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2010-10-20T18:56:00.011-04:00

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Photoshop and Photography: When Is It Real?

2010-02-25T18:26:00.000-05:00

David Pogue posts today in The New York Times regarding two winners in Popular Photography's annual Reader's Photo Contest which were "photoshop jobs." He questions whether these winners should count as photographs because what the image represents never "actually existed." That objection, of course, leaves aside the question of whether the image itself is really worth looking at. Perhaps the best thing about "reality" in this case is that it constrains people from making up scenes we could do without.

In the March issue of Popular Photography magazine, the editor's note, by Miriam Leuchter, is called "What Is a Photograph?"

You'd think that, after 73 years, a magazine called Popular Photography would have figured that out. (Ba-da-bump!)

Actually, though, the editorial is about the magazine's annual Reader's Photos Contest. This year, in two of the categories, the winners were what the magazine calls composites, and what I call Photoshop jobs.

One photo shows a motorcyclist being chased by a tornado; another shows a flock of seagulls wheeling around a lighthouse in amazingly photogenic formation. Neither scene ever actually existed as photographed.

Now, in my experience, photographers can be a vocal lot. And a lot of them weren't crazy about the idea of Photoshop jobs winning the contest.

I have to admit that when I saw the winners revealed in a previous issue, I was a bit taken aback, too. I mean, composition and timing are two key elements of a photographer's skill, right? If you don't have to worry about composition and timing, because you can always combine several photos or move things around later in Photoshop, then, well -- what is a photograph?

read more at Photoshop and Photography: When Is It Real?

The two "photoshop job" winning images:

Click To Enlarge

Todd Mcvey

*Travel/Places Category Winner*“This shot was half planned and half happy accident. I was on vacation in Cape May, NJ, last July, and found this lighthouse while exploring the beach. I knew I had to shoot it— just didn’t know what I wanted it to look like. Then the idea of a composite came to me. I captured just the lighthouse one day, shooting close-ups and from a distance to cover enough angles to choose from. Then I went back the next day at roughly the same time to photograph the seagulls. The sun wasn’t as much of a difficulty as you would expect—framing it behind the lighthouse, I bracketed all my shots so I knew I would get the look I wanted. The main problem was the mosquitoes. They were pretty terrible, so I had to work fast. I think I lost about a pint of blood on this shoot.”*Tech Specs: *Canon EOS 5D Mark II, with Canon 35mm f/2.8 (lighthouse) and 70–200mm f/4 (seagulls) lenses. Exposures, 1/125 sec at f/11, ISO 100. Composited in Adobe Photoshop CS4.

Click To Enlarge

Timothy Bailey

*Action/Sports Category Winner *“I shot this for a project I’m doing with natural disasters and extreme sports. It’s a composite of four different pieces: the background, the sky, the biker, and the tornadoes. The first two were photographed in Northern California in late afternoon. The biker I shot in my studio. It’s my friend Ashley on her bike, which was on a stand; she was pretending to ride it, but it wasn’t actually moving. I created the tornadoes by manipulating cloud images. I like to use a lot of special effects in my photography, and I like having a challenge.” See more at www.timothybaileyphotography.com. *Tech Specs:* Mamiya 645AFD with 17MP Leaf Aptus digital back and 55–110mm lens. Composite made in Adobe Photoshop CS3.

Prow

2010-02-25T01:22:00.002-05:00

artforum.com / critics' picks: "

PROW

ART IN GENERAL
79 Walker Street
January 22–March 20

PROW, Pyre (detail), 2010, aluminum, polyester, theatrical lighting, industrial fans, electric equipment, cello, violin, various technical parts, dimensions variable.

How might artists position themselves between entertainment culture and traditional techniques of representation such as drawing? How might those different possibilities map onto the display practices of commercial gallery venues or nonprofit art spaces? Peter Rostovsky and Olav Westphalen, collaborating under the name PROW, challenge conditions of spectacularization that entangle artistic practices, paradoxically by adopting elements of the most successful model of collective media production: cinema.

In “PROW: The Prequel,” the foyer of Sara Meltzer Gallery contains a series of light boxes displaying posters for sequels to nonexistent movies such as a slasher pic titled Pet II and the disaster flick Iceberg III (mischievously tagged MATTER HAS A MIND . . . ONCE MORE). Lining the main gallery’s walls are six watercolors appropriated from Google’s open-source 3-D modeling software. The drawings, each hand-rendered by one of the two artists, adopt an eclectic range of imagery conjured by wiki-culture’s anonymous users: a floating baby, a stunt actor hoisted aloft in a green-screen environment, a staged plane crash. The exhibition’s central kinetic sculpture, Pyre, 2010, is an agglomeration of B-movie gimmicks: As the lights dim, a dramatic chord is struck by a mechanized cello and violin, activating a phalanx of industrial fans that raise a curtain of theatrically lit fabric into a simulacral fire.

Replacing the gadgetry of Pyre, the central sculpture in the “Anti-Prow” exhibition at the nonprofit Art in General is a Tatlin-like monument consisting of an interlocking group of red ladders surrounded by walls papered with historic political and artistic manifestos. On each wall is a framed graphite drawing of an iconic public death scene (split along its vertical axis, with one side rendered by Rostovsky and the other by Westphalen): the bodies, lying in state, of Lenin and Mao, the corpses of Kurt Cobain and Che Guevara surrounded by police, and the victims of the Jonestown massacre. Like its Chelsea counterpart, “Anti-Prow” addresses a set of questions about the value of artistic labor—this time by taking up the legacy of political activism, and representations of politics, in the visual arts.

“Prow: The Prequel” is on view at Sara Meltzer Gallery, 525–531 West Twenty-sixth Street, until February 27.

— Eva Díaz

Superman's Debut Comic Sells for $1 Million

2010-02-24T21:53:00.000-05:00

Artdaily.org - The First Art Newspaper on the Net: "

Superman's Debut Comic Book Issue Sells for $1 Million at ComicConnect.com

The June 1938 cover of 'Action Comics' that first featured Superman, is shown. AP Photo/Comic Connect Corp.

NEW YORK, NY (AP).- A rare copy of the first comic book featuring Superman sold Monday for $1 million, smashing the previous record price for a comic book.

A 1938 edition of Action Comics No. 1, widely considered the Holy Grail of comic books, was sold from a private seller to a private buyer, neither of whom released their names. The issue features Superman lifting a car on its cover and originally cost 10 cents.

The transaction was conducted by the auction site ComicConnect.com. Stephen Fishler, co-owner of the site and its sister dealership, Metropolis Collectibles, orchestrated the sale.

Fishler said it transpired minutes after the issue was put on sale at around 10:30 a.m. Eastern time. He said that the seller was a 'well known individual' in New York with a pedigree collection, and that the buyer was a known customer who previously bought an Action Comics No. 1 of lesser grade.

'It's considered by most people as the most important book,' said John Dolmayan, a comic book enthusiast and dealer best known as the drummer for System of a Down. 'It kind of ushered in the age of the superheroes.'

Dolmayan, who owns Torpedo Comics, last year paid $317,000 for an Action Comics No. 1 issue for a client. Others have sold for more than $400,000, he said, but this copy fetched a much higher price because it's in better condition. It's rated an '8.0 grade,' or 'very fine.'

Dolmayan said he didn't buy this copy but he wishes he could have.

'The fact that this book is completely un-restored and still has an 8.0 grade, it's kind of like a diamond or a precious stone. It's very rare,' he said.

There are only about 100 copies of Action Comics No. 1 believed to be in existence, and only a handful have been rated so highly. It's rarer still for those copies to be made available for sale.

'The opportunity to buy an un-restored, high-grade Action One comes along once every two decades,' Fishler said. 'It's certainly a milestone.'

The sticker shock was astounding to Fishler, nevertheless.

'It is still a little stunning to see 'a comic book' and '$1 million' in the same sentence,' Fishler said. 'There's only one time a collectible hits the $1 million threshold.'

Works that Leave Many 'Disquieted'

2010-02-24T21:47:00.001-05:00

Artdaily.org - The First Art Newspaper on the Net: "

Portland Art Museum Opens Exhibition with Works that Leave Many 'Disquieted'

Doug Aitken, 'Free', 2009. LED lit lightbox, 48 x 157 x 7 7/8 inches. Regen Projects, Edition of 4. ©Courtesy: 303 Gallery, New York; Victoria Miro Gallry, London; Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich; Regen Projects, Los Angeles.

PORTLAND, OR.- This spring the Portland Art Museum presents 'DISQUIETED'. Curated by Bruce Guenther, the Museum’s curator of modern and contemporary art, the exhibition brings together 38 works that invite engagement and discussion of the elements of modern life that leave so many feeling disquieted.

For many, today’s world is marked by events beyond our control. This unease is a natural response to a tumultuous and troubling decade filled with natural disasters, global terrorism, and worldwide financial collapse.

Artists have always reflected and reacted to the world around them—and contemporary art, through its form or content, often disturbs as much as it provides solace. In 'DISQUIETED', a roster of 28 renowned artists from four continents explore our social conditions and respond to the most compelling issues of the day, challenging our preconceptions and exposing our vulnerability in turbulent times.

“These are some of the most important artists working today,” said Brian Ferriso, The Marilyn H. and Dr. Robert B. Pamplin, Jr. Director. “The objects presented are significant and, like all great art, provide a feast for the eyes as well as food for thought.”

The works—including paintings, photography, sculptures, and time-based film and video installations—evoke an instant reaction. Whether unsettling or benign, all require a second look. The issues presented are both intimate and global, prompting viewers to consider their own humanity and their place in the world.

“The experience is post-retinal—you take it with you and it becomes a part of your next conversation,” said Guenther. “These works provoke feelings that may be lying beneath the surface or below a person’s façade of contentment. The emotional reaction sneaks up on you, perhaps even moving you from laughter to tears.”

The artists presented in the exhibition are among today’s foremost figures in contemporary art; most have never been exhibited in Portland. Artists featured in the exhibition include: Doug Aitken, Chiho Aoshima, John Baldessari, Tanya Batura, Sanford Biggers, Gregory Crewdson, Carroll Dunham, Tracey Emin, Ellen Gallagher, Andreas Gursky, Barbara Kruger, Glenn Ligon, Robert Longo, Paul McCarthy, Ron Mueck, Takashi Murakami, Wangechi Mutu, Shirin Neshat, Lari Pittman, Jaume Plensa, Charles Ray, Daniel Richter, John Sonsini, Adam Stennett, Jan Tichy, Bill Viola, Sue Williams, Su-en Wong.

'DISQUIETED' iPhone/iPod App

The exhibition is accompanied by an iPhone/iPod Application (App) which will be available through iTunes. The Museum will also rent iPod Touches with the tour app installed for visitors. The application features videos of artists from the exhibition discussing their work, practice, and concerns. The Museum’s education department also produced video conversations with the exhibition’s curator and local educators.

Matching the design of the exhibition, the tour app allows visitors to learn more about individual objects and artists in any order. The app includes content on the following artists:

1. Charles Ray – Artist Feature Video

2. Su-en Wong – Conversation About Art Video

3. John Baldessari - Artist Feature Video

4. Sue Williams - Conversation About Art Video

5. Tracey Emin - Conversation About Art Video

6. Gregory Crewdson – Artist Feature Video

7. Paul McCarthy – Conversation About Art Video

8. Wangechi Mutu – Conversation About Art Video

9. Glenn Ligon – Conversation About Art Video

10. Ellen Gallagher – Artist Feature Video

11. Lari Pittman – Artist Feature Video

12. Carroll Dunham – Conversation About Art Video

13. John Sonsini – Conversation About Art Video

14. Ron Mueck –Conversation About Art Video

15. Andreas Gursky – Conversation About Art Video

The Fauxreel Interview

2010-02-24T21:15:00.005-05:00

The Fauxreel Interview - unurth - street art: "

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Dan Bergeron, a.k.a. Fauxreel, creates stunning photo-based street art that also explores really interesting themes - from homelessness & community to the intersection of art & advertising, so I was excited to get into it with him.

