Hirst to Royal Academy: No Thanks - ARTINFO.com
LONDON— The reason isn’t known, but Brit art star Damien Hirst has turned down an offer to become a Royal Academician at the Royal Academy of Arts, joining such other refuseniks as Lucian Freud, Howard Hodgkin, and Paula Rego.
So the One & Other project has gone live in Trafalgar Square, and you can watch it on the web as hour after hour for the next four months a stream of the public take their moment in the spotlight.
Or not. Because it's going to get old very quickly. This project will not be about fame or notoriety or even notice for any but a very few. And surely that is right, because we can't be making art by giving a random bunch of people a pedastal to stand on.
So it must be about something else. I don't want to try and work that out here, I haven't really got a clue why Gormley thought this might be a good idea. What I would like to do is point out a few things that sort of are interesting about the project, but which don't seem to be foregrounded.
Firstly, every person is in a timeframe. Every participant is bracketed between two other people--someone is waiting to follow you as you have followed someone else. But you won't get any idea of this from the website, where only the current person's actions seems to be of any interest (sure, you can look at who else is lined up, but you don't get any idea where they fit in the scheme of things).
And of course every individual is locked into a relationship with their own unique hour. But again, you don't get any idea of where they sit in their hour. There is no countdown clock, no sense of time passing. So time based this aint.
There is also an interesting issue around the 24 hour nature of the event. Some people are going to be up there for an hour in the dark hours just before dawn, when only the street sweepers or hardened clubbers are passing. And then there is the weather. Maybe a thunderstorm is ok at 2 in the afternoon, but what about driving cold drizzle at 3 in the morning. What becomes the maschocistic point of it at that hour?
So the project happens in a bigger frame, it needs to be viewable or interpreted as a big project, not as a series of 'Britain's got Talent' live on the fourth plinth.
But so far there is no sign of this happening, no sign of a bigger issue. Just a series of self promoters. Oh well.
[Edit - more thoughts. There is no information on the site about who is up there or what they intended to do or what they thought about what they would do. It would be a no brainer surely to put this info up under the live feed? And how about allowing public comments? Emails/texts/twitters? A rolling response? Moderated? There is no interaction, just watching. Maybe that's the point.]
» HINTERLANDS Exhibition PV 11/07/09
Hinterlands 12th July 2009 – 9th August 2009 Fri – Sun 12 – 6pm
The Hinterlands exhibition launches the new Trafalgar House studios in Portslade, West Brighton. Situated in this architecturally diverse area, Hinterlands explores notions of landscape construction, re-contextualising and interpreting the familiar. The artists in this show create works that expose the façade of landscape, often divulging ‘that which lies beneath’, creating images that intrinsically link with the memory of landscape rather than re-presenting the physical form.
There are many interpretations of landscape and its meaning to each individual. For some of us, landscape can mean an uninterrupted woodland, for others the interior of a small room; for more, it can be the sea, or an industrial wasteland. Embedded in each of these personal definitions, there is deep rooted symbolism and memory.
By addressing this sense of memory, these artists use theview of landscape to explore their own fascinations with medium and allegory. Matthew Millers models of fake tree mobile phone masts are reconstituted in the gallery, highlighting their artificiality. Christopher Stevens’ mountainscapes are luscious piles of paint he has created, the paint being both the form and the medium. Lulu Allison epic ‘Return to Empire’ atmospherically returns us to the dustbowl of civil war and conquest by using found objects. Throughout the exhibition, we find atmospheres being similarly reinterpreted by the selected artists; we view their own interpretation of space through abstracted or rhetoric imagery.
All artists in this exhibition are currently working in the Brighton area.
The following artists will be participating at Hinterland-
Woodrow Kernohan, Mike Blow, Chris Stevens, Matthew Miller, Tamsin Morse, Louise Bristow, Ivan Pope, Kate Brigden, Laura Mousavi Zadeh, Betsie Geno, Lulu Allison
I don't believe in Artforum,
I don't believe in Hirst,
I don't believe in Saatchi,
I don't believe in White Cube,
I don't believe in Goldsmiths’,
I don't believe in money,
I don't believe in artworld,
I don't believe in Tate Modern,
I don't believe in agents,
I don't believe in cheeses,
I don't believe in Warhol,
I don't believe in Chapmans,
I don't believe in galleries,
I don't believe in Frieze,
I don't believe in magic,
I just believe in me.
Mare Liberum and the Gowanus Studio Space are proud to offer a weekend of boat-building and inner-city cruising! Led by artists Dylan Gauthier, Stephan von Muehlen, and Benjamin Cohen, The Free Seas / Mare Liberum is a freeform publishing, boatbuilding and waterfront art collective, based in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Finding its roots in centuries-old stories of urban water squatters and haphazard water craft builders, Mare Liberum is a collaborative exploration of what it takes to make viable aquatic craft as an alternative to life on land. We are currently building a fleet of Liberum Dories, a design based on the historic 15' Banks Dory. The frame of this boat can be constructed over the course of a single afternoon using minimal tools and basic building skills (seriously, you can do it).
papressblog: "Magnificent and frightening, they suggest an abrupt beginning and a shattering end."
