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Showing posts from May, 2010

Next Week...

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Next week is busy up north: Mill24 is a two-part series of 24-hour exhibitions ready to set up stage for the second time this May 2010 at Islington Mill, Salford. Moving forward from the intense energy of April’s show, Part 2 this weekend will present a multitude of artists, ideas and practices; but offering a difference in pace with the new start time of 12 midday. The overarching focus of this month’s show is to highlight the normally unseen processes of idea generating and work making that normally occur prior to an exhibition. For those who dare to endure our 24-hour challenge, there will be live broadcasting, endurance open-studio projects and performance reenactments in abundance. Mill24 will once again utilise all 5 floors of the mill’s space in its diverse 24-hour showcase of innovatively presented art: from a one-hour lecture series featuring talks and performances, to interactive sound art, to live painting, animation and more. http://mill24.blogspot.com/ The Other Room Wedn

Geof Huth's Birthday

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Happy Birthday to Geof. Nancy asked various people including me to send artworks to celebrate - you can see them at http://geofhuthbday.blogspot.com/

Verona

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Sue likes Michael Buble, so for her birthday (next week), I am taking her to Verona to see him perform in the Roman Amphitheatre http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verona_Arena this weekend. We'll be staying at http://www.escalusverona.com/

The Absence of War

Seeing the exhibition of Goya's Disasters of War at Manchester Art Gallery is a dismal experience, strangely encapsulated by one label accompanying one of the etchings - "A group of people gather sadly around a corpse which is hidden from view". The display itself is as professionally shown, in dim light, nicely laid out, as you'd expect. It is strongly supplemented with Jake & Dinos Chapman's model version of the disasters, reinterpreted with nazi torturers. But to get into the gallery you have to go through an anteroom which features children's prints of war themes - as usual, children's art is only of interest to their parents. Interestingly, quotations from the children have also been mounted in vinyl on the wall; the first one seemed to recognise this problematic intervention: 'Katy' comments: "...it makes me uncomfortable as it is so far removed from my experience and I dont know whether it is right to make a comment on it." It

Hans Ulrich Obrist

HUO: What are the conditions for dialogue in 2009? Is there a way out of this system of isolation? TT: despite the taphonomic questioning the switchboard encourages apoptosis or an equivalent repetition not all directions are the same. Appropriate or. Recursive may be responsible for the concept of self. Remembering recursion qua: because it involves inserting a past mental state into the present one. As an intransitive relation a loop of preferences, perseveration infinite tuples. HUO: What do you think of the current moment, in 2009? Jean-Pierre Page has just published Penser l'après crise [Thinking the After-Crisis]. For him, everything must be reinvented. He says that a new world is emerging now in which the attempt to establish a US-led globalization has been aborted. TT: with the only revolution that mattered overturned in 200 years. Operant conditioning. So you if not simply mandarin the sort of eater who eats everything and nothing of our lowly divisions: [laughs] on food a

Happy Birthday Barney

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2 today

Walls Are Talking

If it hadn't been for showing our visiting Finnish curators around I probably wouldn't have seen the Whitworth Art Gallery wallpaper exhibition " Walls Are Talking "; when I walked in, I realised that I have been waiting for more than 40 years for this show. I imagine that kids still have wallpaper collaging images from cartoons or movies (I don't know any to verify that), but I remember the endless childhood fascination of laying in my bedroom surrounded by repeating images of the 60's colourful Adam West Batman. Before modern domestic interior design, UK houses of the 60's and 70's were pretty much fields of patterned wallpaper - my mother had (and still has) an obsession with wallpaper with huge expressionistically painted roses. Both the Batman paper and the roses are here: Walls Are Talking is dramatically more interesting than either of these but manages to make them (and other, what should be banalities) fascinating and in so being locates thos

London Reviews

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While in London last week I saw four exhibitions: Eberhard Havekost: Guest White Cube http://www.whitecube.com/exhibitions/havekost/ The most interesting Havekost paintings were the Gast series (Guest) – quite convincingly 3 dimensional forest forms maybe seen at night, which are at the same time strangely out of focus as you approach them. The thing that is odd about the show is the unexplained interruptions in the flow of the display with canvases which are vaguely floating colour fields. Then there is one strong graphic piece, “Distanz” possibly representing the bottom of a door in a corridor and another painting called “H2O”, the torso of a swimmer – neither seeming to make sense in relation to the night forest paintings. The upper floor mainly features more of the colour field paintings – which in the majority work quite pleasantly. Apparently Havekost starts from a photo and “enacts a process of de-materialisation and re-materialisation, from thought to object.” I think the inter

Dinner for the Finns

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Arrived from Tampere (Finland) today, Laura Köönikkä , Chief Curator in the Tampere Art museum, Elina Bonelius , Moominvalley museum curator, and Taina Myllyharju , Tampere museum director (pictured with Barney). Sue created one of her legendary dinner parties for the guests: Menu Du Barry soup Warm duck and orange salad Pan-fried cod loin with a bean, potato and choizo broth Assiette of chocolate coffee desserts They'll spend tomorrow in Bury, looking at the Gallery-Museum and preparing future projects.

Bloom

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Bloom opened on Friday. I'm pleased with how it has come out - especially as there was a point where the fact that I am not interested in the environment made me wonder whether anything curatorially meaningful would coalesce. As I wrote in the last two books "ignore the gaps between cities"; but actually what has happened is that my indifference has let the subject breathe, allowed different ideas to reflect between the works, without the tiresomely worthy monotone that characterises most artistic dialogue related to climate change, etc. The process then has been much more of an investigation, a search of what this could be; and in that I am satisfied with the result. One of the themes that weaves through the show is the manifestation of human control as action in relation to the environment; with another key idea being the role of representation of the environment in-itself and qua representation. Lawrence Weiner 's piece (pictured) acts as the nexus for both these