What is your history in art, how did you come to focus on photography and street art?

In terms of art, I am self-taught, although I studied Film and Sonic Design at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. I became seriously interested in photography once I was finished university. At first it seemed like a smart career move; I was working here and there as a freelance writer for a few magazines in Toronto and I looked at photography as a way of making myself more marketable. About 2 years passed and I was working as an assistant video editor at an advertising agency and continuing with photography as a hobby. My time inside the walls of an ad agency opened up my eyes to all sorts of design and illustration and I had access to a cold press machine that could apply adhesion to essentially any paper medium. So I put two and two together and started to turn my darkroom prints into stickers, as large as 20 x 24 inches, and began selectively putting them in spots around the city. I was thinking of the process as photograffiti, and as a way that I could express what I thought or saw to the largest amount of people possible. Now, some seven years later, I’m still working with photography and exhibiting my work outdoors, but with more thought for my surroundings, more sensitivity to the people who occupy these spaces and using regular 20 lb paper instead of photographic prints.

What attracts you to photography in street art? Who do you think is using it well?

I like how photography democratizes street art. Not only does it make the work more accessible for the viewer, because most people have taken a photo and they understand the various nuances of photographic representation, but it also allows more people the opportunity to get their work up quite easily. I’m not saying that the majority of the photos that you see pasted up are good, it’s actually the opposite, but a camera can be a very powerful tool that levels the playing field in a lot of respects.

Aesthetically, I like how black and white photos look juxtaposed against the color world. The work really pops off the wall, especially when human scale and the placement of the image is given a lot of consideration.

In terms of who’s using photography in an interesting way in street art, I definitely have to mention JR. He understands scale, placement and he thinks in big ways – all very important elements of working as an outdoor artist. However, what JR really understands and conveys through his work is how photographic representation can be used to positively enhance people’s lives and help to give the subject a voice. His work is not about him, but about the people that he photographs and pastes up around the world. He shines light on the “other”, those largely unrepresented in media, through his art.

Other photo-based artists I like who work out in the street would include Andrew01 from Vancouver, Raul Zito from Sao Paolo and Cayetano Ferrer from Chicago. Each of these artists shoot their own images and have come to create their own language in terms of utilizing their images in an original and creative way.

Other street artists who I admire, like Judith Supine or Bast, use photography in their work, but I consider this differently as they are using found photos as part of their collage and because, from my understanding, they do not photograph any of the images they use.

read the rest of the interview and see more images at The Fauxreel Interview
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The Making of Images: musée du quai Branly

2010-02-19T16:46:00.003-05:00

Artdaily.org - The First Art Newspaper on the Net: "

Musée du quai Branly Proposes the Discovery of an 'Image Factory'

Installation view of the exhibition. ©Musée du quai Branly. Photo: Antoine Schneck.

PARIS.- After Qu’est-ce qu’un corps? and Planète métisse, the 3rd major anthropology exhibition of the musée du quai Branly proposes the discovery of an 'image factory' spanning 5 continents to the public. With 160 works and objects on display, the exhibition solicits a decryption of the great artistic and material productions of Humanity in order to reveal all the things that one does not see outright in an image.

This comprehension of images is based on 4 major iconological models created by Man, which go beyond any geographical or chronological classification, whether in Africa, in the 15th to 16th century Europe, in the Americas of the Indians from Amazonia or of the Inuits of Alaska, right up to the Australia of the Aboriginals. The exhibition unravels these 4 models – translating 4 major world views – which are totemism, naturalism, animism and analogism.

With the image Factory, the visitor discovers the different principles of decryption according to which civilizations see the world and account for the world.

The itinerary of the image factory solicits the visitor to go through 4 sections corresponding to 4 major systems of world views known as “ontologies”: the part “an animated world” is devoted to animism, “an objective world” to naturalism, “a sub-divided world” to totemism and “an entangled world” to analogism.

A 5th section, for comparative purposes, makes it possible to understand, with a few examples of “deceptive cognates”, that formal procedures or iconographic devices very close in appearance actually meet completely different figurative intentions.

The exhibition the image factory helps the public understand and decrypt these 4 major systems of world views created by Man.

An animated world: animism

masque "Atujuwa" femelle © musée du quai Branly

photo Thierry Ollivier, Michel Urtado

The 1st section of the exhibition deals with animism, i.e., the generalization to non-humans of a human type interiority. All entities – an animal, a plant, an artefact – are endowed with interiority, animated by its own speci fic intentions, capable of action and judgment. On the other hand, the physical appearance changes from one entity to another.

The animist model makes the interiority of the different sorts of the existing beings visible and shows that this interiority is lodged in bodies with dissimilar appearances.

The most common images are those which contain tenuous signs of humanity – features of the face, for instance – grafted on mainly zoomorphous shapes. They generally feature non-humans about whom, through a few human attributes, it is shown that they do possess, just as the humans do, an interiority which makes them capable of a social and cultural life. Thus, the Yupi’k masks of Alaska feature the interiority of animals with the insertion of a human face in an animal head, or by adding human limbs to an animal body.

In Amazonia, the Indians were attached to transforming human bodies themselves in images, by borrowing from designs and attributes with animal bodies in order to do this. By putting on an animal costume, humans borrow their biological aptitudes from animals and therefore the effectiveness with which the animals make use of their environment. Humans do not content themselves just with collecting appendages from animals, they also borrow from them designs for adorning their own bodies and mark speci fic status or states – maternity, paternity, mourning, illness…

An objective world: naturalism

arrière cour d'une maison hollandaise,

Pieter de Hooch (1629-1684) © R.M.N. photo Gérard Blot

The 2nd section of the exhibition exhibits another ontological model: naturalism.

The idea behind naturalism is the opposite of the one behind animism: it is not by their bodies, but by their mind that humans differentiate themselves from non humans, just as it is also by their mind that they differentiate themselves from among one another.

This world view, which has been dominant in the West for centuries, must represent two features:

- the distinctive interiority of each human (the painting of the soul): only humans possess an interiority and are capable of rational discernment,

- the physical continuity of beings and things in a homogenous space (the imitation of nature): all humans are subjected to the same decrees of nature, and do not allow standing out by ways of living, as was the case in animism.

Contrary to the 3 other sections of the exhibition, “an objective world” brings out a very clear historic movement in the iconography, arising from a tension between the interiority and the physicality specific to naturalism: the interiority which asserts itself at the beginning in a resounding manner (right from before the Renaissance) dissolves over time to pave the way for an auto-referential physicality, reducing henceforth both interiority and life to physical parameters (birth of photography in the 19th century).

A sub-divided world: totemism

peinture sur écorce © musée du quai

Branly photo Thierry Ollivier, Michel Urtado

This section presents the world of totemism, made of a great number of classes of beings comprising humans and various sorts of non-humans. The members of each class share different sets of physical and moral qualities that the totem is considered to incarnate.

Totemism ignores the differences between beings on the moral as well as physical plane in order to favour sharing, within the same class, of qualities which apply as much to humans as they do to non-humans.

In the aboriginal societies of Australia, the core of qualities characterizing each class originates from an ancestral prototype traditionally known as “Dream being”. All the images are all over linked to the Dream beings and to the actions in which these prototypes have been engaged in order bring the world to order and render it apt for the subdivisions that they themselves incarnate. The figurative objectives of Australian totemism are implemented by means of 2 well differentiated strategies:

- the body appears as i f at the origin of the image that it has given rise to; it is for example “imprint of the body” of a painting on bark,

- the 2nd strategy shows how the world was formed by beings that one cannot see but which have left traces on the landscape; this is what we call “the imprint of movement”.

An entangled world: analogism

poupée rituelle © musée du quai Branly

photo Thierry Ollivier, Michel Urtado

The 4th section of the image Factory proposes the discovery of the iconological model of analogism to the public, the opposite model to the preceding model. To hold an analogical point of view on the world implies perceiving all those who occupy it as being different from one another. Thus, instead of merging entities sharing the same substances within the same class, this system distinguishes all the components of the world and differentiates them into singular elements.

Such a world, in which each entity makes up a unique specimen, would become impossible to inhabit and to imagine if one did not strive to find stable correspondences between its human and non human components, as between the parts that they are made up of. For example, as per the qualities that we attribute to them, a few things will be associated with heat and other with cold, with day or with night, with dry or with wet. Analogist thinking thus aims at making networks of correspondence between discontinuous elements present, which implies multiplying the components of the image and demonstrating their relations.

We can find numerous contemporary illustrations of animist ontology among the great Oriental civilizations, in West Africa or in the Indian communities of the Andes and Mexico.

The classic figure of analogism is the chimera, a being made up of attributes belonging to different species, but presenting a certain coherence on the anatomical plane. The chimera is a hybrid whose constitutive elements stem from heterogeneous registers, but which can meet in a conjunctural manner in a completely singular being.

Mirages of resemblances: the deceptive cognates

grand masque de diablada ©

musée du quai Branly photo Thierry Ollivier, Michel Urtado

The itinerary culminates with a didactic presentation, side by side, of images having similar formal properties, but whose figurative conventions meet completely different principles. This last stage of the exhibition explains to the public how to decrypt these images in order to weigh the differences, drawing its attention to the fact that a purely formal approach of images does not allow demonstrating the different world views that they express.

For example, a Dutch landscape painting (naturalism) holds a dialogue with a Chinese landscape painting (analogism); a bird shaped mask representing a human type interiority in an animal body (animism)is compared with a bird shaped mask having composite attributes (analogist chimera).

see the exhibit site at musée du quai Branly (in French with some English)

Chinese Subjects and the American Art Discourse

2010-02-19T08:46:00.000-05:00

from The Times-Delphic: "

The Secret life of… Lenore Metrick-Chen

By AndiSummers on February 18 2010

GIANT CHINESE VASE, one of the subjects of Metrick- Chen’s studies. Was made for and displayed at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in 1876.

TRADE-CARD AD IMAGE, for Soapine soap, is part of Metrick-Chen’s studies.

With her beginnings as a Medical Student at the University of Illinois, who knew that Lenore Metrick-Chen would one day become an art history professor at Drake University?

“I thought I wanted to be a doctor—I was into biology,” Metrick-Chen said. “I was in a class, Cells and Organelles, and it trained me how to read what we saw on the microscopic slides.”

After taking a break from school and then transferring to the University of Chicago, in Chicago, Ill., she went into cultural studies. That is where she took the class that changed it all: Art and Revolution.

It was an art history class focusing on the art of the French Revolution, and that was the moment Metrick-Chen knew what she wanted to do.

Instead of exploring cells and organelles, she took the skills she learned from looking at microscopic slides by looking at what is there and why it is there, combined with her love of culture and delved into art history.

“I would be the best (student) I ever could be,” Metrick-Chen said. “I wanted to get straight As and be thorough from the start. I kept quitting other majors, but this was heartfelt.”

After finally locking down a major, Metrick-Chen received a joint Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in the Committee on Social Thought and the department of art history. Her dissertation was entitled “Collecting Objects/ Excluding People: Chinese Subjects and the American Art Discourse, 1879- 1900.”

“I find that the most fascinating is the art of our own time,” Metrick-Chen said.

It is at this time that she started looking in to contemporary art, and the search began to study why people want art to be moral.

