site place

anya gallacio

2010-12-16T08:49:00.000-08:00

martin puryear and richard serra

2010-05-14T09:04:00.000-07:00

Post-Modernism is dead and I am "calling it," as they say on Grey's Anatomy and E.R. The movement had been on life-support this Fall 2007, evidenced in the Richard Prince exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum and the Kara Walker exhibition at the Whitney Museum. These were two very important shows which recontextualized images in order to signify that human behavior can be shamefully violent and repulsively nasty. Richard Prince brings us pornographic nurses and tabloid rape victims (as well as silly old jokes and advertising mythology); Kara Walker seduces us with elegant black silhouettes of female slave degradation in the Ol' South (producing voyeurism to atrocity). Today, as the political wind changes direction, the art of recycling to enlighten the audience seems tired and suspiciously self-serving, as if pandering to the auction houses while sanctimoniously beefing up the museum's reputation.

Thankfully, two recent retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art—Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years (June 7 to September 17, 2007) and Martin Puryear (November 4, 2007 to January 14, 2008)—have blown fresh air into the art-mosphere. Both sexagenarians, Serra (b. 1939) and Puryear (b. 1941) reaffirm that Modernism brings out the best in us, because it asks us to engage in the moment of our absolute being—the here and now—regardless of our ethnic, political or gender differences. Known as Post-Minimalist Modernism, Serra's and Puryear's sculptures induce an exhilarating awareness of sheer physicality in art and one's own physical presence in relation to the work of art. This visceral confrontation recharges our commitment to immediacy as the art experience, eschewing for a moment our personal baggage, culpable pasts and divisive identities that take us out of the gallery and into ego-enhancing navel-gazing. In front of Serra's and Puryear's sculptures we dive deep into the absoluteness of our being—our sentience—to consider, if only for that moment in the museum, the essence of living in time and space. That said, these two exhibitions are very different: Serra creates forms that make us aware of space, while Puryear invents forms that challenge our preconceived notions of space.

Most of Richard Serra's sculptures, such as Band, Torqued Torus Inversion and Sequence (all completed in 2006), require walking into the piece. Situated one after another in a vast open gallery on the second floor, these three enormous architectural settings induced a state of dizziness and visions of Theseus entering the mythical Labyrinth on Crete to find the Minotaur (if only we had taken that ball of yarn from Ariadne ...). Serra expects the visitor to experience disorientation as he or she meanders through the works. This disorientation also brings on confusion, as the visitor may leave one work to enter another without realizing the transition.
Nevertheless, being self-aware in relation to the work of art is Serra's mission. Therefore, you walk (or ride) slowly through the works, registering all along the way the sensation of existing in this overwhelmingly humungous construction, similar to a prehistoric cave or natural canyon. The sensation is majestic: here is grandeur, vastness and geometric complexity—torque, for example, is the curvature of a surface vertically and horizontally (like the wheel of a car). This torque provokes a weird sense of instability among these giant walls.

Other Serra installations, such as Delineator (1974), define space. Here two 26 by 10 foot steel plates, one on the floor and the other suspended from the ceiling, form a separated cross "delineating" (Serra explains) the volume of the room which becomes part of the work itself. The heavy rectangular metal plate hovering above also imparts a sense of danger, as it introduces possibilities that are a bit disconcerting. The work harks back to Kasimir Malevich's Black Cross (1923), which Serra thought about while he lay in bed recovering from a herniated disc.

The anxiety of wondering if a huge metal sheet might smash your body to smithereens or flop down on your toe occasions other compositions, particularly in the 1969-1972 retrospective works Equal (Corner Prop Piece), Floor Pole Prop, Circuit and One Ton Prop (House of Cards), made up of steel plates and lead pipes pushing against each other, and held together only through the laws of gravity and force. Earlier works, such as Belts (1966-67), To Lift (1967) and Slant Step Folded (1967) also experimented with gravity and play.

Martin Puryear's Modernist sculpture also incorporates serious observation with free play, but in a more sensual way than Serra's. Several times I leaned in to smell the wood as I read off the suggestive names: pine, hickory, maple, Sitka spruce and ash. There was little fragrance to inhale, but the potential to indulge this olfactory sense augmented the desire to linger among these elegant visual expressions of interiority and exteriority. Self (1978), for example, carries this idea. It is a biomorphic form, composed through a composite method of compound curves, rather than made of one solid block carved to become a curved shape. Self looks like a whale emerging from the water, sighted from a distance. Stained and painted black on red cedar and mahogany, its smooth, polished wood surfaces bent into a curvilinear form shapes its exterior appearance. But the work is hollow—a secret interior has been hidden, a metaphor of the self and its duplicate identities: appearance and essence. "I value the referential quality of art, the fact that a work can allude to things or states of being without in any way representing them," Puryear explains in a ubiquitous wall text. "But coherence is not the same as resolution. The most interesting art for me retains a flickering quality where opposed ideas can be held in tense coexistence." Exterior surface versus interior space often creates this "tense coexistence" in Puryear's art.

