Entries Tagged 'EXHIBITIONS' ↓

See?

See?

OK so it’s just the ghostly reflection of this wonderful silver inkstand. During the first decades of the 20th century, silver was relatively much more valuable. So it evoked a different quality than it does now. As you see in this piece, made by Josef Hoffmann, for Moriz Gallia, in Vienna in 1911. Gallia was one of the patrons of the Wiener Werkstatte. He must have stared in wonder at this object every time he picked up his pen. Just as we do now.

You can see this and many other silver treasures on display at the remarkable exhibition Vienna Art & Design which opens today at the National Gallery of Victoria. It’s one of those exhibitions where there’s too much for just one visit. Your background reading by Tim Bonyhady is here, and here (the book)…

…according to ArtInfo (photo courtesy DayLife), the Azerbaijan artist Aidan Salakhova has had her sculptures first covered, then removed, from the country’s pavilion, on the order of the President.

Steven Shearer is Canada’s entrant at the Venice Biennale: and here’s the blurb… Rot-munching architects proceed with caution. Want more? Punish yourself: there’s still more. And yet more – altho the relation between outside and inside (Heavy Metal and Fin de Siecle) is thinning…

Seems that way to me. If the experience of the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart irreversibly changes the way you think about the potential of the art-architecture experience, the old guard had better look out! If MONA has established a new paradigm for museum practice in Australia, then how will all the other orthodox public and private museums respond? Mount a rearguard critique? Ignore it? Keep doing what we do? I think not.

In the few months since its opening, MONA has been seen by 163,000 people, and there have been more than 100 reviews internationally. (Some of the best are linked at the bottom of this post).  Sure, the MONA effect is individualistic, some say quirky, but certainly a challenging conjunction of architecture and art. Some say, a tad dismissively, it’s a twenty-first century wunderkammer. And if you are really threatened, professionally, you can argue that it’s not really a museum, but rather an egoseum, a private collection made accessible to a curious public, with none of the constraints and obligations attendant on public collections. Its owner, David Walsh, makes the principle of unpredictability his only standard, where any given event or manifestation is just one of “the multiplicity of things that could have happened”.

And yet, if Walsh and his architect, Nonda Katsalidis, have succeeded in making you think about art and its architectural setting in different terms, has it not also altered the standard by which you engage with works of art when you’re in all those other places? In future posts I want to think about such questions. In the meantime, let me show you why it took us an hour to get to the first work of art…

Your iconophile was traveling with Marr Grounds and his daughter Marina Ely, together with Pam McGrath (these photographs), plus Rebel Films‘ David Batty and Jeni McMahon, who are working on a biographical film of Grounds. It was Marr’s father Roy Grounds who designed the two original 1950s modernist houses on Moorilla Estate for Claudio Alcorso (the Courtyard House) and his parents (the Round House).

When you arrive from Hobart on the MONA ferry (which is a kind of mobile coffee shop) you wonder at the red ochre Cor-ten steel windowless forms which enclose the cliff face at the end of the peninsula. As you arrive at the jetty, you are presented with a long narrow staircase which takes you up to the original level of the Alcorso villa. The staircase is your first experience of the excavation of the site, and the sandstone becomes the key motif of the underground spaces which you discover when you eventually enter the galleries below your feet. But first, as you pass the steel and zinc structures, between the sandstone and concrete walls, and the first plantings, you are being prepared for the material qualities that you will experience throughout the building. It feels very good.

When you reach the top of the stairs you realise you’re in for a lot of visual gymnastics. The spaces of the building often appear like a sparring match between an owner-builder and his architect(s). The ground plane of the original Grounds building is linked to the meandering concrete spaces of the gallery roof to the south via a synthetic tennis court. It was Walsh who was the advocate of this icon of suburban popular culture, which faces off the architect’s rejoinder, a stainless steel mirror which frames the Museum’s entrance. In one direction you are attracted to the view of the world outside, framed by the architect’s elegant transparent steel battlements and the modernist villas, while in the other direction the illusionistic mirror draws you in.  Continue reading →

here, for comparison, is a review of a show currently at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Interesting parallels to the Australian situation…

Here’s Doug Harvey at ArtInfo arguing that street art is best where it started…

“Art in the Streets” is ultimately a hybrid of two ethically ambiguous cultural movements, neither of which bears much resemblance to what it claims to be. Museums are alleged to be educational resources for the public governed by learned consensus — certainly not a tax-shelter arena for rich people’s pissing contests. Street Art is supposed to be an inherently political collective visual reclamation of bureaucratically and commercially apportioned public space and consciousness — certainly not a cynical marketing ploy by semi-pro illustrators without the chops to make it in the industry. To the extent that these fictions cancel each other out and create a gap for creativity to flourish, the show is a surprising and delightful success. Revolutionary and historical it ain’t.”

The French artist Space Invader is OK when he’s inside the walls at MOCA, but when doing his thing outside, he gets arrested by the LAPD.

And here’s the mural by Blu that was too overt for MOCA.

And here’s New York’s New Museum using a cherry picker to access some wall-estate to promote a Festival of Ideas… hmmm now there’s an idea.  institutional tagging !

And it’s worth six months in L.A. (LAT)

via Peter Neville-Hadley

Here’s some great pix and a review of Ai Weiwei’s Tate Turbine Hall installation in De Zeen.

It must seem to the readers of Iconophilia that I have an obsession with the floor plane.  But here’s a thing. There’s no way you can look at the installation of Quentin Sprague’s current exhibition at tcb (until 2nd April) without giving some time to an interpretation of the linoleum floor. That is, before you attempt to engage with the works of art. And then you’ll have to mentally Photoshop it away (and all the connotations it evokes, of institutional dining rooms, of Hay Plains service stations, of, you tell me…) before you can attend to the works themselves. But first you have to look very closely, to make sure the artist hasn’t sneakily integrated the design…

But no, there’s no alignment to the past history of the room. There is, however, all kinds of suggestive alignments to the recent past of art history. Thus the limitations of such art experienced as mere reproduction. So what have we missed?

What were they like? Is crossing open ground a form of homage to Lucio Fontana’s Spatial Concept paintings, or was there something else happening, when experienced face-to-face? So who would like to write about this show, to talk us through it?

(crossing open ground, 2010-11, enamel on Aluminium, gunshots, wood. photo: Christian Capurro)

PS. QS is a contributor to Iconophilia.

and how to write a review. Read this account of Adrian Searle’s experience of Roman Ondák’s exhibition at Modern Art Oxford, in The Guardian.