After looking for the beginnings of what people have found to be moral in art, she traced it back to the Chinese Exclusion Acts. At that point in history, people from China were not allowed to enter the U.S. but that is the time when American art museums were collecting their art.

Metrick-Chen also likes overseeing art shows and worked at the Des Moines Art Center on Grand Avenue before working at Drake.

“A lot of people think art is one picture after another; when you curate it is like a journey of pictures creating a narrative, by how they are working together,” Metrick- Chen said. “It’s like opening a book. You have to put all the things together, with the connections you start to see.”

In the future, Metrick-Chen plans to curate a few shows, one being on contemporary Chinese art.

Miss Van: She-Wolves

2010-02-18T21:46:00.003-05:00

Merry Karnowsky Gallery is proud to present Victor Castillo:
Strange Fruit and Miss Van: She-Wolves. The two Barcelona based
artists unfold their unique personal perspectives on
subjects like seduction, temptation, innocence, desire, and
cruelty.

. . . . . . . .

French artist Miss Van has become one of the best-known
female painters from the graffiti scene, gaining worldwide
acclaim for her work. In She-Wolves, the ultra-feminine
“poupées” (dolls) wear animal heads as they reflect on their
dark, predatory natures.

Always seductive and mysterious, Miss Van’s characters reside
in a mystical world of quiet introspection, as they get in touch
with their feminine power and the dangerous animal within.
While Castillo’s work challenges the viewer with the consequences of allowing our weak
human nature take control, Miss Van’s work asks a different question: What happens if we
surrender to our animal nature?

Miss Van’s work has shown in the United States, France, England, Austria, Italy, Spain, the
Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium, Germany and Australia, and has been featured in
Juxtapoz and Swindle magazines.

Victor Castillo: Strange Fruit

2010-02-18T21:26:00.002-05:00

Artdaily.org - The First Art Newspaper on the Net: "

Victor Castillo, 'The Infinite Complexities of Christmas', 2010. Acrylic on canvas, 24 x 24 inches. Photo: Courtesy Merry Karnowsky Gallery.

LOS ANGELES, CA.- Merry Karnowsky Gallery presents Victor Castillo: Strange Fruit and Miss Van: She-Wolves. The two Barcelona-based artists unfold their unique personal perspectives on subjects like seduction, temptation, innocence, desire, and cruelty.

A moral allegorist, Chilean artist Victor Castillo pairs classical painting with cartoon-like characters. He paints children in dark secret gardens, where they innocently reenact violent media images with brutality and indifference.

Most of the characters in Castillo’s paintings have phallic, hot-dog shaped noses, humorously suggesting Pinocchio. He also makes reference to contemporary culture, human error and vices, politics, and the loss of values in the increasing consumption of modern life, which he sees as an insatiable desire that blinds us.

Castillo’s work has shown in Spain, Chile, Cuba, Argentina, Brazil, Japan, Germany, the United States, Canada, Belgium and Taiwan, and has been featured in Juxtapoz and Hi-Fructose magazines.

Phil Collins Film 'I Am My Mother'

2010-02-18T21:22:00.001-05:00

Artdaily.org - The First Art Newspaper on the Net: "

Daadgalerie Presents Phil Collins Most Recent Film 'I Am My Mother'

Phil Collins, 'Soy mi madre' (I Am My Mother) 2008. 16mm color film/DVD 28 min. © and Courtesy: The Artist.

BERLIN.- The films and film installations, photographs and performances of the British artist Phil Collins are humorous and serious, emotional and complex at same time. His interest lies in cultural anthropology and political phenomena and their symptomatic manifestations, i.e., in popular culture or in the way language is used. Collins’s 3-channel film installation “The World Won’t Listen” serves as a good example of this when Collins offers up a stage to fans of the British pop band The Smiths from Columbia, Indonesia and Turkey. They sing the karaoke version of songs from the eponymously named Smiths album, which was cult in the 1980s -- not only for subversive teenagers in Thatcher’s United Kingdom.

As part of the Berlin International Film Festival’s program Forum Expanded and parallel to Phil Collins’s curated project “Auto-Kino!” in the Temporary Kunsthalle Berlin (from 5 February 2010) the daadgalerie will be presenting Collin’s most recent film soy mi madre (I am my mother) (2008, 16mm/DVD, 28min) for which the artist hijacks the ubiquitously popular telenovela format. Filmed in Mexico City with well-known TV actors, Collins translation of the Latin American variant of the soap opera falls into a hyperdynamic, jarring melodrama with opulent sets in which the archetypical identity patterns of the genre are sharpened to a point. Collins alludes to the romantic stereotypical telenovela of the 1980s and 90s at its high point, and where underlying music and facial expressions play a leading role.

The daily broadcast TV-novel is famous for creating strong moments of identification which occasionally have lead to the spectator’s mingling of the fictional reality with daily life outside of the media. Earlier works of Collins also deal with the effects of the media on the consumer’s life; for example, his project for the Turner Prize Exhibition in 2006 “Return of the Real” – a press conference with “victims” of reality-TV shows in the UK.

A real drama’s collision with its communicative effects through the media coverage were the events of 9/11. In Phil Collins’s early and rarely shown video hero (2002, DVD, 40min) a New York reporter stands in front of the camera delivering his own personal version of the events of September 11, 2001 – as if “freely associating” or undertaking a “talking cure,” albeit assisted by alcohol. Together both soy mi madre and its counterpoint hero make reference to the late 1990s in the USA and the following Bush years and their reflection in the media.

A commission of the Aspen Art Museum, Colorado, soy mi madre will be soon broadcast on local television there. Simultaneous to the exhibition at the daadgalerie, an accompanying catalog to the exhibition by the Aspen Art Museum, Colorado, will be published.

Phil Collins, born in Runcorn, UK, in 1970, was a guest of the Berliner Künstlerprogramm/ DAAD in 2009. In 2010 he will participate in the 6th Berlin Biennial. In 2009 in a one-person-show at the Tramway in Glasgow he presented the project “The world won’t listen” which he started in 2005 at the Istanbul Biennial. In 2006 he was nominated for the Turner Prize. Since the late 1990s Collins has participated in numerous international group and solo-exhibitions, for example, at the Tate Britain und Tate Modern, at CAC Vilnius, P.S.1 New York, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, SFMoMA, Aspen Art Museum, Carnegie Museum of Art, Stedelijk Museum, Frankfurter Kunstverein and Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt. Phil Collins lives and works in Berlin.

Komiks relief

2010-02-18T21:08:00.001-05:00

from BusinessWorld Online:
Posted on 04:54 PM, February 16, 2010
BY SAM L. MARCELO, Reporter

Komiks relief

In the 1950s, Philippine visual culture was shaped by the twin forces of Carlos 'Botong' Francisco’s sweeping murals and the well-thumbed pages of Francisco Coching’s comic books. Although found on opposite sides of the high art-low art divide, both were modernists who imbued their work with an epic sense of history.

An exhibit at the National Museum titled Telling Modern Time maps out the intersections in the lives of the two men and fleshes out their influence on popular culture. Unlike Botong, who was posthumously named National Artist in 1973, Coching never received the award despite being nominated twice. Even more problematic is the fact that Carlo J. Caparas received the honor in 2009, partly for comic books that he wrote but did not illustrate.

'Coching was very rare,' said curator Patrick Flores, citing that the 'one-man Komiks-making machine' was a triple threat who wrote, illustrated, and �” later on �” adapted his work to film. His career, which spanned from 1934 to 1974, included 61 titles, a majority of which became star-studded box-office hits: there was Fernando Poe Sr. in Hagibis; Pancho Magalona in Barbaro; and Rita Gomez in Maldita.

Mr. Flores, who also edited The Life and Art of Francisco Coching (a book released in conjunction with the exhibit), added that the illustrator’s comic books were ideal movie templates since their panels already possessed a cinematic quality that allowed images to jump off the page.

'His perspective was dynamic and even his use chiaroscuro was very dramatic,' the curator said, citing detailed frames filled with contorted bodies. 'The heart of his work was drawing and his main element was the line, which had to express movement and sound.'

The pages of Coching’s novels are filled with mythical archetypes that captured the imagination of the common folk. 'It was like he offered an alternate universe for them to understand their condition �” an allegorical fantasy that made people fully grasp where they were.'

The exhibit includes reproductions of comic book covers and inside pages, film posters and clips, sketches, and memorabilia. Apart from popularizing heroic Filipino iconography that was characteristic of the post-war era, Coching’s stories contributed to the spread of Tagalog as a national language. His anatomically precise figures, too, provided inspiration for young artistic talents in the provinces who had no access to formal training.

The self-taught illustrator toiled endlessly and was always on a deadline to produce. 'More than genius, there was a devotion to craft,' said Mr. Flores. 'Coching set a high benchmark and he did more for his discipline than anyone else. His consistency of quality was truly remarkable.'

Despite the mass-produced excellence of Coching’s original serials, no one collected popular art in the same manner that Botong’s paintings were. However, archives do exist thanks to 'connoisseurs of comics' who possess a cult-like devotion to Coching’s work.

Recently, El Indio, the 1952 sequel to Barbaro, was reprinted as a graphic novel containing all 35 episodes that were formerly released as five-page installments every two weeks.

Placing Coching, the comic book illustrator, side-by-side with Botong, a muralist whose legacy is unquestioned, raises issues about how 'art' and 'culture' are supposed to be defined.

'It’s good to have them both here because it unsettles conventional thinking,' said Mr. Flores. 'They become equivalent expressions.'

TELLING MODERN TIME is on view until April at the National Museum, T. Valencia Circle corner Finance Rd., Manila. The Life and Art of Francisco Coching, on the other hand, is available at Vibal Publishing House Inc., National Bookstore, and
"

Floppy Disk Art

2010-02-18T21:04:00.000-05:00

Visual Culture » Floppy Disk Art: "

Visual Culture

Connect, Create, Inspire

Tuesday, February 16, 201

Floppy Disk Art

London-based artist Nick Gentry recycles obsolete floppy disks to form the foundation of his evocative, moody portraits.

He explains:

“Floppy disks, VHS tapes, polaroids and audio cassettes. As a child growing up in the 80s and 90s this combination played a massive part in how I learned about the world. Favourite films, albums, games and even personal recordings were all stored on there. The whole world was totally reliant on these physical media formats. Now suddenly we are at a time where they are obsolete, replaced by countless intangible data files. As information is released from the physical form it allows personal data and identities to now be revealed and infinitely shared online. At the same time many of us consider individuality and privacy to be more precious than ever. Will humans be forever compatible with our own technology? In my work I want to simply highlight this new movement, as I believe it to be an important cultural and social transition of our time.”

Soviet-style covers for histories of Communism

2010-02-18T20:59:00.001-05:00

Eye blog » Indian ‘ostalgia’? Soviet-style covers for Seagull Books’ histories of Communism: "

16th February, 2010

11:03 pm

Indian ‘ostalgia’?
Soviet-style covers for Seagull Books’ histories of Communism

Published on Tuesday, 16 February, 2010 | 2:02 pm

‘What Was Communism?’ is a series of short, snappy monographs, published by Seagull Books and edited by Tariq Ali (who also wrote one of them), writes Fíacha O Dúbhda. They are hardbacks, printed on high quality paper with tasteful lettering, with vivid and distinctive covers designed by Sunandini Banerjee, one of Seagull’s editors. In short, they are attractive and appealing commodities.

We are a long way here from the simple utilitarian publications so frequently associated with Communism: printed on the cheapest of paper and covers blank apart from lettering, designed to be handed out for nominal fees at factory doors and public assemblies. Yet the spirit of this history is still intact in these works; Seagull sells the works in India at highly subsidised rates (350 rupees or less than £5 each), making them available to the under-waged of the developing world.