Puryear achieves the tension of exterior and interior space by fashioning arcs, circles, slats, basket weaves and other rounded forms out of wood that are both well-wrought and astonishingly subversive. Most notably, Puryear's spare circular works (often untitled) seem to defy wood's natural characteristics. Cerebral and mystical in clarity and roundness—or, as the essay by chief curator John Elderfield suggests: controlled risk—Puryear's works are not about the banality of craft. They are about the presentation of opposites. Brutally course materials vie with smooth amorphous components, as in Maroon (1987-88), made of wire mesh, pine, yellow poplar and tar. The black wire mesh, flattened on one side with a raw surface of wood, encompasses a bulbous form with its porous skin, permitting us to peer into its interior or stand back to behold a strange biomorphic exterior. Open to close examination, Puryear's work remains mysteriously ambiguous and unresolved, a metaphor of life itself.

martin puryear

2010-05-14T08:53:00.000-07:00

Martin Puryear. Bower. 1980. Sitka spruce and pine. 64" x 7' 10 3/4" x 26 5/8" (162.6 x 240.7 x 67.6 cm). Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.
There is so little mystery in many of today's most famous painters whose lives are readily available for public consumption. But interestingly, Martin Puryear's work, which is also on view shares a certain quiet reflectiveness , a stand-aloneness that shouts out:Puryear came from segregated Washington DC and so access to the National Gallery was special and magical; then in Chicago, the science and natural history museums added to his fascination with exotic objects. He enlisted in the Peace Corps and lived in West Africa among indigenous peoples; here, he began the move towards abstraction and to using local materials. But he has never joined an art movement and cannot imagine being held to one or another political or social idea. He began as a figurative painter but his experiences overseas changed him dramatically, and unlike many artists, he doesn't mind if his work is beautiful--and indeed it is. But in a Seurat-ian echo, he finds the most interesting art has a "flickering quality where opposed ideas can be held in tense coexistence." As Seurat sees the sculpture in the human body, Puryear sees the biomorphic forms in sculpture. Puryear's work has one other subtext which stands out: it feels like he has been thinking about the evanescence of the natural environment--and that in a pinch, we could crawl into one of his bentwood structures and be protected, somehow from the ravages of man, if not nature.

fred sandback -more space and volume

2010-03-15T08:46:00.000-07:00

Sandback’s sculptures outline planes and volumes in space. Though he employed metal wire and elastic cord early in his career, the artist soon dispensed with mass and weight by using acrylic yarn to create works that address their physical surroundings, the “pedestrian space,” as Sandback called it, of everyday life. By stretching lengths of yarn horizontally, vertically, or diagonally at different scales and in varied configurations, the artist developed a singular body of work that elaborated on the phenomenological experience of space and volume with unwavering consistency and ingenuity.The exhibitions will examine the broad scope of formal invention that the artist achieved within a defined idiom. The works on view will range from smaller-scale, metal and cord works from the late 1960s to constructions from the 1980s and 1990s that encompass entire rooms, thus demonstrating the artist’s signature vocabulary of forms in varied combinations and at different scales.

richard deacon

2010-03-06T16:03:00.001-08:00

On a cold, wintry afternoon, the strip of 20 buildings huddled along a railway track hardly fizzes with creative energy. The only immediate sign of life is a grim-faced man in a bobble hat scuttling out of one unit and into another, identical but for the words "plastic handrails" emblazoned on its façade.
Yet here, on this dreary industrial estate in south-east London, one of Britain's foremost sculptors has his studio.
"I first came here in 1991," says Richard Deacon, leading me upstairs past bookshelves and a bicycle to an airy pigsty of a room in Unit 18. "It had no history and no atmosphere, but, after renting a space for years in an old meat-pie factory in Brixton, I wanted to buy somewhere, and these units were on the market for less than their building costs."
So it was that the Turner Prize-winning Deacon, whose work is housed in many of the finest art collections in the world, ended up with a studio sandwiched between an organic food company and a dairy. "It was quite an upmarket dairy," he says defensively. "The milkman used to pop in to comment on the sculptures."
Fifteen years on, the original neighbours are long gone. "What started as maybe 25 companies is down to only around five," he says, a hint of nostalgia in his slow, booming voice. "And me. I'm still here."
As if to reassure himself of this fact, the artist has packed the upstairs room of his studio - "a sort of drawing, conceiving kind of space" - with material evidence of his existence. Every available surface is buried beneath a blanket of sketches, clay models, photographs, objects and books.
Perhaps the most striking feature in the studio, and certainly the most organised, is a set of shelves filled with a dizzying array of plastic creatures, rocks, fossils, and junk, neatly arranged according to some indiscernible code. It looks like something one might find in a schoolboy's bedroom.
"They're my collections," says the 56-year-old artist, brushing a giant hand across the bald crown of his head. "Found objects, toys, little bits of nature, souvenirs, whimsy and all the rest of it. They're here to keep me company, I suppose. There is a sense in which the studio accumulates bits, some intentionally and some not."
Bits, and ways of putting them together, have been central to Deacon's work for the best part of three decades, from his early laminated wood-and-vinyl constructions to his more recent steamed-plank sculptures.
The last of these, Restless, was the highlight of the artist's one-man show in Tate St Ives last year, and today hangs in the studio's "less congenial" downstairs room, writhing in the half-light like a mythical sea creature. "I haven't touched a piece of wood since finishing this," he says, patting its distorted surface affectionately. "This was a culmination of sorts."
These days, as his current exhibition at the Lisson Gallery demonstrates, Deacon's preferred material is clay. The tightly structured show centres on a set of ceramics: hollowed-out, angular blocks that look like the frameworks for unconventional tents.
After years of wrestling wooden planks into impossible curves, the move to clay has brought about a fundamental change in Deacon's approach. "I was interested in generating something without building it," he says. "Because these sculptures start as a lump, you don't have to worry about where the top piece will connect to the bottom piece."
The act of carving also takes Deacon back to his earliest artistic memories. "My very first sculptural experience was in Sri Lanka, when I was seven," he recalls. "I remember looking at rock-carved sculptures of the reclining Buddha, and being very aware that the cliff face had been removed. It was like an experience of negative space: something had been taken away and the figure was there."
Two years later, the young Deacon made his first tentative steps as a sculptor, taking his father's best saw and using it to cut a brick in half. "I couldn't see why he was upset," he smiles. "I was just really interested in the fact that it was possible."
Even now - despite the monumental scale of much of his work - Deacon remains more fascinated by the process of sculpture than by the result. Although he has hardly hung on to a single finished piece, he has "never got rid of any drawing, any models, any notes".
"I've never said this to anyone before," he says, "but thinking about how to leave things in the world, I am more likely to leave behind an archive than a permanent series of sculptures - a germ for other ideas to come out of, rather than a bunch of final statements." He sighs, one heavy hand returning to his head. "But how you present something like that without being a boring old fart, I don't know."

