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Posts filed under Tate
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
whither museum
Take comfort, common man and woman, in knowing that the world’s finest museums and galleries are thinking about the plural “you” and your struggles in appreciating art. Don’t get the wrong idea, it’s not that they’re interested in your opinion. If they wanted that, as the saying almost goes, they’d box it up in a… (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)
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)
building an icon
Birmingham: England’s second largest city. It’s a colossal second to London in population, cultural energy, and decent pubs. The distance between the largest and second-largest, in population, is the equivalent of New York City and Austin, Texas. Birmingham, however, is ground zero for the industrial revolution, heavy metal music, and the Balti. The intrepidness of… (read more)
are you going to the art do?
I have a new art theory: the big difference between 19th century art and that of the 20th century are the parties. It’s a tale of two Tates, in this instance, and ultimately it serves only to fortify the boundaries between centuries. We’re just better at entertaining ourselves today than we were in Victorian times…. (read more)