Entries Tagged 'EXHIBITIONS' ↓

Like, where is all the publicity this year? You’d think the Sydney Writer’s Festival was all that was on. But here’s architecture critic Elizabeth Farrelly, on Sugimoto:

“Someone asked me to make a building,” he said, “and why not?” Like, this is so easy. The building was the Izu Photo Museum, which opened – with a Sugimoto show, naturally – last October. It’s a shocker. Crude, gauche and charmless, the museum clearly shows just how hard it is to make a decent garden, let alone a decent room.”

…even though most people in the outside world would rather turn a blind eye. Michael Callaghan‘s exhibition Image and Text 1967 – 2010 confronts the viewer with imagery that makes it hard to ignore the effects of America’s two current “interventions” in the Middle East in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the new works that he has produced since his tenure as the H. C. Coombs Creative Arts Fellow at the ANU School of Art Callaghan has produced new prints and sculptures which force a kind of engagement with his texts and images that is not meant to be comfortable. Concentrating on the war in Iraq, he mixes text references in both English and Arabic with the imagery of war. He lines up graphic representations of militaria (sometimes derived from war carpets) with flags, and the headline texts that have now become meaningless clichés: Operation Iraqi Freedom, Weapons of Mass Destruction, Regime Change… But he also wants us to think about the people on the ground, people who go shopping, who go to school, who go to work, who meet friends. They, more likely, will be reading the Arabic texts…

Earlier phases of Michael’s work are also on show. As a founder member of Redback Graphix, Michael’s current art is still stylistically based on his strength as a designer for the screenprint medium. Solid images, strong colour contrast, integrated text and image. But now, exploiting the School’s new media and digital print technology, his work has been exploring all kinds of subtle visual imaging techniques, so that ancient Islamic texts and illustrations can now be merged with strident, unsettling imagery of war and its effects, and colours and forms can be infinitely layered.

Most striking in this regard is the relationship between the image of a chair (imagining the kind of chair on which you might be tortured) and its representations in both two and three dimensions. Reproductions of maps and documentation from Guantanamo Bay locate its specific referents.

More emblematic are those images which take the outline of a bullet, a jet fighter, a cruise missile, or a burst of flame, laid over the streams of text and icons. Inside the primary form is a text in Arabic. Of course, most of its Australian viewers don’t know what it says. It’s just calligraphy. Exotic, and at the same time unsettling and disempowering. We have to ask what it says. And how does that feel?

Canberra readers and visitors can catch the show at the ANU School of Art Gallery, Ellery Crescent, Acton, until 29 May. Phone 6125 5841 to check the opening hours. Michael is represented by Damien Minton Gallery, Sydney 02 9699 7551.

Tony Burke (Associate Professor in the Politics Program at ADFA, UNSW) gave the following opening address: “It is an honour to be asked to open this exhibition. I recall as a young human rights activist in Sydney seeing some of Michael’s posters – especially the very striking one he did for Amnesty International’s 25th anniversary – and so its interesting to see the longer survey of his work, especially how its book-ended by the early anti-militarist concrete poems and the recent work on Iraq. As someone who has travelled a strange route, from being a human rights activist to teaching at a military academy – where I have a strange role as a kind of embedded critical theorist – seeing Michael’s new work on Iraq and the war on terror is fascinating. Continue reading →

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.

“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.

see the London Design Museum exhibition: Less and More via designboom.

Dieter Rams’ Ten Principles of good design:
Good design is innovative.
Good design makes a product useful.
Good design is aesthetic.
Good design makes a product understandable.
Good design is unobtrusive.
Good design is honest.
Good design is long-lasting.
Good design is thorough down to the last detail.
Good design is environmentally friendly.
Good design is as little design as possible.

It’s The Week of the Vessel on Iconophilia. The most intense expression of this theme is to be found at Patsy Hely’s exhibition “around & about” at Helen Maxwell Gallery in Braddon, Canberra. Not only does Hely make exquisite cast and surformed porcelain vessels, she then uses them as the support for her elegant and engaging genre paintings (in under & overglaze colours). The forms, colours, and translucent materials of her objects/images cohere in a beautifully distinctive way. Hely records her subjects like a visual diary – the images that catch her eye from a wide range of sources and experiences find their way onto her evolving vessel repertoire.

But it was this example Jug: Gwynn Hanssen Piggott, 2009 which particularly caught your Iconophile’s eye: here Hely renders Morandi via Gwynn Hanssen Piggott. And hey presto! in Hely’s work the origins of all this homage action comes full circle: only now are the still lifes of crowded vessels rendered on the surface of a vessel. Hely’s impressions on a twin-lipped jug comes fresh from viewing GHP’s exhibition at the ANU Drill Hall Gallery, which I reported in The Not Morandi Effect

The specific function of a watering-can seems to have stimulated designers to stretch the limits of plasticity. But how does it feel to water your plants with an award-winning icon? Especially one made of extruded plastic? Dutch-born Monika Mulder‘s award winning Vallö (2001) (above) is currently part of Democratic Design: IKEA at the International Design Museum in Munich.

The great Danish designer Erik Lehmann Hansen seems to have seen the humble watering can as an excuse for a playful exercise in style, echoing the geometric purism of his predecessors. But somehow he has exaggerated those characteristics to produce a postmodern object which seems to make fun of its origins: part oil-can, part Constructivism. I haven’t been able to discover the date for Lehmann’s watering can (Rosti #5173), but Lehmann was Rosti’s chief designer from the mid-70s. Although most of his classic designs were cast in melamine, his watering can is extruded silver thermo-plastic.

If the too-much-plastic thing is worrying all you 21st century readers, now check out this nifty award-winning recycliste design by French-born Swiss designer Nicolas Le Moigne seen here at designboom… His minimal use of plastic, part-recycled, maximises functionality, minimises consumption.

Well as it happens, John Kaldor has been busy outside the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Here you will find two blue boxes which at first glance look as if the two equestrian sculptures by Gilbert Bayes (1923) are undergoing conservation.

But no, these are works by the latest John Kaldor sponsored artist Tatzu Nishi (aka Tazro Niscino, Tatsuro Bashi, Tatzu Oozu), who has created a living room and bedroom which accommodate both details of the The offerings of peace,

and the whole of The offerings of war trampling a double double bed. Bravo! Scooped up by roslynoxley9 where you’ll see his drawings…

Anish Kapoor: Memory, 2008

Cor-ten steel, 14.5 x 8.97 x 4.48m  Commissioned by Deutsche Bank AG in consultation with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation for the Deutsche Guggenheim
Installation view: Anish Kapoor: Memory, Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, November 30, 2008–February 1, 2009 Photo: Mathias Schormann
© The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York

Now see it from the other side on Transit Lane. Or, thinking form and space…

here’s Sputnik 1, (at the UN Building in New York, photograph contributed by Jan Luedert).