The covers radiate nostalgia for the aesthetic of Soviet graphic culture – from matryoshka dolls and bombs to Red Army soldiers and fiery liberated working women. In the style of montage pioneered by Vertov and Eisenstein, the new is laid atop the old and thus both are transformed through a dialectic of image. Bubbly contemporary graphics are melded with iconography, rejuvenating and realigning our perspectives on the images of the past.

For many years leftists of all persuasions have attempted to salvage Marxist ideology from the aborted Soviet experiment, highlighting its departures from early Communist intent. Yet here we have a blatant referencing of Soviet visual culture, albeit infused with a contemporary and fashionable retro twist. As Banerjee puts it, the vectors – line drawings – are a modern, hip element, for a series taking a new, contemporary look at an ideology that may not be around very much longer.

Do these covers serve to embed bias, irrevocably placing the equation of Communism with Stalinist society in the mind of the bookshop browser? Do they narrow rather than broaden the target audience? Do they embody a fatalism; that ideology cannot be salvaged from history?

We can only ask whether the best way to promote such literature is to plug it into a past it is trying to shrug off. Would the cause not be better served by opening up a fresh arena of possibility through new and daring visual culture, employing the principles of montage in innovative and breathtaking ways?

The ‘What Was Communism?’ series is available from Seagull Books

Eye, the international review of graphic design, is a quarterly journal you can read like a magazine and collect like a book. It’s available from all good design bookshops and at the online Eye shop, where you can order subscriptions, single issues and classic collections of themed back issues.

DonutChocula: KAWS at Galería Javier López in Madrid

2010-02-18T20:53:00.000-05:00

16/02/10

KAWS at Galería Javier López in Madrid

18 February – 7 April 2010
Opening on 17 February at 7.30pm. The artist will be in attendance.

The Galería Javier López – Mário Sequeira is proud to present the eagerly awaited first solo exhibition in Spain by KAWS.

A multidisciplinary artist, his work extracts and combines material and images from everyday life, reinterpreting and recontextualizing them, to establish his own personal image-bank of contemporary culture. KAWS' work simultaneously moves between and breaks down definitions of the parameters of the design, commercial art, street art, and fine arts worlds.

The three monochromatic paintings in this exhibition mark the newest works on canvas by the artist, each using gloss line on a matte background. The two black works, 'Nightime Office' and 'Through the Door', reuse the artist's signature Kawsbob and Chum characters. Inserting them into claustrophobic compositions, these figures violently break through architectonic frameworks into the space of the viewer, pulling shattered material with them.

The largest work in the show, 'Dead Wrong', builds upon the rectilinear sections of the other works, yet combines both characters. Here, space becomes disjointed, conveying a stronger sense of collaged imagery. The fragmentation suggests a recombining and reconfiguration of separate paintings into an overall visual assault. A diminutive set of Kawsbob's hands seem to pull the fabric of the canvas itself to cover his eyes from something imminent. The graphic Chum looms ominously in the background, rendered flat yet threatening.

By augmenting imagery whose origins are innocuous, Kaws subverts popular culture and presents a vision of panic and anxiety. Incorporating his signature 'X'ed out eyes, the figures become premonitions of their own deaths, merging childlike imagery with abstract concept. High art strategies and popular icons become interchangeable. KAWS' paintings at once recognize the way that popular images inseminate our lives and suggest the collapse of visual culture.

Born in 1974 in Jersey City, New Jersey, Brooklyn-based artist KAWS graduated with a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York. He has had international solo exhibitions at several galleries including Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Miami, FL; Bape Gallery, Tokyo, Japan; Colette, Paris, France; Gering & López Gallery, New York, NY; and Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles, CA. He has an upcoming solo museum exhibition at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, CT with an accompanying catalog published by Rizzoli.

The exhibition is open from Tuesday to Friday from 11.00 to 14.00 and from 16.30 to 20.30, and Saturday from 11.00 to 14.00.

Galería Javier López
José Marañón, 4
E-28010 Madrid

Project to save world's public art

2010-02-18T20:37:00.000-05:00

IUPUI launches unique global project to save world's public art



		IMAGE: This is the Herron Arch I by James Wille Faust (2005). Click here for more information.

INDIANAPOLIS –- Students and faculty from Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) have developed and launched the nation's first organized effort to document public art information in Wikipedia.

Wikipedia Saves Public Art (WSPA), a growing collection of articles prepared for the online open access encyclopedia, makes monuments and outdoor sculpture – from the famous to the overlooked – accessible to all. It is a unique and major step toward sharing and preserving an often underappreciated segment of the world's cultural heritage.

'No other university, museum or municipality has created a public art collection within Wikipedia—this is a first, even though Wikipedia has been around for almost a decade and now has over 3 million articles. Our effort is also unusual because we have included global positioning system (GPS) coordinates in all of our articles, which allows linkages via location-based computer applications like Google Maps,' said Jennifer Geigel Mikulay, Ph.D., assistant professor and public scholar of visual culture at IUPUI, who has spearheaded the project.

Even before the pharaohs built the pyramids, public art has engaged and enriched its audience – the individuals who view it. In the 21st century the potential audience for public art – sculptures, monuments, and other works in public spaces, some tourist destinations and others long forgotten or barely noticed by passersby – can extend far beyond those viewed from a sidewalk. Through the Internet, the audience can expand to anyone with Web access, provided information about the piece is shared online.

That's where IUPUI students and faculty from the School of Liberal Arts and Herron School of Art and Design come in. They are researching, cataloguing, photographing and writing articles on public art pieces in Indianapolis with the hope that the movement will expand exponentially across the nation and around the world. Dozens of Indianapolis public sculptures, many from the IUPUI campus (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IUPUI_Public_Art_Collection), have been documented through WSPA. Already, representatives from Milwaukee have shown interest in following this model to represent their city's public art collection in Wikipedia. Mikulay and Richard McCoy of the Indianapolis Museum of Art, who co-conceived WSPA, report that they are hearing a buzz of excitement about the concept at international meetings they attend.

'As we write Wikipedia articles on public art works from Indianapolis, a metropolitan area which local cultural organizations rank second only to Washington, D.C. in its number of monuments and outdoor sculpture, we are creating a working model to show people how to preserve public art in the 21st century. Public art is one of the most accessible art forms, and Wikipedia is one of the most accessible forums for information, so they make a perfect match,' said Mikulay, whose own research focuses on public art's civic role.

'Wikipedia is open to covering all kinds of topics, including art, all the time, but this is the first coordinated effort to get public art information into Wikipiedia. This is truly making public art available to much wider publics,' she added.

Mikulay and McCoy came up with the name Wikipedia Saves Public Art as a way to demonstrate the project's linkage to the burgeoning open access computer movement, with its promise of enlisting large groups of people to contribute information about public art anywhere in the world, and to harken back to Save Outdoor Sculpture! (SOS!), a joint project of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Heritage Preservation.

The full value and potential of social media as an educational resource has not been tapped, according to Mikulay, in part because students are not taught how to link this new technology to research interests. She believes that if students and others can become more critical users of Wikipedia and other digital media, they will be in the position to utilize it for the preservation of cultural heritage.

As the IUPUI students and faculty generate and share information about the outdoor sculpture and monuments around them through WSPA, they are showing the way for others down the street, across the nation, or around the world to see and save the public art around them.

###

WSPA is located at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Wikipedia_Saves_Public_Art

Great Sphinx of Giza (2555-2532 BCE), Egypt

Watts Towers (1921-1954)
by Simon Rodia

Endless Column (1938)
by Constantin Brâncuşi

Angel of the North (1994)

20th Anniversary of Adobe Photoshop

2010-02-18T19:55:00.003-05:00

In this documentary, the founders of Adobe Photoshop - John Knoll, Thomas Knoll, Russell Brown, and Steve Guttman - tell the story of how an amazing coincidence of circumstances, that came together at just the right time 20 years ago, spawned a cultural paradigm shift unparalleled in our lifetime.

from Adobe TV: Photoshop 20th Anniversary

Happy Birthday Photoshop

Posted By PSN Editorial Staff

Adobe Photoshop Hits Twenty

Community Celebrates Software that Changed the Way We View the World

SAN JOSE, Calif., – Feb. 18, 2010 – Adobe(r) Photoshop(r), the software product that redefined creativity in the digital age, turns 20 on Feb. 19, 2010. Around the world, Photoshop fans are celebrating the impact their favorite software has had across photography, art, design, publishing and commerce. In the United States, the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP) will be hosting a special Photoshop 20th Anniversary celebration for over a thousand attendees in San Francisco at the Palace of the Fine Arts Theater today. The event will feature Adobe’s senior vice president of Creative Solutions, John Loiacono, as well as vice president of Photoshop Product Management, Kevin Connor, Photoshop co-creator Thomas Knoll and famed Adobe creative director and Photoshop evangelist, Russell Brown. To be a part of this celebration and view the live Webcast, visit: www.photoshopuser.com/photoshop20th.

The festivities continue overseas in Japan, Southeast Asia and throughout Europe. In honor of the 20th anniversary, Adobe Germany will host a special 20-hour online marathon, featuring over 15 local Photoshop “gurus” demonstrating their favorite tips and tricks live for Photoshop fans. In India and France, digital imaging contests will be held to showcase the work of Photoshop users. A special Adobe TV broadcast will also air on the anniversary date at http://tv.adobe.com/go/photoshop-20th-anniversary, reuniting the original “Photoshop team” for the first time in 18 years, to discuss their early work on the software and demonstrate Photoshop 1.0 on a rebuilt Macintosh computer.

The Photoshop community is also sharing their favorite stories online, with the product and its over 400,000 fan-strong Facebook page, the hub for a worldwide look at the product’s impact. A new “Celebrate” tab directs users to a 20th anniversary logo, which many have already personalized with Photoshop and used as a replacement for their profile image. Connect with the Photoshop team at www.facebook.com/Photoshop or http://twitter.com/photoshop, and add the tag #PS20 to tweets about the anniversary.

“For 20 years Photoshop has played many different roles – it has given creative people the power to deliver amazing images that impact every part of our visual culture and challenged the eye with its ability to transform photographs,” said Shantanu Narayen, president and chief executive officer at Adobe. “It’s no exaggeration to say that, thanks to millions of creative customers, Photoshop has changed the way the world looks at itself.”

The impact of Photoshop is everywhere – billboard signs, magazine covers, major motion pictures, even the logo on the coffee cup you drink out of every morning. All have likely been touched by the software. Over 90 percent of creative professionals have Photoshop on their desktops and today Photoshop is used by professional photographers, graphic designers and advertisers, as well as architects, engineers and even doctors. Whether it’s bringing visual effects to life in the blockbuster film Avatar, helping save lives in partnership with forensics departments and the Center for Missing and Exploited Children, or challenging the human eye to determine if an image is real or fake, Photoshop continues to find new uses and advocates.

How It All Began

In 1987, Thomas Knoll developed a pixel imaging program called Display. It was a simple program to showcase grayscale images on a black-and-white monitor. However, after collaborating with his brother John Knoll, the two began adding features that made it possible to process digital image files. The program eventually caught the attention of industry influencers, and in 1988, Adobe made the decision to license the software, naming it Photoshop, and shipping the first version in 1990.

“Twenty years ago, Adobe predicted that it would sell 500 copies of Photoshop per month,” said Thomas Knoll, co-creator of Photoshop at Adobe. “I guess you could say, we beat those projections! It’s amazing to think that millions of people use this software today. We knew we had a groundbreaking technology on our hands, but we never anticipated how much it would impact the images we see all around us. The ability to seamlessly place someone within an image was just the beginning of Photoshop’s magic.”

