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Showing posts from July, 2009

Not At This Address Preview

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Artists at the show Pat Flyn & Andrew McDonald Paulette Brien from International 3 & Alison Erika Forde Ben Gwilliam & Matt Wand - sound artists who will be performing as part of the sound event of Not At This Address (titled "If Not This") on 4 September Sarah Sanders (sorry I didnt get shots of everyone in the show)

Poetry Dog Preview

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The world's most famous poetry dog, Barney, had a sneak preview of the "Not At This Address" Exhibition, today - pictured with works by Alison Erika Forde. Report on the human preview to follow...

Not At This Address Opening

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The next exhibition at Bury Art Gallery opens on Friday at 7.00pm, and is on until 7 November. The artists featured are Jesse Ash, Brass Art, Maurice Carlin, Alison Erika Forde, Pat Flynn (pictured), Rachel Goodyear, Andrew McDonald, Amy Pennington, Magnus Quaife, Rachel Elwell, Sarah Sanders and Anne Charnock.

Rupert Bear returned

Is this where my interest in sculpture came from? http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/Rupert-Bear-returned--thanks.5331220.jp Story a few months late, but a family amusement...

Helsinki

A couple of days now in Helsinki. Sue and I went to Kiasma http://www.kiasma.fi/index.php?L=1&id=2028&FL=1 – certainly unusual spaces featuring a couple of shows: Tracing Tracks and (Un)Naturally. The former sounded uncannily serendipitous given my interests and was worth seeing in the main though overall a little variable. The Smudge and Barcode sections of the show were strongest; in the first, Riiko Sakkinen’s wall of politically charged cartoon-advertisement was a good piece, though the simplest element a framed sheet paper with a hand-written list of “My Favourite Banks” was the most powerful. http://www.riikosakkinen.com/ . In the Barcode section, Juha Van Ingen’s ‘ecuador’ http://www.juhavaningen.com/pages/ecuador.html dominated the space. The Imprint section was curatorially a little bit muddy. Three great slashed canvases by Lucio Fontana stood out and a short video work called ‘Foam’ by Adel Abidin from Iraq http://www.adelabidin.com/ The (Un)Naturally show inv

Saari

Back in Helsinki from Saari. Unfortunately I forgot the camera lead so I can’t up load any photos, but Geof Huth has been blogging extensively what it is like. I arrived on Thursday and went virtually straight into my talk. I mainly surveyed the last two Text Festivals and compared text works that I had seen at the Basel Art Fair shows and the disappointing ICA show. I also responded to the question that has been bouncing around the workshop (according to the blogs) which is “What is the difference between a vispo and a graphic designer?” it seems to me that this is the wrong question, instead I asked “What is the difference between a vispo and a visual artist?” Generally it was felt that the answer to both questions is the same – poets don’t get paid. Christian Bök’s line was most interesting - that the reason why poetry can’t compete in artistic status is economic – the price of failure in poetry is so low as opposed to the 'capital investment' of say visual arts. In addition

Helsinki and beyond

Off to Helsinki, then on to the Saari residency http://www.koneensaatio.fi/en/manor/ Geof Huth is already there, and has been blogging the goings on all week. See http://dbqp.blogspot.com/ Presumably, I will be able to blog it too.

A Brief Conversation on Curating

With words from Hans Ulrich Obrist (Director of International Projects, Serpentine Gallery), Pontus Hultén (Museum Director), Johannes Cladders (Director, Abteiberg Museum), Jean Leering (Director, Van Abbemuseum), Werner Hofmann (Director, Hamburger Kunsthalle), Harald Szeeman (Maker of Exhibitions), Seth Siegelaub (art dealer, publisher & exhibition organiser), Anne D’harnoncourt (Director, Philadelphia Museum of Art), Lucy Lippard (Art Critic/Theorist) HANS ULRICH OBRIST: I was wondering what acted as triggers for you, who were your role models in terms of curatorial pioneers, what were the influences for you when you started? TONY TREHY: My strongest influence was actually the spatial thinking of Mikhail Tal, the Latvian Chess genius. I used to play competitively – and to study Tal’s games is to enter a world of staggering multi-dimensionality. For this reason, it surprises me that the artworld doesn’t make more of Duchamp’s Chess games. It is really significant that he gave up

Annual Check Up

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The Barnster is such a happy chap that his tail continues to wag as the vet injects him.

