What art have I seen? Beuys Utopia at the Stag Monuments
Joseph Beuys: Utopia at the Stag Monuments at Galerie Thaddeus Ropac.
So what is the difference between Kienholz and Beuys? Both are constructing with everyday materials including furniture and other stuff selected for symbolic import. Both are speaking to the social. Kienholz’ Nativity or Beuys’ Feldbett?
Kienholz is utilising the detritus of urban society to assemble installations that comment on religion, race and sex. Beuys is using the most basic materials to provoke our understanding of the larger significance of life – fat, felt, electricity, ovens, clay, etc.
Beuys’ work suggests the potential for social transformation. Kienhol’ work on the other hand is mostly stabbing at hypocrisy with satire.
What art have I seen? Ed Kienholz and Speigelgasse
Ed Kienholz at Blain/Southern. Boy Ed could be offensive. The ‘Black Leather Chair’ Proposal is really ‘in your face’ nasty, especially in the wording – see here.
I rather like proposals as a format (e.g. Peter Liversidge and Lee Lozano) and I didn’t know Kienholz had adopted that strategy. I also didn’t know about pricing method – a sum for the written proposal and plaque, a little more for a drawing, and then a sum to be agreed for realising the proposal.
Also saw Speigelgasse at Hauser & Wirth. All Swiss artists, following the influence of dada…
What art have I seen? Gi cont.
Mitchell Library contains two temporary library related projects:
A public library of and for listening by Anneke Kampman and Katherine MacBride
Invitation to Forms with Kate Briggs, Joseph Buckley, Francis McKee, Vivian Sky Rehberg, Sarah Tripp, Nina Wakeford and Brighton Upton-Trust
What art have I seen? Gi
Deniz Uster’s Citadel at the Briggait, along with Nadia Myre’ Code-Switching and Other Work.
Rosie O’Grady’s May Day at the House for an Art Lover.
Duggie Fields at The Modern Institute
What art have I seen? Will Maclean
Will Maclean’s Narratives at the Fine Art Society, Edinburgh
What art have I seen? Ross Birrell The Transit of Hermes
Ross Birrell’s Transit of Hermes at the CCA, Glasgow http://www.cca-glasgow.com/programme/ross-birrell-the-transit-of-hermes
What art have I seen? Séan Hillen
Séan Hillen’s Melancholy Witness: Images from the Troubles at Kamera8. Also on show works from the Irelandis series.
What art have I seen? Séan Hillen
Séan Hillen’s Melancholy Witness: Images from the Troubles at Kamera8. Also on show there works from the Irelandis series.
What art have I seen? Lee Lozano
Lee Lozano Slip, Slide,Splice at the Fruitmarket Gallery. I bought her Notebook republished by Primary Information years ago, partly because I like scores and instructions and partly because we were working on Calendar Variations and I was looking for artists working with grass.
What art have I seen? A Global Table
A Global Table at the Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, Netherlands (thanks to the snow-cancelled flight.
It would be great to be part of one of the conversations that happen around this table periodically.
; or tell you about the ‘policing’ of relationships between Dutch men and indigenous and mixed women in the Indonesian colonies; or explores the batik business in which the Dutch as all good merchants do took from the Africans all sorts of designs and then sold them the materials. These and other works in the exhibition all revealed or described situations, where Shelley Sacks’ piece opens up a dialogue. In her work no simple moral position is offered. Rather we are asked to engage with the lives of the banana farmers.
Sadly the complimentary part of the exhibition focusing on Food in Still Life painting had been replaced at the Museum. It had been replaced with paintings on the theme of humour. Actually this is an interesting juxtaposition. The exhibition blurb is,
Naughty children, stupid peasants, foolish dandies and befuddled drunks, quack doctors, pimps, procuresses, lazy maids and lusty ladies – they figure in large numbers in Golden Age masterpieces. The Art of Laughter: Humour in the Golden Age presents the first ever overview of humour in seventeenth-century painting.
These paintings offer a moral commentary on society. They do this with beautifully rendered scenes containing jokes and knowing winks. Sex is alluded to through visual language of hares and skewers and the audience is captured by knowing looks. Scenes are ripe with meaning and compositions juxtapose meaning in revealing ways. Not all the contemporary works dealt with their subject matter with such finesse.
What art have I seen? Hamburger Bahnhof
Several amazing Robert Rauschenberg works.
Also major pieces by Joseph Beuys at the Hamburger Bahnhof including ‘Tallow’ originally made for Skulptur Projekte Munster and now in the collection. Caroline Tisdall’s description is much more evocative than the one on the archive website.
What art have I seen? Mark Dion’s Theatre of the Natural World
Mark Dion’s Theatre of the Natural World at the Whitechapel, enjoyed with Reiko Goto and Tim Collins.
What art have I seen? The Land We Live In – The Land We Left Behind
The Land We Live In – The Land We Left Behind at Hauser & Wirth, Somerset. Enormous exhibition curated by Adam Sutherland.