Over its 20-year history, Photoshop has evolved significantly from a simple original display program to a wildly popular application that has over 10 million users worldwide. With each release, Adobe has introduced technological innovations that defy the impossible. Layers, introduced in Photoshop 3.0, gave designers the ability to create complex compositions easier than ever before. The Healing Brush, another groundbreaking feature introduced in Photoshop 7.0, allowed users to magically retouch images by seamlessly removing blemishes and wrinkles, while preserving lighting and texture. Photoshop tools like crop, eraser, blur and dodge and burn have become part of the creative vernacular worldwide.

The Photoshop team thrives off its rich beta tester program, with active and vocal users who have submitted requests and helped shape the development of features throughout the years. Adobe has maintained a strong connection with its customer base through blogs, user research, customer support, forums and feedback from Adobe “evangelists” who travel the world to engage with Photoshop users.

Helpful Links

Photoshop Customer Quote Sheet: www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/201002/0211810PS20AnniversaryQuoteSheet.html

National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP) Photoshop 20th Anniversary Celebration: www.photoshopuser.com/photoshop20th

Adobe TV Photoshop 20th Anniversary Broadcast: http://tv.adobe.com/go/photoshop-20th-anniversary

Photoshop Facebook Page: www.facebook.com/Photoshop

Photoshop Twitter: http://twitter.com/photoshop

Photoshop Family Page: www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/family

Adobe Photoshop Family

Building upon Photoshop’s history of innovation and leadership, Adobe offers a line of Photoshop desktop and Web-hosted solutions for every level of user. Each product in the Photoshop family gives users across the spectrum of digital expertise the power to manage, edit, create and showcase images.

Photoshop CS4 and Photoshop CS4 Extended software are at the heart of the Photoshop family, providing unrivaled power and editing freedom. Photoshop Lightroom(r) addresses the workflow needs of serious amateur and professional photographers, helping them find, manage, enhance and showcase images in powerful ways. Photoshop Elements software provides accessible tools and sharing options for photo enthusiasts. Snap-shooters can quickly and easily share and edit photos with simple gestures on their iPhone or Android devices. Photoshop.com completes the Photoshop line providing an online photo sharing, editing and hosting resource for all.

About Adobe Systems Incorporated

Adobe revolutionizes how the world engages with ideas and information – anytime, anywhere and through any medium. For more information, visit www.adobe.com.

Adobe Photoshop Hits Twenty
Community Celebrates Software that Changed the Way We View the World

SAN JOSE, Calif., – Feb. 18, 2010 – Adobe® Photoshop®, the software product that redefined creativity in the digital age, turns 20 on Feb. 19, 2010.

Around the world, Photoshop fans are celebrating the impact their favorite software has had across photography, art, design, publishing and commerce.

In the United States, the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP) will be hosting a special Photoshop 20th Anniversary celebration for over a thousand attendees in San Francisco at the Palace of the Fine Arts Theater today.

The event will feature Adobe’s senior vice president of Creative Solutions, John Loiacono, as well as vice president of Photoshop Product Management, Kevin Connor, Photoshop co-creator Thomas Knoll and famed Adobe creative director and Photoshop evangelist, Russell Brown. To be a part of this celebration and view the live Webcast, visit:

www.photoshopuser.com/photoshop20th.

The festivities continue overseas in Japan, Southeast Asia and throughout Europe.
In honor of the 20th anniversary, Adobe Germany will host a special 20-hour online marathon, featuring over 15 local Photoshop “gurus” demonstrating their favorite tips and tricks live for Photoshop fans. In India and France, digital imaging contests will be held to showcase the work of Photoshop users.

A special Adobe TV broadcast will also air on the anniversary date at http://tv.adobe.com/go/photoshop-20th-anniversary, reuniting the original “Photoshop team” for the first time in 18 years, to discuss their early work on the software and demonstrate Photoshop 1.0 on a rebuilt Macintosh computer.

The Photoshop community is also sharing their favorite stories online, with the product and its over 400,000 fan-strong Facebook page, the hub for a worldwide look at the product’s impact. A new “Celebrate” tab directs users to a 20th anniversary logo, which many have already personalized with Photoshop and used as a replacement for their profile image. Connect with the Photoshop team at www.facebook.com/Photoshop or http://twitter.com/photoshop, and add the tag #PS20 to tweets about the anniversary.

“For 20 years Photoshop has played many different roles – it has given creative people the power to deliver amazing images that impact every part of our visual culture and challenged the eye with its ability to transform photographs,” said Shantanu Narayen, president and chief executive officer at Adobe. “It’s no exaggeration to say that, thanks to millions of creative customers, Photoshop has changed the way the world looks at itself.”

The impact of Photoshop is everywhere – billboard signs, magazine covers, major motion pictures, even the logo on the coffee cup you drink out of every morning. All have likely been touched by the software. Over 90 percent of creative professionals have Photoshop on their desktops and today Photoshop is used by professional photographers, graphic designers and advertisers, as well as architects, engineers and even doctors. Whether it’s bringing visual effects to life in the blockbuster film Avatar, helping save lives in partnership with forensics departments and the Center for Missing and Exploited Children, or challenging the human eye to determine if an image is real or fake, Photoshop continues to find new uses and advocates.

How It All Began
In 1987, Thomas Knoll developed a pixel imaging program called Display. It was a simple program to showcase grayscale images on a black-and-white monitor. However, after collaborating with his brother John Knoll, the two began adding features that made it possible to process digital image files. The program eventually caught the attention of industry influencers, and in 1988, Adobe made the decision to license the software, naming it Photoshop, and shipping the first version in 1990.
“Twenty years ago, Adobe predicted that it would sell 500 copies of Photoshop per month,” said Thomas Knoll, co-creator of Photoshop at Adobe. “I guess you could say, we beat those projections! It’s amazing to think that millions of people use this software today. We knew we had a groundbreaking technology on our hands, but we never anticipated how much it would impact the images we see all around us. The ability to seamlessly place someone within an image was just the beginning of Photoshop’s magic.”

Over its 20-year history, Photoshop has evolved significantly from a simple original display program to a wildly popular application that has over 10 million users worldwide. With each release, Adobe has introduced technological innovations that defy the impossible. Layers, introduced in Photoshop 3.0, gave designers the ability to create complex compositions easier than ever before. The Healing Brush, another groundbreaking feature introduced in Photoshop 7.0, allowed users to magically retouch images by seamlessly removing blemishes and wrinkles, while preserving lighting and texture. Photoshop tools like crop, eraser, blur and dodge and burn have become part of the creative vernacular worldwide.

The Photoshop team thrives off its rich beta tester program, with active and vocal users who have submitted requests and helped shape the development of features throughout the years. Adobe has maintained a strong connection with its customer base through blogs, user research, customer support, forums and feedback from Adobe “evangelists” who travel the world to engage with Photoshop users.

Helpful Links

National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP) Photoshop 20th Anniversary Celebration: www.photoshopuser.com/photoshop20th
Adobe TV Photoshop 20th Anniversary Broadcast: http://tv.adobe.com/go/photoshop-20th-anniversary
Photoshop Facebook Page: www.facebook.com/Photoshop
Photoshop Facebook Page: www.facebook.com/Photoshop
Photoshop Twitter: http://twitter.com/photoshop
Photoshop Family Page: www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/family

Adobe Photoshop Family
Building upon Photoshop’s history of innovation and leadership, Adobe offers a line of Photoshop desktop and Web-hosted solutions for every level of user. Each product in the Photoshop family gives users across the spectrum of digital expertise the power to manage, edit, create and showcase images.

Photoshop CS4 and Photoshop CS4 Extended software are at the heart of the Photoshop family, providing unrivaled power and editing freedom. Photoshop Lightroom(r) addresses the workflow needs of serious amateur and professional photographers, helping them find, manage, enhance and showcase images in powerful ways. Photoshop Elements software provides accessible tools and sharing options for photo enthusiasts. Snap-shooters can quickly and easily share and edit photos with simple gestures on their iPhone or Android devices. Photoshop.com completes the Photoshop line providing an online photo sharing, editing and hosting resource for all.

About Adobe Systems Incorporated
Adobe revolutionizes how the world engages with ideas and information – anytime, anywhere and through any medium. For more information, visit www.adobe.com.

Valentine Day Art Poll Results

2010-02-17T09:37:00.001-05:00

Valentine's Day Poll

Art Fund Asks

The Art Fund's Valentine's Poll has now closed. Thank you for all of your votes.

Listen to Marina Warner talking about romance in art, and her choice of Poussin’s Rinaldo and Armida, on Classic FM’s Arts Daily podcast.

Paul Gauguin, Nevermore, 1897	29%
Samuel John Peploe, Roses, 1920	26%
Jan van Eyck, The Arnolfini Portrait, 1434	19%
Nicolas Poussin, Rinaldo and Armida, 1629	14%
Titian, Bacchus and Ariadne, 1520-3	12%

Matthew Collings

Artist and art writer

Paul Gauguin, Nevermore, 1897

The Courtauld Gallery, London, © The Samuel Courtauld Trust

"Gauguin's Nevermore – that's a painting in which a sense of light is created by a glowing emanation of colour. A photo can never do it justice – the tones are actually rather dark, and the texture is mostly rough and dry. For me the word 'romantic' in a painting context m ... More

'Gauguin's Nevermore – that's a painting in which a sense of light is created by a glowing emanation of colour. A photo can never do it justice – the tones are actually rather dark, and the texture is mostly rough and dry. For me the word 'romantic' in a painting context means feeling. It has nothing to do with subject matter. The romantic ideal is summed up for me by this painting because of its sense of restless change within an overall order, shifting registers, and many possible points of focus backed up by a feeling of confident constant unity." ... Less

Kirsty Young

Presenter and Art Fund Prize 2010 chair of the judges

Samuel John Peploe, Roses, 1920

Kelvingrove Art Gallery, Glasgow, © Culture & Sport Glasgow (Museums)

'No lovers entwined, no eyes misty with thoughts of longing and lust and yet this Peploe that hangs in the wonderful Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow is heavy with romantic intent. Who are the exquisite roses from? The perfectly painted well-thumbed book that lies beneath the wilting flower could be a volume of romantic poetry or a diary of a broken heart. The composition, the colour, the cast of light – to me this is a painting heavy with beauty and love.' ... Less

Grayson Perry

Artist

Jan van Eyck, The Arnolfini Portrait, 1434

© National Gallery, London

“This cool, crystalline painting may not seem an obvious candidate for a favourite romantic image. The figures of Italian Merchant Giovanni Arnolfini and his betrothed Jeanne de Chenany are formal, even stiff. The painting style is almost photographically real rather than passionately expressive. The orange on the windowsill, the discarded shoes, the brush hanging by the bed are all precisely rendered in what was, in the 15th century, a revolutionary matter-of-fact way. This painting is like an official document of a business agreement rather than a celebration of fleeting romantic love. Yet there is a tenderness in the way he holds her hand, and they seem to be looking at each other askance. Maybe they would giggle and put off Jan van Eyck if they caught each other’s eye.

