Entries Tagged 'ARTISTS' ↓

but on the right track! And there’s just ninety years left to get into the next round. But surely there’s nothing wrong with ambition…  If you missed his opening last night, be sure to catch Trevelyan Clay’s show at neon parc in Melbourne until June 5th.

Read Marieke Hardy’s account on ABC Blogs

“If you want to be famous, you must do something more badly than anybody in the entire world.”

So said Miroslav Tichý. It was the late Harald Szeemann’s “discovery” of this (now) 84 year old photographer’s work in 2005 that has placed him at the center of the art world’s focal plane. Szeemann curated a show at the 2004 Seville Biennale, which was awarded the “New Discovery Award” from the prestigious Rencontres d’Arles photography festival, followed by shows in Zurich, Frankfurt, London, Paris and now the ICP. The high profile dealers, a Foundation, and Museum exhibitions followed close behind.

The nature of Tichý’s work, and the circumstances of his life, navigating the boundary between insider and outsider, seems perfectly aligned with Iconophilia’s six mythologies of twentieth century art:  Obsessive/compulsive behaviour. On the boundaries of taste and rationality. Sex and instability. Rejection of the academy. Melancholia and isolation. Cantankerous and evasive communications. Szeemann explained it thus:

“One of those incredible stories. A story about blurred, underexposed photos and homemade cameras. A story about the bodies of women, taken pictures of with the eyes of a confessed voyeur, who sneaks a look through the fence of the men’s bath to get a glimpse of the ladies and who puts up with the ubiquitous fence pattern inscribed on the obscure bodies of his victims by the measures of decency. Maybe one of the weirdest, most touching contributions to the gallery of “bathers“ that has sublimed all the longing for bodies in the occidental history of art. The incredible story also has its rift, the rupture that simply occurs without a cause there. Miroslav Tichý is not naive. He had studied at the academy of arts in Prague and was an avant-garde painter in the Fifties, not without risk in communist Czechoslovakia. He was in jail for eight years, but yet he had his entourage that admired him. Until it simply occurred: the rift, the rupture, the becoming of an outcast, of somebody who belongs nowhere. For a while, Tichý kept on painting; then he built his first camera, refining the prototype in whichever way the yield of scrap allowed for. Ever since, he has been hunting, taking pictures of that he used to paint: women. How should we call that, here, in the context of art? The breakthrough of an impulse? Obsession? The art of a misfit? How should we call pictures, the author of which remains unknown, hidden in subconsciousness? The incredible story plays deep down inside, and yet far out, in a dimension for which we have no category of explanation, of comprehension, not even of description.”

To see how Tichý’s work is seen as a challenge to his avant-gardist contemporaries, read Jana Prikryl’s perceptive review of the ICP exhibition, in The Nation, where the random effects of Tichý’s method is compared to that of the late Czech master of the avant-garde, Milan Knizak, who said of his own working habits: “From time to time I pressed the button…. I didn’t use the automatic, I didn’t focus the picture, etc…. Some parts came out clean, some not. As in life.” And yet Prikryl finds qualities in Tichý’s work that are missing in Knizak: “The handful of his [Knizak's] photographs reproduced in the catalog Out of Eastern Europe: Private Photography look merely accidental and discomposed.”

Alas you only have two days to get to New York’s ICP to catch the retrospective of the 84 year old Miroslav Tichý’s work. If you miss it, you can read the Karen Rosenburg review in the NYT here, or Sanford Schwartz in the NYRB here, or follow this link to the Tichý Foundation to see more, and find references like Szeemann’s text above. Or this link to Michael Hoppen Gallery. Or his “apprentice” Brian Tjepkema’s website here… Or the film Worldstar… Enjoy the trail…

See Roger Hiorns at the Art Institute of Chicago. The blurb speaks about his “program of “re-evaluating selected objects.” He has stated that “powerful organizations in the world leave their excess power lying in the street for the citizen or the artist to pick up and reuse, reassert or transgress from the original use.” The Pratt & Whitney engines, now abandoned tools of surveillance missions, represent just this excess literal and figurative power, called into service at the Art Institute to remind visitors of the price of prosperity–as do the pharmaceuticals–and the materials of modern society.” Hmmm.

