RSS
Twitter
Posts filed under London
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
citrus oil
In the New York area, there exists a New York buzz for a New York art collective called The Bruce High Quality Foundation; or the Bruces, if you’re avoiding excessive typing. The Bruces are, at times, a cheeky bunch of prankster artists, not only in what they make, but how they make it. No names… (read more)
dust happens
Tate Modern is out with a new set of visiting directions for Ai Weiwei’s exhibit in its Turbine Hall. With the over-zealous prodding from Those That Know Best – the UK’s own disciplinarian and self-appointed headmaster, Health and Safety – gallery visitors are no longer permitted to walk onto the porcelain sunflower seeds. Turns out… (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)
humour me just this once
In the Exhibit book for “Rude Britannia”, shown at Tate Britain earlier, the director of the Tate, Penelope Curtis, states matter-of-factly that “Understanding humour is never easy and understanding in a historical sense is especially difficult.”. Except, well, I don’t think it’s difficult at all, understanding humour, especially in “a” historical sense. In fact, history… (read more)
hypercomics: your move
Comic books are not everyone’s cup of tea, but nothing is “everyone’s” cup of tea. Except maybe tea. Everyone does, however, enjoy a witty comic story; if for no other reason than the text is much shorter than that of a novel. The comics creator, Daniel Merlin Goodbrey, proves this point at a small show… (read more)
gormley-under-white-cube
When men imagine themselves driving cars; we usually picture ourselves in an environment that suits the particular model. A Bugatti Veyron on Germany’s Nurburgring with the landscape visibly blurred as we roar through the air. Inside a Mitsubishi Evo, we’re tearing up a dirt track off-road, sliding around sharp bends in the trails of Northern… (read more)
beginning, meet end
Pubs are probably a fertile incubation space for art. All sorts of unhinged, but nonetheless possibly valid ideas begin life in a pub amongst friends, usually after at least four quick pints. Laced with alcohol, people say the most outrageous things which nearly always require proof of concept outside the fantasy world of your local… (read more)
revealing the obvious
Eberhard Havekost; every heard of him? Me neither. Knowing who he is, at this point, is unimportant as he’s unlikely to be remembered by anyone in say 10-20 years. But Eberhard Havekost deserves a look, if only to be example-boy for What’s Wrong With Contemporary Art. Let’s get the process out of the way first…. (read more)
agoraphobia finds a friend
Lately, the over-busy mega-populated, push-to-shove city of London has been overloaded with single artist shows at the Tates; Arshile Gorky and Van Doesburg at the Big Smokestack, Henry Moore at Old Tate. After being blitzed through the eyeballs with a supermarket full of Pop artists a few months ago at Tate Modern, it’s a relief… (read more)
decode the olde
Surely, this means War! The Victoria and Albert Museum, the traditional bearer of arch conservatism in London, the safe-house for fine arts and antiques, has fired a Victorian cannonball at the young, art-drunk pirates across the river at Tate Modern. So, it is with pressed trousers and starched, button-down shirt, I managed a clean and… (read more)
art by number
Let’s say you’re trundling along to work on British Rail on a weary weekday morning, about 8:30, pressed up as politely as you can, to your like-minded human brothers and sisters, and you’re counting the stops to your final destination because, well, you can only hold your breath for so long. Just as you’re quietly… (read more)