This exhibition is in parts a bit like a rural museum managed by volunteers with cases of curiosities (models of bird feathers probably ten times life size, a doorstop homage to Robert Burns, various other tchotchkis). The first room you enter had a number of artists’s projects that explored food production. Another had strange hybrid works including an applebarn doubling as a confessional. The end wall of that room had a video piece which included a shocking segment of a cow being killed with a bolt gun in an abbatoir.
Whilst it is great to see the exploration of the rural in art and craft, the curation in the end felt conventional rather than radical. It’s a question of balance – the room with the food production projects was too modest and the room with the arty installation pieces was too overblown. The shocking video was just shocking. In about 1970 Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison exhibited, as part of a group show at the Hayward Gallery, a portable fish farm. This led to a storm of protest because they proposed to kill and eat the fish at the end of the exhibition. What were catfish, a staple food in the US, were carp kept as pets in the UK. The Harrisons’ scale of production was also more interesting – enough to produce a feast. The food production in The Land We Live In might keep a family in lettuce for a couple of weeks – it’s is certainly not enough to supply the Gallery restaurant. That installation should have been a whole room producing vegetables and fish for the restaurant. How would we have felt seeing the fish swimming around and then having them killed for our lunch?
We had too much ‘big art’ and not enough big ideas.
What art have I seen? Vertigo Sea
John Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea at the Talbot Rice Gallery.
What art haven’t I seen? Martin Puryear
Went to Parasol Unit. Really looking forward to seeing Martin Puryear’s work. Not open yet.
What art have I seen? Life of John the Baptist
Faith
Andrea del Sarto’s Life of John the Baptist at the Chiostro dello Scalzo. Last here 18 years ago. Just as good.
Salome’s Dance
What art have I seen? Niki de Saint Phalle’s Tarot Garden
Detail from The Emperor
I have a particular love of artists’ personal projects (Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Little Sparta, Charles Jencks’ Garden outside Dumfries) and Niki de Saint Phalle’s Tarot Garden is no exception. Quirky and deeply personal under a veneer of playground fun.
The Devil
Fascinated to read that Tinguely did a lot of the welding for the armatures and that the ceramics were largely made, fired and glazed on-site.
The Moon
What art have I seen? Collection Gori
Gori Collection of site specific sculpture on World Deep Listening Day.
What art have I seen? Aleksandra Mir
Aleksandra Mir’s Space Tapestry: Earth Observation and Human Spaceflight at Modern Art Oxford as well as Kazem Hakimi’s Portraits from A Chip Shop (also at the Fire Station).
What art have I seen? Tschabalala Self and Richard Wright
Tschabalala Self at the Tramway and Richard Wright at The Modern Institute. In passing saw Florian Hecker at the Tramway and Manfred Pernice at The Modern Institute.
What art have I seen? Muirhead Bone
Exhibition at Roselle House of Scottish artist known for his prints and drawings of industrial Glasgow and his work as the first War Artist. He was connected with Ayr and Pamela Conacher put the Inspiring Landscapes exhibition together as part of WW1 remembrance. Master Printmaker Ian Nicol contributed participatiry workshops.
What art have I seen? E.A.T. Experiments in Art and Technology
E.A.T. Experiments in Art and Technology at Arts Catalyst.
What art have I seen? William Kentridge, The Guerrilla Girls, Jannis Kounellis
William Kentridge environments and Guerrilla Girls on European galleries and museums and the women they show and collect bothe at The Whitechapel Gallery.
Jannis Kounellis at White Cube.
What art have I seen? Sunken Cities
Sunken Cities at the British Museum. Jake pointed out that the pitch the Lighting Designer made was to give a sense of being underwater with strong directional pools of light. It’s too much – the shadows on this utterly astounding carving of a woman with a diaphonous dress was so bad there were big areas in shadow.
What art have I seen? Marie Velardi
‘Lost Islands and other Works’ by Marie Velardi at Peacock Visual Arts including the timeline of human development according to Sci-fi literature.
I was invited to respond to the work as part of a Creative Carbon Scotland Green Tease. Anne Douglas and published an essay in the Elemental: Art and Ecology Reader earlier this year talking about the way that the Harrisons use inconsistency and contradiction in their works. This seemed relevant in relation to Velardi’s works, perhaps most obviously the timeline but also the works about islands and coastlines. Keeping contradictory truths in tension is an important skill and capacity that artists use in their works. Having just been at Tim Ingold’s lecture on the Sustainability of Everything this point is relevant to how we conceptualise living and carrying on.
What art have I seen? Out There: Our Post-War Public Art
Walked past this yesterday and today went to see the Historic England exhibition on post-war public art. Highlights how the Festival of Britain in 1951 acted as a platform for new work perhaps in a similar way to how the 2012 Cultural Olympiad and 2014 Commonwealth Games have provided a platform for a new cross artform sited work.
https://historicengland.org.uk/get-involved/visit/exhibitions/public-art/
What art have I seen? Surreal Encounters
Surreal Encounters at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art – Dada through Surrealism.
https://www.nationalgalleries.org/whatson/on-now-coming-soon/surreal-encounters/
What art have I seen? Jo Spence
Jo Spence at Stills. Three groups of work that clearly demonstrate the radical approaches to photography being used by Spence and her various colleagues. Put this alongside the ‘Context is Half the Work: Partial History of the Artist Placement Group’ at Summerhalland its a salutory reminder of what radical practice looks like.