“Gaz’s big black-and-white aerial photographs of meteor-impact sites in Namibia, Australia, South Africa, and elsewhere appear prehistoric; with the exception of a crater in Arizona and its attendant industrial sprawl, there are no signs of human habitation. Or maybe these images anticipate the end of history, a time when the earth returns to moonlike desolation, its skies black and its barren surface gouged. Gaz’s decidedly lunar landscapes may not be sci-fi fantasies — he took them hanging out of a hovering helicopter — but they’re almost unrecognizable as our home planet. Magnificent and frightening, they suggest an abrupt beginning and a shattering end.”
Sites of Impact
GUY DEBORD is celebrated as the leader of the Situationist International and as the author of the searing critique of the media-saturated society of consumer capitalism: The Society of the Spectacle.
What is much less well known is that after the May '68 Revolution, Debord and his partner - Alice Becker-Ho - quit Paris and went to live in a remote French village. Over the next two decades, Debord devoted much of the rest of his life to inventing, refining and promoting what he came to regard as his most important project: The Game of War.
Can you tell the difference between an Israeli and a Palestinian? - Haaretz - Israel News
The advertisement published in Haaretz in March read "Wanted: people who look alike," and promised NIS 8,000 to anyone that could locate someone who looked like one of the eight people featured in the advertisement.
What the advertisement didn't say, was that the eight people pictured were Palestinians.
The ad was made by Swiss artist Olivier Suter, as part of his project 'Enemies', which focused on the absurd ways people identify "the other".
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The advertisement is similar to a project Suter performed in Belgium, which asked viewers if they could dfferentiate between Flemish and French speakers.
VOLTA, the cutting-edge art fair, will move to a stunning new location for its fifth edition in Basel from June 8th-13th, 2009. The Markthalle, one of Europe’s largest cupola structures, is located steps away from the main railway station (SBB) and five short tram stops away from the Messe.
VOLTA5 is thrilled to announce it will be taking up residence during Basel’s Art Week in the historic Markthalle. Completed in 1929, the prominent dome is one of the highlights of the city skyline, welcoming all Basel visitors arriving at the central railway station or from the airport by direct bus. With a usable surface of 2,600 sq. meters, the Martkhalle sets a new standard for VOLTA5, which will move from its former home in the industrial harbor area to the very heart of the city, taking the organization up to a new level of professionalism.
As my last show was drawing to a close, I had a bit of a revelation. I realised it was really something of a remaking of the first installation I made after graduating college - in 1990, almost twenty years ago now. That piece was called 'In Mourning for Nothing'. It was a six month project to make a long term installation. After six months work in the same site, I indeed had something that has haunted me ever since.
After thinking about that for a while, I concluded that I was actually stilll making that first installation, that indeed I had been making the same piece of work for almost twenty years. And if I was still trying to resolve that first piece now, there was little chance I would ever finish it. So the concept of an entire career making the same piece of work raised its head, and was found not unpleasant. From that I swiftly (in my head) invented the concept of 'Slow Art'. Then I Googled it and found that Grayson Perry had in fact launched a Slow Art movement back in 2005. It doesn't look like anything much has come of it since, but then that's the nature of the beast. The Slow Art movement is now well and truly underway, and I'm signing up for it.
Slow Art - it's the new Slow Food. No, really - Grayson Perry - Times Online
Let's kill speed, says the Turner prize-winning potter in the first of his new weekly columns
As a producer of art I feel an increasing pressure to keep in step with our 24/7 culture-on-demand society, and as a consumer I am overwhelmed by a tyranny of choice. I hereby declare the launch of the Slow Art Movement (I have not hired a PR). Artists, I call on you to spend some quality time with a sketchbook before pointing the digital camera out of the car window. Think long and hard, perhaps even discuss your ideas in a Hoxton café before ringing up the fabricator and ordering that monument to a one-liner. Maybe even take the rebellious and increasingly fashionable step of learning how to make something skilfully with your hands.
Picasso set an awesome precedent by knocking out three art works for every day of his life but Vermeer is held in reverence for a surviving oeuvre that wouldn’t crowd out the wall space in a squash court. So I ask gallerists and curators not to expect artists to churn out cool stuff like some cultural ice machine. Often I plan to see a certain exhibition only to find it has been superseded in the blink of an art historian ’s eye by the next show. If we all spent longer thinking, making and looking perhaps less bad art would get made, shown and seen.
YouTube - Father Guido Sarducci on art school
Father Guido Sarducci (Don Novello) explains the advantages of being an artist. Produced by George Manupelli and William Farley in 1982 at San Francisco Art Institute. Won a 1982 Clio award.
Tate art made available on iTunes
The Tate galleries have made hundreds of video and audio downloads available for free on iTunes.
More than 400 files are now on iTunes U - a section of the online store which features educational content.
Projects include a series of films that use social networking site Twitter to bring the audience's questions directly to artists like David Hockney.
