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Posts filed under sculpture
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
len_lye: science guy
Len Lye is Science Guy for art of all kinds. “How to Enjoy Art Without Thinking” by Len Lye. It’s not the original name of Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery exhibit (The Body Electric) but it’s the first notion that comes to mind wandering through the roomful of audio-enhanced, kinetic sculpture from the New Zealand artist. In… (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)
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)
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)
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)
palais de tokyo, my future thanks you
Thank the Art Gods on High for someone in the universe who is watching over each and every one of us gallery hustlers and museum freaks who just don’t have enough time in the day. Enough time in the day to pore over, wrestle through, sneer at and wonder through as much contemporary art as… (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)