Entries Tagged 'EXHIBITIONS' ↓

…are at their best on shoes, seen here on the Met’s blog. Or on skateboards, apparently. And so, facing the global onslaught at Gagosian galleries everywhere, Will Brand at AFC has declared: “So I’m going to lay this down, just to clarify, so that nobody from the future gets confused: we hate this shit. Everyone hates this shit. These spots reflect nothing about how we live, see, or think, they’re just some weird meme for the impossibly rich that nobody knows how to stop.”

(PS. And, if you’ve got the stomach for it, you can win a print if you visit all eleven exhibitions. Seriously).

(PPS. This quote was spotted first on ArtInfo).

(PPPS. Hennessy Youngman also has something to say about it).

(PPPPS. And it has triggered his obituary at the Village Voice).

(PPPPPs. And there’s more! Hrag Vartanian at Hyperallergic flicks some more links…

The Canberra Museum and Gallery has a vitrine out front which enables a rolling series of invited installations. It has a history of generating really interesting displays. One of my favourite sites.

Until mid-September you’ll see Jan Hogan’s To shadow, an installation made of Japanese woodblock prints with Sumi ink and builders pigment on Kozo light with the plywood woodblocks on the floor.  It fills the whole space. Hogan says:

“To shadow traces the shimmering and shifting forms observed on Gundaroo Common in the small country town of Gundaroo, New South Wales. The shadows of clouds, trees and the artist’s body merge and are overlaid onto undulating ground, and these moments in time are rendered as woodblock prints on Japanese paper, using eucalyptus ink from the trees on the Common, Sumi ink and earth pigments. The works on paper float on the wall above the jigsaw cut-out woodblocks from which they are printed, forming an interconnected network. This work investigates the possibility of a meeting point between Indigenous and settler culture, through the ancient idea of ‘the common’, land shared and used for the benefit of all. The visual effects of this work suggest how various and fluid are our relationships to place, and how different views and memories of the same place can co-exist and expand individual perspectives.”

It’s an awkward space to photograph effectively (thanks here to Keven), so you’d better get over to see it for yourself…

Reviewed here by Ben Davis on ArtInfo.

Q: when is a motorbike a work of art? A: when it’s in the Museum of Modern Art.

Here’s the precursor: this 1949 Vincent HRD Rapide is currently on display in One’s Not Enough at the Canberra Museum and Gallery, the latest in a series of exhibitions of local private collections. This example is from the motorbike collection of Peter and Ann Toet. And here’s the 1949 Vincent Black Shadow, in pride of place in the MoMA galleries of architecture and design.

What, I hear you ask, are such things as a Cisitalia or a Black Shadow doing in an art gallery anyway? One of the distinctive characteristics of the MoMA collection is its integration of machine art/industrial design displayed in parallel to the evolution of modern art. And so it’s inevitable that this gorgeous example of early modern automobilia finds a place alongside everything from kitchenalia to a Bell helicopter. The 1946 Cisitalia 202 was designed by the famous Italian Battista “Pinin” Farina who in the immediate postwar era pioneered the idea of the application of aerodynamics to the automobile. One of only 170 produced, the Cisitalia epitomised the “pure, smooth, essential” lines that were to characterise the next age of automobile form. Slippery. Innovative. And very red.

What, I ask myself, are they doing side by side? This celebration of purity, pure red and pure black, is a very MoMA conjunction. But the Black Shadow, built by Philip Vincent and Phil Irving from 1949, is a classic example of stylelessness – of form determined by function – with nothing about it determined by fashion or aesthetics. Which indeed has been one of the criteria espoused by MoMA’s approach to design since its adoption in 1934 of the rubric of Machine Art. So the Shadow is present in the art gallery as the embodiment of mechanical essentialism – if anything, a late futurist expression of power, speed, plus a kind of madness, all present in the same moment as an expression of technological sophistication. One could say it is expressive of the modern in a purely mechanical way, which is how the MoMA first argued its approach to design.  Hand-built in the slipstream of the technological advances of WW2, it is said the Rapide and the Black Shadow were made for the generation who survived the war. For those who were prepared to take risks… But is it art?

Writing in 1984, Arthur Drexler explains: such “an object is chosen for its quality because it is thought to achieve, or to have originated, those formal ideas of beauty that have become the major stylistic concepts of our time.” Thus once its “balance of proportions and fitness for purpose” have been established, an object enters The Modern to be located within its art historical concepts of style… Admittedly, a quarter century has passed since this dictum was published, and the world has moved far beyond “Mechanical Art” as the paradigm of the future. And yet, with its underlying interests in design for mass production, these two hand-made objects represent the end of an era, worlds away from the age of digital design. Nevertheless, with “Painting and Sculpture” still the main game, these two icons are closer in time and sensibility to the beginning of the modern than to the present. So, with all options covered, anything is possible at the MoMA. Stand by. Before long they’ll be hanging them on the wall.

Let’s ask Joseph Kosuth: is a chair still a chair if you hang it on the wall?

(image: Sybil Gordon Kantor, Alfred H. Barr Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art, MIT Press, 2002, p.315)

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

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.

With apologies to James Thurber or Anne Desclos fans, but this is a story about another kind of O…

When you visit MONA (the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart), once you’ve made it past the engaging architectural effects and you’re standing in front of a work of art, you realise there are no labels! And so you turn to the “O” they gave you at the door. It’s a modified iPod (an OPod perhaps) which is (another) paradigm shift in the way you experience a museum.

Powered by 46 WiFi transmitters embedded throughout the building, at any time at least six of them know where you are, and your O presents you with a list of the things you’re looking at. And better still, you have options at your fingertips which allow you to go beyond the title data to levels of information and opinion which are inaccessible in other formats.

No longer do we have to engage in that forward and back dance to read the label beside a work of art: “this looks like…” “never heard of him, oops, her…” “when was this made?”  or “where on earth did they get this treasure/dudster from?” Now MONA’s O gives you access to all these layers of provenance and interpretation, and more. It’s very smart. You can even vote: yes, you can form a love/hate relationship with a work of art!

Other museums agonise over how much information to provide on their labels. Not enough, and you’re expected to buy the book. Too much, and it’s Anthropology. Don’t let the Words get in the way of the Art, they say. With the O, you decide. And if you enter your email, by the time you get home you’ve been sent a record of all the things you looked at, all the things you missed, and access to the layers you didn’t have time to read.

One of the tabs at the bottom of the gadget’s screen is GONZO This gives you David Walsh’s words… What made him buy it, among other things:

Enjoy the mini-essays by Jane Clark and others, under the ARTWANK tab…

And there’s the interactive diagram of your voyage through the labyrinth. Very cool indeed.

And MONA keeps all this info to tell them how to rearrange things in the future. According to David Walsh, if a work becomes too popular, it comes down!

Even though that’s unlikely in the case of the Kiefer Pavilion. The O is a product which DW would like to see adopted by museums internationally. It gets the Iconophilia vote, but we don’t yet have a museum to go with it…