“My personal romantic association with this painting is that it was very much in my thoughts when I got married. My wife Philippa wore a voluminous green dress and was five months pregnant. We posed for a wedding snap which aped the painting. I found out later that Mrs Arnolfini is not actually pregnant in the portrait but merely holding up the front of her dress in the fashionable manner. I hope their marriage was as long and happy as mine.” ... Less

Marina Warner

Writer, critic and professor of literature at University of Essex

Nicolas Poussin, Rinaldo and Armida, 1629

Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, © Trustees of Dulwich Picture Gallery

'Armida is a pagan enchantress, and she is going to stab the sleeping Rinaldo to death. But she is so touched by the sight of him that the putto can restrain her without exerting much pressure. Within the stillness of a painted scene, Poussin manages to give a vivid feeling of strong passions in contradiction. Armida’s pearly skin tones, and the unfurling incandescence of the drapery, make this picture irresistibly romantic to me -and besides, there are his gorgeous glowing silk shorts. It's a picture that could also be called The Triumph of Love.' ... Less

Andrew Graham-Dixon

Writer and broadcaster, whose new biography of Caravaggio comes out in the summer of 2010

Titian, Bacchus and Ariadne, 1520-3

© National Gallery, London

'Titian freezes the action at the moment of the god’s athletic leap, which perhaps retains a certain trace of contrivance, bringing to mind a model in the painter’s studio straining to hold what must have been a somewhat uncomfortable pose. This may have been recognised by the artis ... More

Gordon Matta-Clark: Undoing Space

2010-02-13T08:13:00.000-05:00

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Museu de Arte Moderna de Sao Paulo Presents Exhibition of Matta-Clark

Gordon Matta-Clark, 'Splitting', 1974.

SAO PAULO.- After its opening at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes do Chile, it is the turn of the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo to receive the Gordon Matta-Clark: Undoing Space exhibit, the first comprehensive retrospective of the provocative, irreverent artist to travel through South America. The opening at MAM is scheduled for February 11 (Thursday) from 8 pm, closing on April 4th. The exhibit is organized by the Museo de Arte de Lima in collaboration with the Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark and supported by the David Zwirner Gallery, New York, featuring the work and life of the son of surrealist artist Roberto Matta, who is still almost unkown by the continent’s public.

Splitting (1974)

Just before the opening, at 6 pm, MAM presents a colloquium with the curators, Tatiana Cuevas and Gabriela Rangel; the artist’s widow, Jane Crawford; the critic and curator Lisette Lagnado; and Carmen Beuchat, dancer and close friend to the Matta-Clark couple. They will discuss the collective aspect of Gordon Matta-Clark’s work, from which it would be possible to think of an urban ethic which considers empty or derelict spaces as a path in the search for freadom.

Curated by Tatiana Cuevas – Curator of Contemporary Art at the Museo de Arte de Lima – and Gabriela Rangel – Director of Visual Arts and Curator at the Americas Society in New York –, the exhibition aims to introduce the work of Gordon Matta-Clark as a radical figure who brings together critical discourses of the European Neo-Avant-Garde and experimental art practices that emerged in New York between the 1970s and 1980s.

The exhibition proposes a reconstruction of the various layers encompassed in Matta-Clark’s approach to art-making as well as in his interest in the history of architecture and derelict urban spaces. Together with the photographic and filmic documentation of his iconic building “cuts” such as 'A W-Hole House' (1973), 'Splitting' (1974), 'Bingo' (1974), 'Day’s End' (1975), 'Conical Intersect' (1978), 'Office Baroque' (1977), and 'Circus' (1978), 'Gordon Matta Clark: Undoing Space' reconsiders some of the artist’s social or political grounded actions such as 'Garbage Wall' (1970), the 'Counter-Biennial' (1971), 'Fresh Air' (1972), 'Fake Estates' (1973), the development of the concept and language of 'Anarchitecture' (1972-1974), or his late recorded performance at the Berlin Wall – 'The Wall' (1976) –, all in a broader context informed by the Cold War and the transformation of cities into real estate commodities.

This is the first time a group of photographs from the artist’s in-site 1971 intervention at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Chile will be shown. The exhibition will also present a selection of notebook sketches, drawings, and written statements, which go from proposals to potential sponsors to produce his works to more philosophical meditations on space and time.

'Gordon Matta Clark: Undoing Space' examines the artist’s critical response to the failure of modern architecture as a humanist endeavor and the collapse of affordable housing policies vis-à-vis his social concerns for creating sheltering (from self sustainable dwellings such as garbage walls, basket houses, balloon houses, among others) which still could find an echo within the urban changes and social demands of many South American countries.

The catalogue, edited by the Museo de Arte de Lima and published in bilingual editions Spanish/English and Portuguese/English, includes texts by Jane Crawford, Tatiana Cuevas, Lisette Lagnado, Justo Pastor Mellado, Gwendolyn Owens and Gabriela Rangel, as well as a selection of the artist’s writings and interviews.

Carlos Amorales' Urban Gothic Dream World

2010-02-13T08:07:00.000-05:00

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Carlos Amorales' Urban Gothic Dream World Comes to Cornerhouse

Carlos Amorales, 'Discarded Spider', 2008.

MANCHESTER.- Cornerhouse will present a solo show by one of Mexico’s leading contemporary artists, Carlos Amorales, featuring two of his most recent works Psicofonias, and Discarded Spider, both from 2008.

Psicofonias, 2008

Flooding Gallery 1 will be the soundtrack from Psicofonias, 2008, a large-scale two-screen video installation Carlos Amorales created along with musician Julián Lede and digital programmer André Pahl. This realtime-animation or ‘virtual pianola,’ translates Amorales’ digitized graphic drawings, into musical notes, which trigger two synthesizers as they scroll down the screen.

Alongside this, expect video installation Discarded Spider, 2008, which depicts Amorales’ silhouette as he manipulates giant sculptural spider webs. A metaphor of entrapment, these sculptural spider webs create intricate patterns across the screen.

Dissolving boundaries between his media, Amorales’ works are rendered mysterious and menacing in surreal visions influenced by gothic literature, mythological motifs, and Mexican popular culture.

This exhibition coincides with this year’s ¡Viva! Spanish and Latin American Film Festival (6 – 27 March).

Nicolas Baier: Pareidolias

2010-02-13T08:02:00.000-05:00

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Montreal Artist Nicolas Baier Attempts to Capture the Invisible

Nicolas Baier, 'Paesine 1', 2008. Courtesy: Galerie René Blouin, Montreal, and Jessica Bradley Art + Projects, Toronto. ©Nicolas Baier.

OTTAWA.- Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon. The term is used to describe how the human mind sees familiar objects in abstract forms, such as animals in clouds or the man in the moon. It is also an intriguing title for the recent work of Montreal artist Nicolas Baier, whose subjects include antique mirrors, the surface of polished stone, and water-stained paper. Presented by Pratt & Whitney Canada, "Nicolas Baier: Pareidolias" is on view in the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography (CMCP) galleries of the National Gallery of Canada (NGC) from February 12 to April 25, 2010.

Nicolas Baier: Pareidolias was organized through the joint efforts of the artist and Bernard Lamarche, curator of contemporary art at the Musée régional de Rimouski, as well as the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, and circulated by the CMCP. Following the Ottawa venue, the exhibition will travel to the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec in Quebec City where it will be on view from June 17 to August 23, 2010.

“Since the early 1990s, Nicolas Baier has been challenging photographic convention with his elaborately constructed digital imagery. His work is poetic, thought-provoking and playful,” said Martha Hanna, Director, CMCP. “This exhibition invites us into a world of illusions, where uncertainty is the only certainty, and where seductive surfaces and abstract imagery engage us in a search for possible meaning.”

"Pratt & Whitney Canada is proud to present Nicolas Baier’s inspiring digital imagery," said John Wyzykowski, Vice President, Mississauga & Turbofan Programs, Pratt & Whitney Canada. "His original work is innovative and we continue to support programs such as this one that enhance the cultural life of our communities all while expressing P&WC's own values of creativity, sustainability and advanced technologies."

Vanitas (2007-08) – The centrepiece of the exhibition

To Nicolas Baier, art almost always acts as a mirror. “Objects, people, the smallest surface on which our eyes come to rest—everything, no doubt, is but a reflection of who we are,” explains the artist in the exhibition catalogue. “We see only what we know.”

Mirrors are the source matter for Baier’s monumental work, Vanitas (2007-2008) from the collection of the CMCP. Astonishing in scale and complexity, this mural-like piece is comprised of 40 images, each made by directly scanning the surfaces of antique mirrors, which thereby lose their ability to reflect. Our likeness cannot be seen in the scratches, cracks, holes and other markings of these damaged surfaces, but it is practically impossible not to continue to seek for whatever may constitute an image, be it a hand here, a bear’s head there, the surface of a pond or distant galaxies. In Vanitas, what is visible refutes permanence. There is always more to see; the gaze ceaselessly invests these marks with a meaning they do not intrinsically have.

More exhibition highlights

Other works in the exhibition elaborate on the theme of pareidolias. The artist’s Paesines (2008) prints suggest that the infinitely small may appear to trace shapes and forces of the infinitely grand. To produce these works, Baier scanned the polished surface of small Tuscan stones, called pietra paesina in Italy or “landscape stone.” He then enlarged the images to suggest colourful painted landscapes.

Baier saw an interesting network of lines that were left as a result of humid temperatures on the surface of paper used to cover a storefront window. By scanning and enlarging this paper to create The Formation of Clouds (2008) and The Path of Water (2008), Baier provides a record of nature creating its own image and plays with the idea of condensation as the creator of clouds and eventual rain.

Banks Violette at Gladstone Gallery

2010-02-13T07:59:00.000-05:00

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New Installation by Banks Violette at Gladstone Gallery

Installation by Banks Violette. Photo: Courtesy Gladstone Gallery.

NEW YORK, NY.- Gladstone Gallery, in collaboration with Team Gallery, presents a new installation by Banks Violette. Violette’s work ranges from haunting yet exquisitely rendered graphite drawings to sculptural installations composed of cast salt, light, and sound. Throughout his practice, he plumbs the simultaneous degradation and accretion of meaning through the process of mythology, often embodied in forms strongly associated with sub-cultural communities, personal memorials, or historical obscurities. The black and white spectacle of his stark compositions belies the uneasy and fraught allusions of appropriated images and forms reconstructed as vessels of oblivion.

For this new installation, Violette continues to mine a rich art historical terrain in which the materials and forms associated with Minimal and Conceptual Art become reactivated as theatrical platforms of performative decay. He pairs a large chandelier composed of multiple fluorescent tubes with a black wall that seems to buckle and melt against the reflection of the light. Both aspects of the installation recall the monochromatic tone and the use of replaceable industrial materials common to Minimalist and Conceptual sculptors such as Donald Judd and Dan Flavin; however, Violette’s works seem self-consciously constructed and theatrical. Wires fall in a cascade alongside the chandelier while the apparatus of steel tubes and sandbags supporting the wall remain in plain sight. By exposing these more banal technical necessities, Violette heightens the artificial spectacle of his installation, as if willing these two canonical art historical movements into an internecine danse macabre. He unmasks form and content as sites vulnerable to intellectual vandalism and moribund mythologizing.

Banks Violette was born in 1973 and lives and works in New York. His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including those at Museum Dhont-Dhaenens in Deurle, Belgium; Kunsthalle Wein; the Modern of Art Museum of Forth Worth, Texas; Kunsthalle Bergen, Norway; and the Whitney Museum of American Art. He has also participated in group exhibitions at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Migros Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, Zurich; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the Royal Academy, London; P.S. 1, New York; the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam; among others.

Lee Lozano at Moderna Museet

2010-02-13T07:55:00.000-05:00

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First Retrospective Exhibition in the Nordic Region of Lee Lozano at Moderna Museet

Lee Lozano, No title, ca. 1963. ©The Estate of Lee Lozano. Courtsey: Hauser & Wirth.

STOCKHOLM.- This is the first retrospective exhibition in the Nordic region of Lee Lozano (1930-1999), the American artist whose original and challenging work is still largely unknown, especially in Europe. Lozano was part of the 1960s art scene in New York, an artists’ artist in the midst of the avant-garde of the time. On the border between minimalism and conceptual art, she created a powerful and individualistic body of work in a completely male-dominated environment.