richard deacon

2010-03-06T15:51:00.000-08:00

richard deacon

2010-03-06T15:44:00.000-08:00

martin boyce-interior/exterior

2010-02-15T14:29:00.001-08:00

In a series of new works developed specifically for presentation in Venice, Martin Boyce has devised a lyrical installation for seven inter-connected rooms of the second floor of the 15th-century Palazzo Pisani (S. Marina).
The artist transforms the fading grandeur of this palace with suspended, geometric chandeliers, sculptural autumn leaves, stepping stones, brass letters, tables and benches – all altered from the everyday into an atmospheric, poetic landscape. Boyce has set out to ‘delve into the city’s interior landscape’ and with this exhibition he conflates the internal and external and echoes the labyrinthine nature of Venice, creating a heightened sense of displacement and abandonment.Martin Boyce (born 1967) lives and works in Glasgow. He is one of Scotland’s most prominent artists and is well known for his sculptural installations that recall conventional public spaces – the playground, pedestrian subway, discarded or abandoned sites – to form a cohesive and immersive environment, one that the writer Will Bradley calls, “both a proposition about social space and a dreamscape in itself”. Individual works comprising of sculptural forms recall familiar public furniture: benches, bins, signage and lighting. Drawing on the iconography and subsequent production of modernist design, these objects take on an alternative life by being displaced from their original context and purpose.

john cage: chess pieces

2010-02-03T03:54:00.001-08:00

Chess Pieces, was only rediscovered and played for the first time in 2005.

Cage had been invited to participate in a chess-themed exhibit at the Julian Levy Gallery organized by Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp, and he created a chessboard-sized painting with fragments of musical scores in each of the squares. Each square held about twelve measures in three rows. The painting went into a private collection where it remains, almost completely invisible to the outside Cageian world until 2005, when the Noguchi Museum recreated the 1944 exhibit, "The Imagery of Chess." [Noguchi had contributed a chess set to the show, as did artists such as Man Ray and Alexander Calder.]

Anyway, Cage pianist Margaret Leng Tan was commissioned to transcribe and perform the score in the painting, which premiered alongside the 2005 exhibit. The DVD of the Chess Pieces performance includes several other Cage sonatas and some short-sounding documentaries, including one about the history of the work. Not sure what that means.

As a painting, the collaged, juxtaposed chaos of the notes contrasts with the order of the grid. It kind of reminds me of the cut-up technique William Burroughs and the Beats' applied to books and printed texts a few years later. [The history of cut-up mentions an interesting, even earlier reference: Dada pioneer Tristan Tzara, who was expelled from Breton's Surrealist movement when he tried to create poetry by pulling words out of a hat.]

As a musical composition, Chess Pieces is nice, old-school Cage, abstract and occasionally abrupt, but with a still-traditional piano feel. Since the piece's randomness comes from its structure--the distribution of the notational fragments across the grid--and not from the performer's own decisions, it somehow has a "composed" feeling to it. So though it's new to audiences today, it's also classic, early Cage.

fred sandback: space and volume

2010-02-03T03:06:00.000-08:00

toby paterson

2010-02-02T04:38:00.001-08:00

Toby Paterson makes paintings, reliefs and constructions which explore the relationship between abstraction and reality. He has a keen interest in post-war modernist architecture which he deconstructs both materially and politically, developing a practice in which some works are almost understandable as architecture, while others are expressions of purely abstract form.

martin boyce- developing a motif

2010-02-02T03:31:00.000-08:00

Martin Boyce presents a suspended sculpture composed of standard fluorescent light fixtures in the form of a spider web. Measuring approximately forty by fifty feet, the piece will fill the entirety of SculptureCenter's ceiling space and hang twenty feet above the ground. Boyce has employed the web as a motif for several years, a form that references the urban grid and simultaneously suggests organic order, both possessing the ability to expand infinitely. The sculpture will diverge from an earlier version of the piece in that the web will be irregular, reflecting a broken grid.

robert irwin: light and space

2010-01-28T14:36:00.000-08:00

September 17 — October 19, 2008

For his exhibition at White Cube Mason’s Yard, Irwin has created two new installations. On the ground floor, Black³ features a series of floor-to-ceiling parallel scrim material panels, which the viewer must navigate, thereby altering the perceptual field of the space. In addition, Irwin has made subtle adjustments to the optical conditions of the room, as a means of altering the phenomenological experience of the work. Positioned on the west and east walls are two square lacquered black paintings, echoes of which reverberate through the space, transmitted on and through the perpendicular translucent screens.