The Poetry Trap

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When a flagship piece of architecture opens a little test of aesthetic integrity is to look at the back stairs. It's around there that any flaw in design integrity is obvious (if it isn't already clear because it is a crap building). One of Buckminster Fuller's criticisms of the Bauhaus was that its designers never looked at looked at plumbing or drainage. There is an analogy for the uses and abuses of poetry in visual arts contexts. I will talk more about this in future blogs and it is one of the issues I will be considering at the Saari Residency in Finland next week. Basically, it is a generally observable phenomenon that when curators and museum directors open there fabulous new buildings or refurbishments; after they have thought of the wine and cheese, the next accessory on the list is a poet, an opening poem, a poem read. But the overwhelming evidence suggests that their knowledge of this other field, of contemporary poetry is non-existent. So they cast around and c

Zombie Parade

An unexpected and very large procession of Zombies has just walked passed the flat. It was at least as entertaining as Deller's considerably more expensive International Festival Procession. A quick search reveals that this happens all over the world - http://www.zombie-aid.com/Zombie_Aid_website_by_Carl/Videos.html

H1N1 v H5N1

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This may seem off my usual topics but anyone who has any time trapped in a lift with me will know that my secret obsession is flu pandemic planning. This interest started surprisingly due to art history: as a youth studying, it was a source of fascination that the career of the Austrian Expressionist Painter Egon Schiele was cut short by the 1918 flu pandemic. William Carlos Williams talks about the experience of being a doctor at the time in his excellent autobiography. Anyway, at the time I was also studying history and it seemed bizarre that an event that had killed more people than the first world war was never mentioned. So over the years I have taken an interest in the story of the virus and the ongoing epidemiological research. Some years ago the science consensus was that another pandemic was inevitable - though not mentioned publicly, the UK government are planning for up to 600,000 deaths. In Scotland plans are in place for inflatable temporary morgues to be sited in parks to

Flailing Trees

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Aside from Jeremy Deller's entertaining Procession on Sunday, Manchester International Festival's only effort at public art is Gustav Metzger's Flailing Trees . http://www.mif.co.uk/events/flailing-trees/ According to the festival brochure "Walking or driving the same streets every day, many of us take our surroundings for granted." I wonder, does that mean anything? Anyway, Gustav Metzger "challenges this sense of security with Flailing Trees, an arresting and poignant new piece of public art that will stand in the Manchester Peace Garden for the duration of the Festival." I don't quite get this: usually taking things for granted is taken as a criticism of complacency, but apparently 'many of us' are guilty of a sense of security - I am not so sure that the absence of anxiety is a bad thing. As you can see from the picture, Flailing Trees comprises 21 willows inverted in a concrete block, "a subversion of the natural order that brings

Procession

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http://www.mif.co.uk/events/procession-2/

Zaha Hadid, Piotr Anderszewski, JS Bach

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Zaha Hadid: "The Aim: to create a near-perfect environment for the audience to experience some of the world's most beautiful chamber music." Putting the strangeness of aiming for near perfection rather than actual perfection down as clumsy copy in the publicity, this ambition was repeated by the Festival Director at the launch event; with such pronouncements, you make the claim you get measured by it. Comparing a real photograph with the image on the MIF website http://www.mif.co.uk/events/js-bach-zaha-hadid/ there is a bit of disconnect between computer generation and real construction. There is a lack of drama in entering the environment because you come in from the side and the views that are included in publicity are actually impossible because the construct is packed into a gallery space. The impression you get when you sit down is you are in a cross between sets from Star Trek Next Generation and the 1967 Casino Royale movie. Sue pointed out that there is a reaso

Currents of Time

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A show well worth seeing in London is Currents of Time : Zineb Sedira ’s 3 works at 2 Rivington Place. Rivington Place is worth a look being designed by David Adjaye. http://www.iniva.org/events/2007/david_adjaye I managed to catch Hans Ulrich Obrist's conversation with her last week. He is really very impressive at getting an artist to relax and talk freely about their work in front of an andience. The high point of the installation is the newest part of the triptych, Floating Coffins, filmed on the coastline of Mauritania, where the world's shipping is beached and broken up. Although Sedira draws parallels through this with another of the region's characteristics - the harbour city of Nouadhibou, which has become a point of departure for African migrants trying to reach Europe, the complex arrangement of 14 screens with layered sound compiled by Mikhail Karikis, was remarkable artistically (the photo can't give you the effect obviously), and strongly reminiscent of t

"Presumed Innocents", the trial: 10 years later

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(news via e-flux) Bordeaux Judge Reopens Decade-Old Child-Porn Charge Against Curators Marie-Laure Bernadac, Henry-Claude Cousseau, and Stéphanie Moisdon . Indicted at the end of 2006 , after six years of investigations, long period during which no element was produced that could have fed the prosecution (the specialized unit for minors and the rectorship gave a favourable opinion) and after the attorney general of Bordeaux called for a not guilty decision in march 2008 the trial judge Jean-Louis Crozier has just decided to refer before the magistrate's court Marie-Laure Bernadac, Henry-Claude Cousseau, and Stéphanie Moisdon, for having, within the exhibition entitled "presumed innocent- contemporary art and childhood " organized 2000 in the CAPC contemporary museum of art in Bordeaux exposed " violent and pornographic art works "*. With this decision—which, in an extremely unusual move, disregards the conclusions of a Parquet investigation—the entire national