No title, 1961

Some sixty paintings and hundreds of works on paper and text-based works from the period 1960-1972 are featured in this exhibition, which is produced by Moderna Museet: the early “surrealist” paintings, sexually evocative and charged with both humour and aggressiveness, on to her gigantic so-called tool paintings, some of which are up to six metres long, and The Wave Series. Some of Lozano’s conceptual “language pieces”, representing her development towards immateriality, are also included in this presentation in the main hall of Moderna Museet.

Lee Lozano was an idiosyncratic artist, largely going against the grain of her contemporary scene. In 1971, for instance, she caused controversy with her boycott of women – a project in the form of an “examination”. The Drop Out Piece (1972) was Lozano’s defection from the New York art scene. In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in her unique artistic oeuvre, in acknowledgement of its width and depth. After her death, Lee Lozano’s work has been shown in several solo and group exhibitions in the USA and Europe, including at the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York and documenta 12 in Kassel.

George Condo at Sprueth Magers

2010-02-12T22:03:00.000-05:00

from | PEEF: "

Artist: George Condo

Venue: Sprueth Magers, Berlin

Exhibition Title: Family Portraits

Date: January 30 – April 1, 2010

Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Sprueth Magers, Berlin

Press Release:

Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are delighted to present an exhibition with new works by George Condo. At the opening of the gallery in Berlin in October 2008, large-format drawings by the artist were displayed in the cabinet on the upper floor. Now with the exhibition ‘Family Portraits’, Condo is continuing the discourse on the figurative element in painting, which is one of the fundamental aspects in the artist’s oeuvre.

George Condo, who already in 1984 had his first solo exhibition at the Monika Sprüth Galerie in Cologne, resided at the beginning of the 1980s for an extended period in Cologne and moved within the context of the ‘Jungen Wilden’. The style of this group of young painters, to which such artists as Walter Dahn and Jiri Dokupil belonged, was typified by an emphatically painterly and expressive character which deliberately distanced itself from the artistic movements in vogue at that time, such as Minimalism and Concept Art. Whereas artists who practiced painting wished to free themselves from the notion of art which was esteemed at that time, unconventional art forms such as graffito and comic simultaneously entered into the formal repertoire. The repudiation of a historical or genre-specific hierarchy continues to characterize the oeuvre of George Condo right up to today: the pictorial language of painting from Velázquez to Picasso enters into a symbiosis with the aesthetic of the modern comic book and of everyday visual culture. There are not, however, any direct pictorial quotations or discovered and appropriated motifs to be found here; instead, Condo connects formal references and subjects into a new pictorial sphere, so that an art-historical aspect shines through the presence of a contemporary visual world.

The portrait as a classical pictorial genre functions in Condo’s works as a commentary upon the history of painting and simultaneously as a mirror of our own era. Through the utilization of light and shadow, which recalls classical chiaroscuro, Condo draws forth from the dark, almost black background the countenance of the grotesque-beautiful ‘Smiling Girl’ (2009) or the lugubrious shape in the work ‘Silent Thoughts’ (2009). The figures, which are to some extent composed of geometric forms, look like hideous creatures with their gaping mouths and bulging eyes, and they summon up associations with ventriloquists’ puppets. At the same time the paintings, executed in the virtuoso manner of the old masters, take on a melancholic and abstracted appearance.

The large-format works of the exhibition such as ‘The Fallen Butler’ (2009) or ‘Central Park’ (2009), combine figures, fragments of faces and abstract forms into an intricate pattern juxtaposed on the pictorial surface. The temporal aspect indicated by the titles becomes an element of the paintings. The narrative element, however, does not serve to describe a specific occurrence, but instead complements the depiction of complex factors and constellations. Inasmuch as Condo coaxes an irritated smile from the viewer with his humorous and grotesque mode of representation, he places at our disposal the manner in which we perceive experienced reality.

Whereas the current era is characterized by an intensive examination of the past, i.e. of history and its reception, it is influenced at the same time by an environment which is constantly increasing in speed and complexity. In his oeuvre, George Condo expresses an awareness of the history of images and the phenomena of our times. His paintings, along with his sculptures and drawings, evince a characteristic which maintains a delicate equilibrium between the sublimity of the work of art on the one hand, and the aspects of comicality, grotesqueness and distortion on the other.

Link: George Condo at Sprueth Magers

John Baldessari Retrospective

2010-02-12T21:59:00.000-05:00

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Largest John Baldessari Retrospective Exhibition Ever Mounted in Spain

A visitor observes some of the works of art made by John Baldessari on view at MACBA. EFE/Toni Garriga

BARCELONA.- Thirteen minutes and one same hand that writes a single phrase, “I will not make any more boring art”, over and over again on a blank sheet of paper, like the most banal of school punishments. The work is in fact entitled I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art (1971) and its author is John Baldessari (National City, California, 1931). “I love the idea that, in a world in which everything has a use, it’s possible to make something gratuitous; and I love to leave people a little unsettled.” Under the title John Baldessari: Pure Beauty, taken from one of his first works exploring language, the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) presents the largest retrospective exhibition ever mounted in Spain dedicated to one of the most innovative and venerated artists on the international scene. The display features more than 130 works created between 1962 and 2009 which, following shows first in London (Tate Modern) and now in Barcelona (MACBA), will travel to Los Angeles (Los Angeles County Museum) and New York (Metropolitan Museum of Art). “It’s a bit scary to have so much acceptance. You tend to wonder what you’re doing wrong” says the artist, who received the Golden Lion Lifetime Achievement at the last Venice Biennale. Curated by Leslie Jones, Jessica Morgan and Bartomeu Marí, the exhibition brings together many of his most relevant works, such as God Nose (1965), whose floating nose was a prelude to his recent sculptures of noses and ears emphasised to the point of absurdity; Cremation Project (1970), which marked Baldessari’s burning of all the canvasses he had produced between May 1953 and March 1966, accompanied by its corresponding urn, commemorative plaque and death notice published in the San Diego Union newspaper; Commissioned Paintings (1969), in which he ridicules Al Held’s declaration that “all conceptual art is just pointing at things” by making a hand that points at something ordinary in the painting appear in each of his works; and Baldessari Sings LeWitt (1972), featuring the artist singing every one of Sol LeWitt’s thirty-five conceptual statements to the music of different popular tunes, such as Singing in the Rain and the American national anthem.

Born in National City, California, in 1931, John Baldessari is undoubtedly one of the most influential artists of our time. He has challenged the conventions of artistic practices by employing language and imagery in unexpected ways.

The exhibition begins with Baldessari’s early works made during the 1960s, when he was working as a painter, primarily using oil on canvas. These paintings represent some of those that survived the artist’s infamous Cremation Project. On 24 July 1970, Baldessari incinerated all the work made prior to 1966 that still remained in his possession, leaving behind the ashes in a book-shaped urn as a testimony to the event. This drastic act was a result of the artist’s doubts concerning the dominant art form of the time and symbolised his artistic rebirth. The composition and content of these early paintings were never traditional, already embodying Baldessari’s sense of humour and wit. Fascinated by the idea that art could be taught, Art Lesson (1964) and Art Lesson #3 (1967) mock the preaching of art instruction manuals. God Nose (1965), a Pop-style painting of the sky with a cloud and floating nose, plays with the title of the work and its imagery. This fascination with language is a theme that continues throughout the artist’s work until the present.

Working in the cultural isolation of National City and not in Los Angeles, California’s art nucleus, allowed Baldessari a certain freedom to experiment and do what he wanted without being scrutinised by an audience. In 1966 he began taking photos in a working class suburb of his hometown, National City. The pictures were intentionally non-spectacular and mundane, often taken from the car without looking through the viewfinder. As an antithesis to Pop art, Baldessari adopted an anti-heroic attitude by documenting ingenious actions instead of monumentalising his subjects. The photos were enlarged and transferred onto canvas, and then commercial sign painters painted equally prosaic texts identifying each site. These photo and text pieces created new meanings and tensions between images and words and marked a pivotal turning point in Baldessari’s artistic trajectory.

Baldessari later went one step further in his inquiry of prevailing art-world aesthetics by dropping imagery all together from his canvases, as well as removing himself entirely from the art-producing context. Baldessari hired assistants to prepare the canvases and sign painters to paint the lettering on them. The texts were appropriated from various sources ranging from clothing labels to theories on art history, which the artist sometimes manipulated. Clement Greenberg (1966–68) displays text from the critic claiming that art is about aesthetic impact, not ideas; while Everything is Purged… (1966–68) insinuates the contrary. A Painting that is its Own Documentation (1966–68) is a growing work that chronicles the exhibition details of each venue, adding new panels as and when necessary.

This series of text paintings marked an important exploration of the way language is inextricably bound to our forms of understanding of art. ‘I sought to use language not as a visual element but something to read. That is, a notebook entry about painting could replace the painting... I was attempting to make something that didn’t emanate art signals. The only art signal I wanted was the canvas... [it was] important that I was the strategist. Someone else built and primed the canvases and took them to the sign painter, the texts are quotations from art books, and the sign painter was instructed not to attempt to make attractive, artful lettering but to letter the information in the most simple way.’

The concept of authorship was further addressed in the Commissioned Paintings (1969) series in which Baldessari hired amateur artists to produce paintings of photographs with which he provided them. The photographs are all pictures of a hand pointing at something ordinary. The inspiration for the series came from a criticism that said that Conceptual art was nothing more than pointing.

Teaching has always been a significant and integral part of Baldessari’s life. In 1970 he was offered a position at the renowned California Institute of the Arts (Cal Arts) where he taught alongside influential contemporaries such as John Cage and Nam June Paik. Being exposed to their work and their respective mediums, music and video, made a significant impression on Baldessari. Music brought about the notion of temporality, which is reflected in his work through the use of multiple photos in a time sequence manner. Artist Hitting Various Objects with Golf Club (1972–73) chronicles the artist doing just that in 20 frames. Similarly, in other works the artist photographed his attempts to exhale cigar smoke in imitation of a small cloud or waving at boats passing by.

With the recent introduction of the Sony Portapak and its availability at Cal Arts, Baldessari’s naturally experimented with the new medium. Initially made for his students, such videos as I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art (1971), where the artist writes this sentence repeatedly in a notebook as if it were a punishment, and I Am Making Art (1971), in which Baldessari moves different parts of his body slightly while reciting this sentence, have become some of the artist’s most iconic video pieces.

The artist’s foray into other media also included artist books such as Brutus Killed Caesar (1976), which consists of the images of two men, one on the left and one on the right, on every page. The image between them, the equivalent of the word ‘killed’ or the murder weapon, changes on every page. Starting with a knife and then a gun, the subsequent weapons are presented in an ascending degree of improbability.

Having moved to Los Angeles, the proximity of Hollywood also found its way into Baldessari’s work. He adopted the work processes of the film-making industry as themes in works such as Story with 24 Versions (1974) and Scenario: Story Board (1972–73) where plots are sketched out scene by scene.

Baldessari also appropriated imagery from film stills, which he found in local shops and meticulously categorised by content for inspiration and use in his works. Simultaneously, the pieces he created began to take on a larger scale, using the photographs as building blocks to suggest narratives. In Kiss/Panic (1984) there is a provocative juxtaposition of a couple kissing, with a seemingly chaotic crowd scene below, surrounded by photos of pointing guns.

By the mid-1980s coloured dots began appearing on the faces of the characters in the found photographs. Baldessari discovered that obliterating the face gave even more anonymity to the subjects and therefore forced the viewer to focus on other aspects of the image to make sense of the scene. Although text is absent from the works themselves, language continued to play an important role in the form of suggestive titles, which for Baldessari are as significant as the piece itself.