In Light and Space II, located in the basement gallery, Irwin has created an installation with hundreds of fluorescent lights mounted at right angles in a non-repeating, grid-like formation. With no fixed focal point, the enveloping visual field resonates with geometric patterns, drawn by luminous lines, which redefine the characteristics of the space. Light and Space II brings together, in a large-scale but concise installation, the three principle points of reference throughout Irwin’s career: light, architecture and space.

christo and jean-claude; wrapping stuff

2010-01-28T14:27:00.001-08:00

Although their work is visually impressive and often controversial as a result of its scale, the artists have repeatedly denied that their projects contain any deeper meaning than their immediate aesthetic. The purpose of their art, they contend, is simply to create works of art or joy and beauty and to create new ways of seeing familiar landscapes. Art critic David Bourdon has described Christo's wrappings as a "revelation through concealment."[3]To his critics Christo replies, "I am an artist, and I have to have courage ... Do you know that I don't have any artworks that exist? They all go away when they're finished. Only the preparatory drawings, and collages are left, giving my works an almost legendary character. I think it takes much greater courage to create things to be gone than to create things that will remain."[4]

james turrell; skyspace

2010-01-28T14:19:00.000-08:00

For over three decades, James Turrell has used light and indeterminate space—not objects or images—to extend and enhance perception. The artist once remarked, "I am really interested in the qualities of one space sensing another. It is like looking at someone looking. Objectivity is gained by being once removed. As you plumb a space with vision, it is possible to 'see yourself see'. This seeing, this plumbing, imbues space with consciousness."
The work of James Turrell (b. 1943, Los Angeles) has been the subject of over 140 solo exhibitions worldwide since 1967. In addition to a permanent installation at the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle and The Nasher Sculpture Garden, Dallas, which opened October 2003, permanent installations of James Turrell's work are on view in several museums including: The Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh; Museum fur Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Germany; Museum of Fine Art, Houston; Panza Collection, Varese, Italy; P.S. 1. Long Island City, New York; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona; and the Springel Museum, Hanover, Germany.
Since 1972 Turrell has been transforming the Roden Crater, a natural cinder volcano situated on the southwestern edge of the Painted Desert in northern Arizona into a large-scale artwork. Through the medium of light, the piece relates to the surrounding sky, land, and culture. As an observatory, the Roden Crater will allow visitors to see celestial phenomena with the naked eye. Construction of the project is under the direction of the Dia Art Foundation and the Skystone Foundation with support from the Lannan Foundation.
Since 1968 when Turrell received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the artist has been the recipient of a total of nineteen awards ranging from The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (1984) to being named a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government (1991). For six consecutive years, from 1997 to 2002, Turrell was given six various prizes and awards and three honorary doctorates from the Chicago Art Institute (1999); Claremont Graduate University, California (2001); and the Royal Academy of Art, London (2002).
James Turrell has a B.A. in psychology from Pomona College. He attended graduate art classes at the University of California, Irvine from 1965-1966 and received an M.A. from Claremont Graduate School in 1973. The artist currently lives in Flagstaff, Arizona.

james turrell; playing with light

2010-01-23T15:41:00.000-08:00

The piece consists of a beautifully lit square room with walls lined by benches and a rectangular opening cut into its roof. Meeting, like many of Turrell’s pieces, shapes the act of perception using the medium of a nearly tangible light, allowing viewers to experience the development of their own sensory responses over time.
Writer Ina Cole captured the viewer’s experience perfectly in this description in Art Times, “Certainly, the sense of disorientation felt once inside Turrell’s configurations is profound, as the distinction between solid and void areas is often unclear; even after the eyes and brain become accustomed, a sensation of altered states prevails for the entire time spent in the structure.”
For the summer of 2008 P.S.1 is delighted to have on view a remarkable work that succeeds both in complement and contrast to Meeting. Olafur Eliasson’s Take your time, which can also be found on the third floor, consists of a massive, rotating mirror affixed to the ceiling of an otherwise empty room.

With its precise skew and motion it plays with both vertical and horizontal orientation, creating multiple inversions of both space and self. The Danish-Icelandic artist’s work often recontextualizes existing architectural elements to shift perceptions of the places in which they have been placed. With the two pieces in such close proximity in one building allows for a delicious and challenging personal inquiry. Interestingly, during his early artistic training, Eliasson was influenced heavily by the California Light and Space movement of the 1960s and ‘70s, of which Turrell is often seen as a leading figure. Eliasson, like Turrell, creates environments that are meant to be entered and experienced, awakening viewers to their own modes of perception and the power of environment to bring such understanding into view.
When questioned about the meaning of his works, Turrell has often responded by saying, “It is about how you confront space and plumb it. It is about your seeing.” Eliasson subsequently declares that “There is no fixed interpretation of my works. Everyone experiences and understands them in his own way.”

slinky light

2010-01-20T14:14:00.000-08:00

Slinky like light pattern in the blackness of moonlight sky produced by a time exposure of the light tipped rotor blades of a grounded helicopter as it takes off into the dark sky”, says Life. Images by Andreas Feininger. More here. Via But Does it Float.

The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical. It is the power of all true art and science. ( Albert Einstein, 1947)

rachel whiteread; casting, rubber and polystrene

2010-01-18T14:45:00.000-08:00

In her castings from common objects, British sculptor Rachel Whiteread proposes a reverence for the everyday. Among her unique monumentalizations are mattresses, furniture, and bathtubs. To greater or lesser degrees, these sculptures resemble their household counterparts yet, as art, they have a different status. First of all, they are nonfunctional; they exist to be seen. In looking at them, routines are dislocated; our relationship with the object on view may become more self-conscious or assume a fresh significance.