Good review here http://thisistomorrow.info/articles/jo-spence-1
What art have I seen? Alice Neel and Jess Johnson
Two exhibitions at the Talbot Rice Gallery, University of Edinburgh. Alice Neel, New York portrait painter. The drawings in the Playfair Library on the ground floor and the balcony are well worth the trouble. The influence of the Expressionists is really strong, but it’s clearly NYC. The show links biography with work which is fascinating, but a bit distracting. The mark making is great!
Jess Johnson’s Eclectrc Panoptic drawings, video and VR environment are all enthralling – the VR environment is really successful transposition of the drawings – it is a linear exploration and not ‘gamified’ but I suspect that the real quality is in the work with Simon Ward to make it feel like you are moving through the drawings.
What art have I seen? A partial history of the Artist Placement Group
Roger Coward speaking about his Placement with the Department of the Environment in Small Heath, Birmingham
What art have I seen? Dia Beacon
‘Best of minimalism’. The good tracks were Agnes Martin, Louise Bourgeois, Richard Serra, Robert Irwin, On Kawara, Fred Sandback. Having come from Mass MOCA it is apparent that Dia need to have a space for one artist to be focused on in depth.
What art have I seen? Mass MOCA
This is part of Michael Oatman’s ‘All Utopias Fell’, a strange spin on solar energy and communication with the stars. The Jetstream is about 3 stories up and contains amongst other things a library and archive.
The three floors of Sol Lewitt’s work arranged Early, Mid and Late.
Explode Every Day – an inquiry into the phenomena of wonder – standout pieces by Michael Light’s ‘100 Suns’ (photos from the Los Alamos National Laboratories); Rachel Sussman’s ‘(Selected) History of the Space Time Continuum’; Ryan and Trevor Oakes’ drawings exploring perspective; Tristan Duke’s scratch holograms; and Julianne Swartz’ trembling, rattling ‘Bone Scores’.
Three works from the Hall Foundation by Anselm Kiefer, one of which immediately physically connected with Kilmahew.
What art have I seen? Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
In the Yellow Room we find Whistler’s ‘Nocturne, Blue and Silver: Battersea Reach’ along with a Matisse, a Degas, a Sargent and another Whistler. Having been to Hearst Castle last year, we wondered what the difference was?
What art have I seen? GSA MFA
Glasgow School of Art MFA at the Glue Factory. Liked Yeonkyoung Lee’s disco inspired installation – v nicely composed. Uesung Lee’s drawings and detritus of drawing as a form of labour. Also Jamie Green’s Shankland ‘Sun Never Sets’ – v clever curatorial exercise. Finally like Sian Collins and Westmoreland Stones.
What art jave I seen? Deep in the Heart of Your Brain
Jacqueline Donachie’s exhibition at the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow. Three groups of work: drawings of lamposts – sources of illumination in the modern urban landscape; sculptures which use the materials of accessibility infrastructure (ramps and handrails) but perhaps seen from the perspective of someone for whom they don’t work or maybe just that they evoke the precariousness of the people for whom they are designed; finally videos speaking to sisters, speaking to feelings of doubt, but also playful. Powerful stuff. (Oh and a piece of armour – a boot – that could flex more than you expected.)
What art have I seen? When the future was about Fracking
He He’s installation and film in the Visual Research Centre in Dundee, part of Mette M High’s Leverhulme funded St Andrews’ based Energy Ethics programme
What art have I seen? Gray’s Graduates in Residence
They’ve called it Only the improvisation remains constant, a quote from the Harrisons
This is a detail of one of Tako Taal’s works.
What art have I seen? Musee Art Moderne, Paris
Dufy, de Chirico, Braque and Picasso, Matisse, Sekula (Museum Guardroom), Duchamp, Bourgeois, Messenger.
What art have I seen? Island Drift and Nick Hedges
Streetlevel have an exhibition of work done with NVA in the Loch Lomond national park exploring light in a dark landscape. Light is brought to life almost as another albeit strange and new entity in the landscape. In the Trongate 103 Foyer Nick Hedges photographs from the Gorbals in the 70s are a reminder of what highrise housing was replacing – slum tenaments – but Hedges photography doesn’t just capture the issue – it’s as beautifully composed as a Vuillard.
What art have I seen? Drawn into tomorrow
Drawn into tomorrow by IC-98 at Dundee Contemporary Art
What art have I seen? Burnt Sierra and the Ship of Theseus
Calum Stirling’s exhibition Burnt Sierra and the Ship of Theseus at The Briggait.
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