Entries Tagged 'ARTISTS' ↓

David Homewood reviews Margaret Seaworthy Gothic in Un magazine Issue 5.1 here: msg_reviewed. Quite complimentary, actually…

Have you noticed how often this is happening? Photographs of photography? Here, on Lisson Gallery’s Fb page, a woman iPhotographs an Ai Weiwei. And so the subject of this photograph is?

an excess of care, according to his sister.

Imagine my surprise when, walking through the campus of the UWA, admiring the rich neo-classical architecture, this face on the Arts Faculty building called out for my attention. “Look at this! On my nose!” the building exclaimed.

Imagine my surprise when I thought I recognised a work by my favourite international street artist, Invader! A delicious doubly anthropomorphic effect…

And it’s true, apparently. Ten years ago (here’s a mini-interview) Invader visited Perth and left his calling cards everywhere. Many still exist. There’s a map, Invasion of Perth, online here. And his site, here.

Sebastian Smee has reviewed the Venice Biennale in The Monthly – and at last someone has some insights into the rise of hyper-realism. What was the attraction of the naturalistic effects of Ricky Swallow’s gelutong carvings, or Mueck’s and Piccinini’s special-effects modeling? Now SS has put this move nicely in context as a post-Duchampian aesthetic – as a form of one-upping the readymade, perhaps as a kind of fetishisation of the mundane. Touche. Hence the rise and rise of Hany Armanious – widely regarded as having a god-like touch by Gen-Y artists – but also the contributions of Mike Nelson, Murizio Cattelan, and Urs Fischer, plus Bruno Jakob’s “Invisible Paintings” elsewhere in the Biennale.  Cough cough. And then he mentions Mexico’s Gabriel Kuri, Sweden’s Klara Liden, and China’s Song Dong. It’s a good wrap.

The nail gets its final whack when Smee concludes that there is the “preciousness – the safety -  of irony” in all these ‘moves’ (of endgame art)…

“The beauty of irony, as Julian Barnes pointed out in Flaubert’s Parrot, is that “you can have your cake and eat it: the only trouble is… you get fat.”

PS and here’s another exhibition that could be the beginning of a thread…

The Asia Society’s exhibition of Ai Weiwei’s photographs is reviewed here on ArtInfo.

The recently opened Art Gallery of New South Wales’ new Kaldor Galleries houses the gift of the Kaldor Family Collection. With the transformation of previous storage areas there are now three new large galleries plus some smaller spaces which form an extension to the existing contemporary art galleries. It’s full of the most comprehensive collection of 60s/70s painting, sculptures, and installations in the country. It favours minimalist art (Sol LeWitt, Don Judd, Carl Andre, plus a great early diptych by Frank Stella) but also includes significant collections by Nam June Paik, Rauschenberg, and of course, Christo.

In one instance, the Sol LeWitt room (titled Wall Drawing # 1091: arcs, circles, and bands, 2003) turns the convention of The Ubiquitous White Cube inside out. This work is a freestanding room structure (with quite specific and inexplicable architectural features – was it designed for somewhere else?) and you look in the windows at the blaze of hard-edge colour design on the inside. Here we see it looking past that other favourite white cubist of Kaldor’s, Don Judd, with a piece from 1975. As a forensic label-reader, I would love to know one more piece of information for all these works: when were they acquired?

When you reach the end of the exhibition, you’re even invited to make your own LeWitt! At this point you suffer an uncharacteristic art historical land-grab: “The artist – Sol LeWitt – developed a style of art called ‘conceptual art’ where the concept or idea for the art is as important as the final work.”

Another whole gallery is hung around a series of four more LeWitt sculptures, (Incomplete Open Cube 1974 – four versions) which draws the eye towards another Wall Drawing #337, of 1971. Luckily there’s enough good and interesting examples of minimalist and post-minimalist work to make the whole experience a really rewarding immersion into the aesthetics of 1970s New York.

“deprivation of political rights”

“In the first official comments about Hu’s release at the weekend, foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei said he faced “deprivation of political rights” – essentially a ban on political activities that typically bars media interviews.”

Full story here.

And in relation to the law and the charge of tax evasion, HuffPost reports: “Again, the rule of law in China takes a back seat to politics and Party supremacy.”

however he remains subject to a gag order. So much for freedom of expression. For the archivists among you, you may follow the daily thread of the last 80 days here. Latest news coverage here. ArtInfo’s summary of the situation is here.

From an conversation held on February 27 between Hans Ulrich Obrist and Julian Assange for e-flux journal, where a number of artists were invited to ask JA questions:

Ai Weiwei: As a perfect example of how individuals can act against collective power, such as the state, what do you think about the future of this trend? How can individuals use their power to question state power?

JA: There are many technical and practical responses to this question. But this is just not a matter of things that may be useful or practical to do. I think a certain philosophical attitude is needed. And it is this attitude that then pulls together the practical considerations that must be part of a realization of that attitude. So, we encourage the people and our supporters to understand that courage is contagious. It’s a practical reality that, for example, most revolutions start in public squares. Why is that? It’s not like there are more people in a public square. You still have the same number of people in the population, whether they are in their homes, in the street, or in the public square. But in a public square, if there are a few courageous people, everyone else in the public square can see the courage of those individuals and it starts to spread.