In Untitled (Yellow Bath), cast from an old tub, a gentle hollow familiar to all bathers makes a concave protective subject. Site of respite, dreams, and cleansing, the tub, for all its sculptural bulk, exudes intimacy. Its translucency simultaneously heightens and denies the work's tactility: when lighted, it glows but repels touch. As the negative of a worn object, Whiteread's cast shows the inverse of a familiar surface as well as a geometrized block of surrounding space.

robert morris ; untitled, felt work

2010-01-16T13:53:00.000-08:00

I like this work, made in felt, which is a soft material but in such a sculpture it takes on a quite solid look, probably due to the thickness of the felt. In some of his other work, for example his plywood polyhydrons, he create minimalist sculpture that is very architectural in its presentation.

anya gallaccio -ice piece

2010-01-11T14:12:00.000-08:00

Not sure of the title of this piece, need to research it more, but I'm beginning to like work in ice.

2010-01-11T14:08:00.000-08:00

'Cast,' Anya Gallaccio
Materials: Acorns: Quercus Robur and Quercus Rubra; one unique cast bronze acorn; box.Size: 6 x 6 x 2.3 inches.Edition: 35

"Cast" brings together a handful of real English acorns and one unique cast bronze acorn in a box specially produced by BookWorks for the project. The buyer is invited to plant the acorns for the future, keep them to dry out and die or throw them away, leaving only the cast acorn. "Cast" has both the association with throwaway culture and that of permanence.

In 2002 Anya Gallaccio installed seven felled oak trees in the monumental space of the Duveen Galleries at Tate Britain. Stripped of their branches but with their bark intact these powerful structures continued Gallaccio's dialogue between "nature" and "culture", "permanence" and "ephemerality".

The English oak tree symbolises tradition, permanence and value. The oak doesn't even reach its prime until it is at least 100 years old. This association of the oak with the long-term - much longer than human life - contrasts markedly with the short-term nature of contemporary life.

ARTISTS INFO:

Scottish artist Anya Gallaccio was shortlisted for the Turner Prize 2003.

She has had recent solo shows at Camden Arts Centre (2008), Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, Thomas Dane Gallery, London (2007), Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York, the Centro Arte Contemporanea, Siena and the Sculpture Center, Long Island (2006).

Her work is featured in numerous public and private collections such as the Tate Gallery, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, and South London Gallery, London.

robert smithson; nonsite works

2010-01-08T11:04:00.000-08:00

An example of Smithson's nonsite work, Mono Lake. Used here to illustrate research for installation workshop in Jan 2010.

do ho suh: staircase

2009-07-14T01:20:00.000-07:00

where do you work on your designs and projects?
I have two studios, one in new york and one near seoul.
that is where I make my work, where I give form to my
work. the conceptualization part happens in-between
places, when in transit, like in an airport,
on the airplane or on the train - those in-between places.
I think I have more inspiration when I don't actually make
something. in the beginning, I didn't like traveling too much.
but now it's part of my job. I have to travel a lot and I sort
of developed a habit to use that time for more creative
things. for example, instead of reading, I actually do a lot of
sketching during a flight. I carry a very small sketchbook.
that has been the same format since my college days.
I travel light too, so I always carry those little things and
make sketches.

2009-07-14T01:07:00.000-07:00

Skaer makes sculptures, films and drawings mainly based on photographs sourced from newspapers and books as well as pictures taken off the Internet, and assembles them in installations. The transformation of her found material into pictures and objects is an elaborate, often manual process that also involves the collaboration of craftsmen. What results is a push and pull between representation and the still recognizable meaning and physical shape of the original subject matter. T

richard serra

2009-07-07T15:15:00.000-07:00

Richard Serra's monumental steel sculptures are covered in rust. The 68-year-old American artist's work at the Gagosian in King's Cross, on show in London for the first time in 16 years, may all be new but they ooze oxidation. Orange specks that flake off, or flashes of silver through oil-slick blackness, the layered textures speak of another element.

And walking through them is like entering another element, chatter in the gallery muffled and reverberating to become a kind of whalesong. Two giant funnels called TTI London resemble beached hulls, their high-tide levels marked by mottled metal. Moving through the space makes each surface undulate, the top edges gently curving out of vision like an ushering maître d'.

There's not a straight line in the main gallery: beyond TTI, the towering black Open Ended leans in on itself menacingly. It has been likened to a maze but it's one without a heart; keep going, and you reach the edge again without ever feeling as though you've been at the centre.

It's a brilliant deception that Serra has choreographed as well as sculpted. In an anteroom, however, another piece is all straight edges. A huge block of steel leaks colour through accumulated layers and scored lines, as rich as any Turner landscape.

mike nelson : amnesiac pieces

2009-07-07T14:56:00.000-07:00

Mike Nelson who presents a new, immersive Amnesiac Shrine. After a hiatus of nearly a decade the Amnesiacs, a mythical gang of bikers invented by the artist in the mid-1990s, have made a recent comeback. Here Nelson turns to them once again for their help in building AMNESIAC SHRINE or The misplacement (a futurological fable): mirrored cubes - inverted - with the reflection of an inner psyche as represented by a metaphorical landscape 2007. The materials and references used to construct it, provided by ‘flashbacks’ from the Amnesiacs, are elevated by their devotional context yet remain largely indefinable.

2009-07-02T10:42:00.000-07:00

Hesse defined the word ‘schema’ as ‘synopsis, outline, diagram. general type, essential form, conception of what is common to all members of a class.’27 While the evenly-spaced, balanced grid of her eponymous sculpture (fig.9) may be read in terms of Hesse’s definition, her interest in ‘diagram’ and ‘essential form’ are also expressed in the meticulous planning and rigor with which she approached its design, including her choice of material. In addition to drawings,28 Hesse made numerous ‘test pieces’ (fig.10) prior to the execution (by her own hand or otherwise) of many of her works. She used these ‘material studies’ to experiment with the structural properties of rubber, papier-mâché, Sculp-Metal, and other matter so as to determine, in part, their potential usefulness in crafting specific forms like hemispheres, cylinders, and various vessels. For Schema, she chose to work in latex, as she did many of her sculptures dating from the late 1960s and about which she stated: ‘the materials I use are really casting materials, but I don’t want to use them as casting materials. I want to use them directly, eliminating making molds and casts ... I am interested in the process, a very direct kind of connection

luke fowler

2009-05-21T12:05:00.000-07:00

A central figure in Glasgow’s vibrant art scene, Luke Fowler creates cinematic collages that break down conventional approaches to biographical and documentary film-making.

