. Rarely, if ever, do we think about our own, living culture as capital;… (read more)
Trecartin: Turgid Waters
Ryan Trecartin is a former art student from the Rhode Island School of Design, and makes videos that he claims are scripted. The results prove otherwise, as amateur actors appear in various forms of drag and costume, seemingly having a ball slinging phrases about that don’t pretend to make any sense. The direction is a… (read more)
wow man!
When I was a teenager in the 1970s, our otherwise uncool bunch of smart aleck kids used to make a night of attending a show called Laserium at a local Planetarium in the middle of the USA. While laser light emitted gaseous clouds and spiky beams, played to progressive rock music of the day, we… (read more)
Dickensian Moments
In Dickensian fashion, a tale of two cities is exposed in the realm of British art. For rough and tumble adventures, Liverpool serves up its own, street-wise biennial, lasting from September through November. Meanwhile down in the sumptuous south, London slips us four days of glossy eye-candy at Frieze Art Fair at Regent’s Park. While… (read more)
jean tinguely: one of us
Do you ever wonder what artists were like when they were young; when they were a mere five paintbrushes high? I had a visit to Tate Liverpool this past week, where an exhibit for Jean Tinguely had been in place for a few months. Tinguely is the perfect artist for men, or as women would… (read more)