There are also recent interviews with contemporary artists including Jeff Koons and Louise Bourgeois.
Clips of Turner Prize-winning artist Martin Creed and his band performing at the Tate Modern are featured alongside debates about his work.
Audio recordings of leading academics, teaching resources and multimedia guides for the latest Tate exhibitions will also be made available.
We painted this mural by the cover of night on the side of the old American Thread factory in Clover, SC.
I went to the opening of this work - even then I seem to remember the glass was damaged. I came across the documentation of that even the other day and wondered what ever became of it. Now I know.
Henry Moore Foundation to showcase public art proposals that never made it | Art and design | The Guardian
One of the saddest stories in the archive is of Vong Phaophanit's Ash and Silk Wall, which won a design competition for an installation in a new park at the Thames Barrier - beating artists like Daryl Viner, whose proposal for an inverted glass pyramid will be in the exhibition. Phaophanit's wall, commissioned by PADT and Greenwich council, was installed in 1993, 14 metres of brilliantly coloured silk and ash sandwiched between giant sections of glass.
Trees in the park had been smashed even before he started, and the vandals soon closed in on the wall which was intended, the artist said poignantly, "to make people happy". Even when the shattered panels were fenced off, the vandals still managed to get at it. Eventually the whole structure was demolished as a safety hazard: it lives on only in the archive, and will be seen when the exhibition opens next month.
In the lead up to speaking at the seminar MAXIMISING THE IMPORTANCE OF ARTS AND CULTURE THROUGHOUT THE ECONOMIC DOWNTURN, Anne Bonnar is asking How should we reconfigure the cultural landscape ?
with a week of postings at her 21st century culture blog:
During the seven days from 14 - 21 April, I will be posting some of my views on the type of cultural support structures we need now. These views will contribute towards my contribution to the CPPS seminar on 24 April, a later publication of my thinking and also towards the development of a new platform for everyone in the arts. Some of the views are well developed and some not. Some of the posts will be long and some short.The usual list of anodyne questions about the arts industries ends with three questions that offer us a route to the nub of this issue:
In particular, I will be writing about the type of intermediary cultural public agencies that we need at this time. That is, those agencies which intermediate between government policy and the creative experiences achieved by artists and audiences.
How can creative industries be most successful regionally, nationally and internationally?I would add some questions of my own to these:
How should we best overcome physical, linguistic, religious and psychological barriers?
How can this be mirrored in all of our cities and regions?
Where can we expect to be in ten years time?
How to we communicate and share experiences and knowledge?
What role do the networking and social media tools play in the next ten years?
How do our self imposed arts categories stand up in an online world where there are no arts ghettos?
What do the concepts of open source and wikinomics mean in the context of arts agencies?
Arts Council North East held an event: Great Art For Everyone. They even put up a blog for it, though how you can have a blog for a one day event I'm not sure.
Anyway, great roster of speakers. Great day for all concerned. Just one question: what was the event about?
And another question: couldn't they find a single artist to speak? Do they know where art comes from?
Great Art For Everyone
Welcome
10Mar09
Welcome to the Great Art For Everyone blog, a place to comment, discuss and find out more about Arts Council England, North East’s event at The Sage Gateshead on Tuesday, 24 March 2009.
We’re working to realise our ambition to get great art to everyone. On Tuesday 24 March we’d love you to join us online for a day of discussion and debate around some key themes from the Arts Council Plan. We will be “twittering” live from the venue from greatartlive. We will also be broadcasting a live video stream of key sessions (more info coming soon!) and a Flickr feed.
This is an opportunity to share ideas on the future of the arts in our region and includes sessions on what we mean by ‘great art’, how ‘for everyone’ might be achieved, the digital opportunity, young people, internationalism and more.
Our guest speakers include our Chief Executive, Alan Davey who during his time with the Arts Council has advocated for artistic excellence, risk and innovation as well as a new sense of ambition as to how we engage audiences.
Check out our Speakers page for a full list of Speakers and be sure to sign up to our RSS feed to get the latest news and posts.
Pareidoliac thinks Jade is an artist and compares her to Damien Hirst --
Jade Goody: Farewell to our world's first big reality artist
Not long ago, I blogged about Jade Goody's plans to die on camera. Goody of initial Big Brother fame well exceeded Warhol's prediction of 15 minutes of fame and her dying resurrects something of the public affection attending the death of Diana Princess of Wales. Fame wise, Goody is at least on a par with Damien Hirst, if not exceeding Hirst's popularity in fact. Whilst many art professionals might be loathe to concede it, I believe a good case may be made for Jade Goody making a more original contribution to the history of human social expressivity. Like Hirst, Goody deployed the concept of fame to amplify perceived value - she made of her living quite literally a living, a personal economy. As the logic of a house (economy - oikos logos) the Goody economy furthermore is one that has a heart and family on the one hand, and relations of deep affection with the vast global public on the other.
Next week I have to build an inflatable that fills the first room in the space I'm showing in. So I've been experimenting:
Visit five years of AWoL archives, full of lovely stuff.
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Email me with ideas, links and offers of shows.
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