Fowler’s films have often been linked to British Free Cinema of the 1950s, whose distinctive aesthetic came out of a conscious decision to engage with the reality of British society. Fowler uses similarly impressionistic sound and editing, and avoids didactic voice-over commentaries and narrative continuity. However, the artist moves beyond simply referencing the work of his predecessors. He intuitively applies the logic, aesthetics and politics of his subjects to the films he constructs about them.
The results are atmospheric, sampled histories that reverberate with the vitality of the people he studies.

jilly sutton

2009-05-12T09:06:00.001-07:00

Cedrus deodara, the Himalayan cedar or sacred Indian fir, derives its botanical name from the Sanskrit word devdar signifying 'tree of the gods'. Trees and tree imagery are fundamental to primitive belief systems - from the tree of knowledge of good and evil in Genesis to Odin's ash and Druid oaks - and their interaction with humankind is a constant feature of civilisation. The human head as the seat of the brain and thought processes, together with the expressiveness of physiognomy, make it the perfect subject for treatment in wood. However, since the long-term durability of wood can never be guaranteed, Fallen Deodar has also been cast in bronze.

juan munoz : a narrator sculptor

2009-05-12T05:30:00.000-07:00

From his early architectural works - staircases, balconies and banisters - located in impossible settings, by way of his optical floors that dissolve the limits of space and time, to his dramatic, theatrical installations involving groups of human figures that evoke the solitude of the individual in society, Muñoz’s works play with the spectator, enticing him into relating to them, even awaking feelings of unease and isolation. Muñoz described himself as “a narrator”, and his ability to propose new forms of contemplation and thought, to create tension between the illusory and the real, made him one of the few artists capable of renewing contemporary sculpture.

antony gormley

2009-05-11T03:10:00.001-07:00

2009-05-11T03:06:00.000-07:00

Gormley describes his work as "an attempt to materialise the place at the other side of appearance where we all live." Many of his works are based on moulds taken from his own body, or "the closest experience of matter that I will ever have and the only part of the material world that I live inside." His work attempts to treat the body not as a thing but a place and in making works that enclose the space of a particular body to identify a condition common to all human beings. The work is not symbolic but indexical - a trace of a real event of a real body in time.

louise bourgeios

2009-05-11T02:48:00.000-07:00

In 1986 the Andalusia Government started to reform and rebuilt the Monastery with the idea to reserve all essential activities from the past. In this context they installed at the plot of the Monastery an Investigation and Cultural Centre, back in 1989.

Additional works were later on be done for the World Expo 1992 in Seville, to change finally into the Andalusia Centre of Contemporary Art (CAAC) in 1997. The Centre was created with the aim of giving the local community an institution for the research, conservation and promotion of contemporary art. Later the centre began to acquire the first works in its permanent collection of contemporary art.

The CAAC, an autonomous organisation dependent on the Andalusian Government (Junta de Andalucía), took over the collections of the former Conjunto Monumental de la Cartuja (Cartuja Monument Centre) and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Sevilla (Contemporary Art Museum of Seville).

From the outset, one of the main aims of the centre has been to develop a programme of activities attempting to promote the study of contemporary international artistic creation in all its facets. Temporary exhibitions, seminars, workshops, concerts, meetings, recitals, film cycles and lectures have been the communication tools used to fulfil this aim.

The centre's programme of cultural activities is complemented by a visit to the monastery itself, which houses an important part of our artistic and archaeological heritage, a product of our long history.

kiki smith :

2009-04-30T16:51:00.000-07:00

'A dream is like and animal, but an unknown one, and you cannot see all its limbs. Interpretation is a cage, but the dream can never be found inside.' ( Elias Canetti ). Quotation taken from start of book on Kiki Smith entitled, 'All Creatures Great and Small'.
The introduction goes on to say " Kiki Smith's works construct an image of the world that unites the fragmented experience of our time. It is an image that is permeated by the utopia of a harmonic whole but where the wounds and fractures of human existence and the desires and contradictions of our time remain, become tangible even."

Mark Wallinger curates the Russian Linesman

2009-04-17T07:30:00.000-07:00

One of Britain’s most intellectually curious, socially committed and unpredictable artists, Mark Wallinger has often dwelt on the interface between two realms. The mundane and transcendent meet in Ecce Homo, his anti-heroic sculpture for the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, in which an ordinary man becomes a life-sized Christ. State Britain, a painstaking recreation of Brian Haw’s protest running through the Tate’s Duveen Sculpture galleries is intersected by the circle defining the limits of freedom of political protest in the vicinity of Parliament.

For the 2007 Münster Sculpture Project, Wallinger has created his own ZONE appropriating the delineation employed in an Eruv, the area within which observant Jews are permitted to behave as if at home (carrying or pushing objects on the Sabbath, for example): a nylon cord, 4.5 metres above ground and 4,800 metres long encircles the centre of the city.