Forgive me for wondering why Nike Savvas (who was awarded this year’s ACT Creative Arts Fellowship worth $45K) is described by ArtsACT as a “Canberra artist”? I must have missed the December 17 announcement, but just caught up on ArtsACT’s  NEWSWIRE # 9…  See her gallerist’s bio here: according to Ros Oxley, she “lives in London”.  Or, according to Breenspace, where she has an upcoming show, she “lives in London, Nicosia, Canberra”.

“With the 2010 ACT Creative Arts Fellowship, Savvas will conduct research which will lead to a new body of work. She will undertake field work in Rio de Janerio, looking at the relationship between modern architecture and traditional housing and aspects of Brazillian textiles. She will then spend nine months in her Canberra studio developing the work for exhibition.”

Now here’s the mystery: while the ACT Arts Fund Information Booklet doesn’t explicitly require it of an applicant, what makes one a “Canberra artist”? However, recipients “must also propose public engagement activities that would be undertaken as a part of their Fellowship year, for example, public lectures, workshops, a blog on their artistic process.” Can’t wait…

Here’s the general eligibility for all artsACT applications.

Applicants need to be a resident of the ACT. Where
applicants do not reside in the ACT, their application must
strongly demonstrate an ACT-based arts practice or an
activity that would otherwise not be available in the ACT.

Internalising the frame renders ambiguous the boundary between art and the everyday. Here’s two examples to chew on. First see how Jack Featherstone, the Magic Realist of Braidwood, has a way of positioning the viewer weightless above him as (as we imagine) he sits on a vantage point committing this scene of the Deua Valley, in southern New South Wales, to memory, and to his sketchbook? Then see how he has employed another pictorial device in the way he has framed the distant view of the mountains with the two groups of trees, to the left and right of his primary subject matter. These groups of trees are formally distinctive, strangely synthetic, and yet inviting. They form parallel bands, like saplings planted too closely together, but they are somehow out of scale, sitting in the middle distance. They act like curtains, framing the scene ahead of us, yet allowing the continuity of the landscape behind this plane to show through. To this viewer, they suggest a mobile vantage point, a capacity to look around corners. Very seductive.

The surface of this painting, (painted in 2007, in acrylic and oil on bark, 270 x 770) renders the depiction of these and other formal elements in minute detail with tiny dots and blobs of pigment. His perspectival control of deep space is enhanced by the intensification of blue as the far distant mountain ranges roll on past the bush-covered middle ground. There are introductory figures in the foreground (Jack’s family), and the viewer is invited to follow as the group sets off along the road as it twists and turns through the pictorial space.

By contrast, consider this painting by the late Micky Dorrng (b. ca. 1940, d. 2006), of the Liyagawumirr clan, who lived on Milingimbi and Elcho Islands in Central Arnhem Land. Sure, I accept that it’s an extreme example to choose for a comparison of the manipulation of form and space, nevertheless, there are commonalities to be teased out. Micky Dorrng’s painted abstract motifs are derived from ceremonial body painting designs, the referent for which is the djirrididi (kingfisher) narrative. As abstract as you can get. Yet some have claimed that the horizontal marks are the marks left by the tide on Mangrove tree trunks. Be that as it may, when painted on the body, these bold parallel brush strokes vary between vertical, horizontal and diagonal configurations, painted on the chest and upper thighs. Rendered on canvas or bark, they have the capacity to produce complex visual ambiguities, which we read through the lens of abstraction. It has been suggested (by Howard Morphy, and others) that the capacity for Yolngu painting to confuse the eye relates to their invocation of ancestral power.