Mark Wallinger’s exhibition for Hayward Touring will be concerned with the liminal, a concept with physical, political, metaphysical meanings. It signifies the dissolution of boundaries and fixed identities, and is associated with rituals and rites of passage, transitional states characterized by ambiguity, openness and indeterminacy, during which the normal limits to thought, self-understanding and behaviour are relaxed, opening the way to something new. Where necessary the artist will show his own work, along with objects that fit the manifesto - whether they are aesthetic, scientific, political and social or anthropological.

‘The Russian Linesman’, Tofik Bakhramov, is famous (or infamous) for a controversial ruling in the 1966 World Cup Final between the home team England and West Germany, which had just eliminated the Soviet Union team in the semi-finals. His ruling gave the goal to England, a 3-2 lead in extra time, perhaps the most debated decision in all of football. In England, it is commonly believed that the decision was correct, while in Germany it is commonly said that the linesman made a mistake. Bakhramov was in fact from Azerbijan.

TOUR INFORMATION

Exhibition opens at the Hayward Gallery, London in February then tours to -

16 May - 28 June 2009
Art Gallery, Leeds

18 July - 20 September 2009
Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea

For information on this exhibition please contact Alison Maun alison.maun@southbankcentre.co.uk

Image credit: Renato Giuseppe Bertelli, Profilo Continuo (Testa di Mussolini) [Continuous Profile (Head of Mussolini)], 1933. Courtesy The Imperial War Museum © The estate of Renato Giuseppe Bertelli

Endings and beginnings

2009-03-27T06:18:00.000-07:00

I like this piece,it reflects a kind of ending or begining, like the empty cocoon of some creature that has emerged to a new life. But what is it? What might that new begining be like? Real beauty in the cast off skin, the left behind shell, the protective layer that is no longer required. Seems appropriate for the term, the season, the future.. Wonder if I'll fly, or crawl, or swim in this new world. Whatever, it won't be the same as before. Time to reflect, to ponder, to imagine, to look, to gaze, to draw. To do nothing.

internals

2009-03-10T07:49:00.000-07:00

Another image from her collection, again demonstrating a labyrinth of images that suggest internal organs, intestines, innards. You can image it working, pumping fluids around its system, moving with the rhythm of the activity, almost mesmerising.

a body of work

2009-03-10T07:28:00.000-07:00

Jennifer Taylor's most recent sculptures depict chaotic messes of interlinking pipes, chains and disposable objects coated in white paint and wax. Cancer cells, labyrinths and internal organs are just some of the images that spring to mind when looking at these troubled objects. Might use some of this imagery in developing this project, and it may compliment the ideas I have started to develop already.
I'm interested not only in the external body but on the internal, the unconscious, the hidden. This applies equally to the organs and the mind. In fact it creates a morass of images that could be dreams, flashbacks, imagination, or fantasy. Or bits of them all.

four humors

2009-02-27T07:56:00.000-08:00

I like the ideas generated by the medieval view of health and illness. People were understood to be either in balance, or out of balance depending on the four humors, or fluids in the body. They were blood, yelow bile, black bile and phlegm. Any imbalance in the fluids created different illnesses and hence the practices of bleeding, leeches and purging. While the ideas behind this approach faded in the 18th century, with the development of medical and scientific techniques, some of its influences are still around. So for example peoples personality may be described as sanguine, phlegmatic, melancholic or choleric. There are also some links to astrology and in certain cultures these practices still exist. In western societies, particularly with experiments in alternative medicine, some of these ideas are still explored and used. Interesting how ideas and knowledge develop, evolve and go full circle sometimes.

normal/abnormal

2009-02-23T06:48:00.000-08:00

Who sets the boundaries, are they fixed forever or do they change? where are they now? are they personal, moral, physical, mental, environmental, cultural, financial, class based, gender based. do these boundaries involve intelligence, looks, speech, dress, posture, colour, age, ability, disability. who decides on them and their use? can you change them? have you changed them? how? why? why not? when. how about tomorrow?

the new canvas

2009-02-18T08:37:00.000-08:00

I'm still exploring ideas for the project and this caught my imagination. It is a representation of the face transplant area that was replaced last year on a French woman. I believe it was the first successful face transplant in the world and I wonder what its significance might be. Are we moving into an era where body parts can not only replaced, which has been aroucd for certain organs for about 50 years, but where surgeons act as sculptors, or artists, redrawing/reshaping peoples bodies. Are we the new canvas? Is this the Burke and Hare of the 21st Century? Is it live art? Is it art? Discuss.........

metamorphosis by bridget riley

2009-02-15T14:54:00.000-08:00

Each month, TATE ETC. publishes new poetry by leading poets such as John Burnside, Moniza Alvi, Adam Thorpe, Alice Oswald and David Harsent who respond to works from the Tate Collection. Subscribe to the Poem of the Month RSS feed.

In April 2006 Lawrence Sail presented his poem based on Bridget Riley’s Metamorphosis, on display at Tate Britain from March 2006 – February 2007.

Considering Bridget Riley’s Metamorphosis

Here it is, in black and white –
the optic nerve seduced into playing
a blinder. Pressures out of sight
mill all images back to latency,
the mind’s series, treacherous and true.

Yet definitions are at their sharpest
when speeding towards the point where disks
of silver and black throng to the mesh
of something like judgement, then a remix
of tried perceptions, making them new –
as, say, the image of holes in a colander
themselves drained away; or a swarming stream
of fish-eggs; or a geometer’s world
of ciphers somehow unhooked from time,
an eternity made of in betweens.

Now you don’t see it, now you don’t –
the invisible ink which you know is there,
the oxygen of desire, which can’t
be denied; that gasp of mortal love, or
the momentary gift of all its meanings.

metamorphosis of narcissus

2009-02-15T14:30:00.000-08:00

I've always liked Dali's ability to manipulate images, to challenge the eye to look again at a picture. I particularly like how he has made these two images reflect each others but also remain so totally different. Wonder how this might feed into my thinking about the project, "body as a site of cultural representation"? Who knows where I'll end up with this one. I like the idea of metamorphosis, the process of change, of your body or character undergoing fundamental changes. Suppose we all have a bit of that at times, a wee touch of metamorphosis, but for a fundamental change, that would be something.

culture

2009-02-11T15:04:00.000-08:00

In 1871 E.B.Taylor defined culture as "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, customs, and many other capabilities and habits acquired by...(members) of society."

"Culture means the total body of tradition borne by a society and transmitted from generation to generation. It thus refers to the norms, values, standards by which people act, and it includes the ways distinctive in each society of ordering the world and rendering it intelligible. Culture is....a set of mechanisms for survival, but it provides us also with a defintion of reality. It is the matrix into which we are born, it is the anvil upon which our persons and destinies are forged."

body images

2009-02-09T04:56:00.000-08:00

Marisa Maza seems to be an artist and teacher who has studied the body as cultural means of expression. Much of what I have seen already is about dance, so I'll have to continue searching.

self assessment

2009-02-06T15:21:00.000-08:00

This is how you do it. As you can see this is stage one. Stage two I'll leave to your biological imagination.

Gravitacion : Eduardo Chillida

2009-02-01T14:26:00.000-08:00

I like this piece, simple, strong, thought provoking, full of memory.

words and pictures

2009-02-01T13:47:00.000-08:00

"Art used to have issues....art will become the occasional gesture of the isolated person."(Donald Judd)

studio/gallery/place

2009-01-30T08:07:00.000-08:00

Art in a box, or in this case a container, in the street, a portable piece, a portable gallery. Interesting.

mind stretch

2009-01-30T07:51:00.001-08:00

What does this say to you? How about archive? Museum of piano players? Extermination camp? Seven ages of man? CSI wherever?

my brain hurts/the friday rant

2009-01-30T07:32:00.000-08:00

This is how you feel on a Friday afternoon, or is it a Monday morning? Or both! Felt a bit like this yesterday, as if my brain had started to melt, and I wasn't sure if I was going anywhere with this project. One minute you think you know and the next...doubt. So just got on with it today, seeing where the flow would take me. It feels better now. Think there needs to be some issues, challenges, controversy, argument, debate - danger of the studio becoming a cosy corner. Should we care about art school cuts and its politics, the future of art in a time of economic collapse, Gaza, whether art has any relevance to people in Glasgow, what is GOMA about, is it cutting edge, is it modern, should soap operas be banned, is the BBC right to ban the appeal for help for Gaza, did we tell them when they were in the art school, is there a life beyond this bubble?

profile

2009-01-27T14:20:00.000-08:00

Tried to get this as my profile picture, but couldn't crack it. Helpers? Not sure it's my best side, but hey the light in the southside is fading. Not got as much done today as hoped. Read some more of Poetics of Space, and liked these bits.

"The first task of the phenomenologist is to find the original shell."

" the titanic importance of setting."

"Thus we cover the universe with drawings we have lived."

glasgow zen

2009-01-26T14:34:00.000-08:00

A wee bit of Alan Spence to round off the evening.
On the oneness of self and universe - it's aw wan tae me
On identity in difference - six an hauf a dozen
On walking the pathless path - by the way
On the music of what happens - one singer one song

new white space?

2009-01-26T14:24:00.000-08:00

It seems white space has more than one meaning, news to me! But it raises the question is this the new studio? or is it an extension of the studio? the studio of the mind? does it matter? raises some interesting practice and process questions. Watch this space...........I may be gone some time!!
The space in front of me is a blank canvas, page, space to work in - be it 2D, 3D or virtual. Or indeed the space in my mind, the unconscious, imagination, dreams, fantasy. Mind games.

white space

2009-01-26T03:37:00.000-08:00

The studio has become the white space, but was it always that way? Seems to have been a 20th century movement to create the clean space that would allow the art to be displayed/created without any impurities effecting its development. This has been carried on into galleries throughout the world - white walls, wooden floors, lighting from ceiling windows or lights.But other institutions are often white too - cells, padded cells, decontamination chambers, operating theatres. Are they creative spaces? What stimulus do they provide? Are they different? The same? What impact does the stated purpose have on the players in each?

studio - in ma cell!!

2009-01-23T07:14:00.000-08:00

the studio, the gallery, the cell, the ward, the space, light, shade, cool. wandering or not wandering, daydreaming, asleep!

the black cat has the blues

2009-01-23T06:47:00.000-08:00

http://www.nugrape.net/republic.jpg
Republic will encourage the listening to blues, jazz, rock and the occasional roll and sausage. Currently working on research ideas from thomas hirshhorn and gillian wearing among others.

Some posssible ideas around a video, a constructed piece and even a beehive.This is not a reference to Amy Winehouse's hair by the way.

Exploring the difference between the studio space and the padded cell.

Or even the prison cell, the white cube, the gallery space, the de-contamination centre.

More to follow.............................

blowing up or falling down

2009-01-23T06:40:00.000-08:00

Who can tell? Does it matter? I like the ambiguity of the picture, interpretation can be left to the viewer - do you agree,or not? Though I think it may be an impact picture after all.

new republic formed.

2009-01-23T06:12:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the new republic. Discussions of democracy, autocracy, accuracy, anarchy and tracy will follow. But certainly not monarchy.

Just having a wee ramble about site/place/context. Might try and import some images and the odd bit of text later. First explosion of ideas becomes visual after much hassle and coaching from the nameless one.