This example, a small (life-size) canvas, was painted in 2001, (520 x 415, in ochres and acrylic on canvas). The viewer’s attention to the geometry of its forms oscillates between the framing bands and the central panel. Like the architecture of a theatre stage, the bottom panel (six colours: red, white, yellow, white, red, and white) establishes a foreground, mirrored by the upper lintel-like panel above. These top and bottom panels overlap the curtain-like panels on either side (painted in a different sequence: yellow, white, red, white, yellow, and white). When seen together with the side panels, you see how the artist has created the effect of a proscenium, the perfect illusion of inside-outside space.

When you analyse the central panel, you find it is composed of twenty five bands, starting and finishing top and bottom with yellow, and with yellow in the central horizontal axis. The eye plays tricks on the viewer: not only via the spatial effects of framing, foreground and background, but schematically. Why are the colours sequenced differently, horizontally and vertically, one asks? Then experience the excitement of discovery as you decode the sequence, realising that the different order of the bands above and below, and on the sides, also recur in the central panel, from different starting points. It’s harder than it seems. Your eye plays hopscotch as it searches for the starting point for each sequence.

And now ask: how is it that his geometry works so perfectly, given the irregularity of the lines of colour, drawn freehand, twelve lines up and twelve lines down from the horizontal axis, then six and six on the sides, then six and six above and below? The artist’s command over colour, material, and form, apparently so simple, is amazingly engaging. The eye never tires of decoding its rhythms. The surface never stops moving. The spatial ambiguities never stay still.

As with the Jack Featherstone, the viewer is imaginatively drawn into the central space, equally curious, no matter how different the referents may be. The first draws us into a detailed recounting of memorable experiences – almost as if the artist can’t believe his own eyes. The latter painting persuades us that the painted surface is permeable, and, as it references its origins as body paint, how such a painting may be experienced from the other side by the person who wears the painting on his chest.

In each case, pictorial and abstract, each operating within their own poetic code, one sees a process of layering of space, and a control over spatial ambiguity. Each sits at opposite ends of a spectrum of representational intent, cultures apart, and yet each employs pictorial devices that share common effects. Familiarity breeds… wonder.

P.S. The question of “Aboriginal abstraction” is discussed in more detail on ArtWranglers.

Buy the frame, get the (1938) painting for free… See ArtDaily here for the full story.

London’s Lord Mayor Boris Johnson announces Anish Kapoor’s sculpture ArcelorMittal Orbit, to be built in time for the Olympic Games. (See The Guardian video here). Apparently funded by Britain’s wealthiest individual, its title advertising his business identity, its 21st century character could hardly be further from Vladimir Tatlin’s dream of nearly a century ago.  Why Tatlin? His proposed Monument to the IIIrd International was far more ambitious, and despite its impossible futurism, given the technology available to him, there’s an echo here in form and structure, yes? And yes, I have nothing against an art which pays homage to its antecedents… If indeed, that is the case…

The Independent’s Jay Merrick says “It’s anti-bling, and its brusque form will be either loved or hated.” How very English. It’s an unfortunate choice of words, unless anti-bling means pro-spin? Either way, there’s an art-hyperbole thesis in it for somebody… And what will ArcelorMittal Orbit be saying in 95 years time?

Here’s a relevant post on another blog – and I’m sure there will be more! See Kapoor on the BBC,  Tom Dyckhoff. Farah Nayeri. Someone who calls themselves “live toad”.

says the ghost of Marcel Duchamp. He’s worried about inauthentic readymades… Thanks to Breakfastpolitics for the lead.

The war rug aficionado Kevin Sudeith is leaving New York to go bush for a year. Literally. “War rugs” you ask? Wait! There’s a connection…

Kevin’s form of practice as a visual artist is creating contemporary petroglyphs in secret locations “out west”. I’m surprised to hear there is an “out west” left anywhere on the planet – but maybe, hidden away in his (studio) cave, he finds places nobody goes anymore? And if they do, quelle surprise!