Bloody Sundae consists of two distinct scenes with the subjects composed in the form of an ice-cream dessert. On top, two men attack a third beside a stack of paintings, while beneath them a couple lounge decadently on a bed. All five faces are covered with coloured circles. The violence of the upper image coupled with the suggestive title, hints at a pending raid on the couple’s room.

In the Goya Series (1997) Baldessari returned to the aesthetics of the National City series with simple parings of photos of ordinary objects and text. The curt sarcasm of the titles is inspired by a series of etchings by Francisco de Goya.

Text also reassumes its role as the co-protagonist in the Prima Facie series. Portraits are juxtaposed with a range of adjectives that describe possible emotions or characteristics associated with the person’s facial expression – the idea being that you don’t know what anybody is thinking just from the expression on their face.

In later works the signature coloured dots usurp the rest of the person, flattening the image and creating an abstraction of the human form. The Duress Series: Person Climbing Exterior Wall of Tall Building/Person on Ledge of Tall Building/Person on Girders of Unfinished Tall Building (2003) has three such figures in compromising situations; however the filled-in silhouettes somehow attribute humour to what would be a dangerous scene.

Baldessari revisits his ongoing interests in the parts of the body that identify visual sensitivity in the series Noses and Ears and Arms and Legs, in which these parts are isolated while other details of the body and environment are coloured in or omitted, leaving viewers the bare minimum to interpret the work.

His most recent series Furrowed Eyebrows and Raised Foreheads, Baldessari continues his exploration of human expression through fragmentations. The works combine film stills of faces and bodies that are covered over by layers of paint or collage, or altered by the superimposition of paint over the foreheads and eyebrows.

The sculpture from the new work Brain/Cloud (Two Views): with Palm Tree and Seascapes (2009) is reminiscent of the clouds in his first paintings: Falling Cloud (1965) and God Nose (1965).

Baldessari’s long-term exploration of language and image coupled with his inquisitive approach to art making has expanded the parameters of what we consider art. His dedication as an educator has had – and still continues to have – a profound impact on generations of artists such as Rita McBride, Meg Cranston, Jack Goldstein, Allan McCollum, Matt Mullican, Richard Prince and Christopher Williams, among others.

Winners gallery 2010 - World Press Photo

2010-02-12T21:52:00.001-05:00

Winners gallery 2010 - World Press Photo: "

World Press Photo of the Year: 2009

Pietro Masturzo, Italy.

Women in Tehran shout from a rooftop in protest against the regime on 24 June in Tehran. The Iranian presidential elections were held on 12 June and the results, proclaiming victory by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad over opposition candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi, were strongly contested. In the weeks following the election, violent protests took place in the streets. At night, when the streets were empty, people went on to the rooftops of their homes to continue shouting their dissent. Their cries of 'death to the dictator' and 'Allah u Akbar (Allah is great)' echoed through Tehran.

Winners gallery 2010
World Press Photo of the Year
2009
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Kiki Smith: Sojourn Installation

2010-02-12T08:41:00.002-05:00

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Site-Specific Installation by Artist Kiki Smith at the Brooklyn Museum

Kiki Smith, 'Sojourn Installation Image: Gallery 7'. All artwork: ©Kiki Smith, Courtesy: PaceWildenstein, New York. Photo: Courtesy the Brooklyn Museum.

BROOKLYN, NY.- 'Kiki Smith: Sojourn', a major site-specific installation that explores the ideas of creative inspiration and the cycle of life in relation to women artists, will be on view February 5 through September 12, 2010, in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. The exhibition will draw from a variety of work by Kiki Smith in a range of media including cast objects, unique sculpture, and works on paper. The artist will also incorporate her work into two of the Brooklyn Museum's eighteenth-century period rooms in the nearby Decorative Arts galleries.

Major Henry Trippe House Chamber Room

Inspired, in part, by an important eighteenth-century New England needlework, Prudence Punderson's 'The First, Second and Last Scenes of Mortality' (Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford), Smith focuses on a variety of universal experiences, from the milestones of birth and death to the quotidian, such as the daily chores of domestic life. She also analyzes the artist's creative development and associates it with the stages in a lifetime, beginning with the creative awakening or birth and followed by a period of exploration, the achievement of artistic maturity, the later part of life, and, finally, death.

The exhibition's gallery space will be divided into segmented rooms containing the sculptures and components of the installation. 'Sojourn' will include work incorporating other iconographic appropriations that have interested the artist in the past, including representations of the life of the Virgin Mary, ancient mythical figures, and more contemporary figures such as the suffragettes of the 1920s.

In a career spanning more than three decades, Kiki Smith has produced a body of work unique in its engagement with social and political mores, particularly as they relate to the physical experiences and emotional lives of women. She has worked in a remarkably wide range of media. Best known as a sculptor, she is also an adept print maker and draftsman and has made significant work in glass, including installations using stained glass.

One of three artist daughters of the late Minimalist sculptor Tony Smith (1912-1980), Kiki Smith at an early age helped her father fashion cardboard models for his monumental geometric sculptures. Her interest in the body as subject manifested itself early in her career and was augmented by her training as an emergency medical technician. By the mid-1980s, she had gained a reputation for work that focused on the biological systems of human bodies. Themes of regeneration, birth, and the cycles of life proliferate in her art. Her early affiliation with the political action and artists' collaborative group Colab fostered her interest in print media and the adaptation of commercial strategies for disseminating information.

Smith gained international fame with her first major New York exhibition in 1988, and her influence has continued to grow through more than 150 solo exhibitions. She was the 2009 recipient of the Edward MacDowell Medal and has also been honored with a Skowhegan Medal for sculpture in 2001.

'Kiki Smith: Sojourn' is organized by Catherine Morris, Curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum. It is the fourth venue in a series of site-specific installations, a long-term project by the artist that originated at Museum Haus Esters, Krefeld (March 16-August 24, 2008) and traveled to Kunsthalle Nürnberg (September 18-November 16, 2008), and Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona (February 19-May 24, 2009).

Gerhard Richter & the Disappearance of the Image

2010-02-12T08:36:00.001-05:00

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Rediscovered Gerhard Richter Video on Show at the CCCS

Gerhard Richter (b.1932), 'Canaletto', 1990. Oil on canvas, 2 panels, 250 x 175 cm each, total: 250 x 350 cm. Courtesy: Collection Böckmann, Berlin at Hamburger Kunsthalle.

FLORENCE.- Gerhard Richter and the Disappearance of the Image in Contemporary Art, an exhibition staged in collaboration with the Kunsthalle Hamburg, will take place at the Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina, Palazzo Strozzi, in Florence from Saturday, February 20th to Sunday, April 25th, 2010. The show’s title is a tribute to the acclaimed German painter Gerhard Richter (b.1932).

The exhibition, conceived by Franziska Nori (project director of the CCCS) and Hubertus Gassner (director of the Kunsthalle Hamburg), presents twelve works by Richter, nine of which are loaned by the Collection Böckmann, Berlin, and the Kunsthalle Hamburg, which demonstrate the range of different styles in his painting from blurred figurative photo paintings to abstract pictures. The exhibition will also include the only video work Richter ever made, which has recently been rediscovered and has only been shown at the Videonale in Bonn and at the Kunstverein Hannover. These works by Richter will be placed in dialogue with works by seven international contemporary artists: Xie Nanxing (China); Wolfgang Tillmans (Germany); Lorenzo Banci (Italy); Antony Gormley and Roger Hiorns (UK); and Marc Breslin and Scott Short (USA); who all share Richter’s profound distrust of the image as a guarantee of truth.

Gerhard Richter and the Disappearance of the Image in Contemporary Art follows the current CCCS exhibition Manipulating Reality (on view until January 17th, 2010), which explores the relationship between reality and representation in the medium of photography. Gerhard Richter, one of the best-known and most sought-after living painters, has made the theme of the disappearance of the image a hallmark of his work and laid the foundation for the next generation of artists.

Richter, one of the pioneers in depicting the dissolution of both the motif and the medium, paints over original pictures or uses a blurred painting technique. He deliberately selects trivial or random motifs as the starting point for his paintings. Well aware of the power of images, Richter strives to break or at least question their authority by making his pictures merge or disappear. He plays with reality and appearance and converts figurative images into abstract ones by focusing, for example, on fragmentary details. He pioneered the use of existing images as the basis of his paintings, primarily as a means of transferring the characteristics of one medium to another, and for placing different genres on an equal footing. Through his entire body of work, Richter addresses the difference between subjective perception and the objective experience of reality in which the artist can only offer possible approaches to address the difficult relationship between the object and its representation. The video also continues this theme, showing out-of-focus portraits and silhouettes of his friend Volker Bradke.

The CCCS has invited seven contemporary artists who also use the dissolution of the image to engage in a dialogue with Richter’s work. To maintain their own artistic identity, the work of each artist will be presented in its own space. Xie Nanxing (b.1970) uses video and photography as intermediate media for his reflections on painting and the human condition; Lorenzi Banci (b.1974) investigates the boundaries between representation and abstraction by painting dissolving shapes in which mere light is the object; while Scott Short’s (b.1964) conceptual work is based on photocopying a blank sheet of paper hundreds of times until incidental marks create an accidental image which then becomes a painting. Roger Hiorns (b.1975), one of the four artists shortlisted for the 2009 Turner Prize, works with chemical components and choreographs planned incidents to create his sculptural work. Marc Breslin (b.1983) uses the pictorial surface like a palimpsest, scratching signs and graffiti into the many layers of paint, thus creating a metaphor for mental processes, memory and oblivion. Wolfgang Tillmans (b.1968) treats the photographic paper as canvas. He started by representing everyday subjects and from there he went further into abstraction, following the logic of the medium itself. Antony Gormley (b.1950) will produce a site-specific installation for the exhibition, that further develops his research for a new social art where the interplay between abstraction and figuration is the result of a process of dissolution of the human figure.

Meanwhile Richter remains true to the medium of painting, yet questions its possibilities against a backdrop of the “end of painting” declared by Duchamp. The other seven artists take as their theme the absence (and sometimes impossibility) of making a clear statement by means of a picture today.

Gerhard Richter and the Disappearance of the Image in Contemporary Art will present visitors with a display of works by a fascinating group of internationally-known artists that are both intellectually stimulating and visually beautiful.

New work by Thomas Ruff

2010-02-11T20:20:00.001-05:00

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Thomas Ruff Debuts New Work in Sixth Solo Exhibition at David Zwirner

Thomas Ruff, 'zycles 4020', 2009. Chromogenic print, (186 x 186 x 6 cm) 73 1/4 x 73 14 x 2 3/8 inches. Photo: Courtesy David Zwirner, New York.

NEW YORK, NY.- David Zwirner presents Thomas Ruff’s sixth solo exhibition at the gallery, marking the New York debut of new work in two series: zycles and cassini.

Among the most influential photographers working today, Ruff has redefined photography’s conceptual possibilities, simultaneously capturing and questioning the essence of photography as both a means and a tool for visual experience. Over the past twenty-five years, he has approached various photographic genres in his work, including portraiture, the nude, landscape and architectural photography. He carries out these investigations using his own analog and digital photographs, computer-generated images, alongside images culled from scientific archives, print media, and the Internet.

In both of his new series — drawing from the natural sciences, astronomy, neurology, and art history — Ruff creates elaborate, open-ended visual systems that challenge viewer’s perceptions, demonstrating that structures can become increasingly complex the more one contemplates the details.

The zycles series, grounded in mathematics and physics, shows computer screen-grab recordings of curves modeled in three dimensions. The views captured by the computer are produced as large-scale chromogenic prints, or are printed directly onto canvas. Inspired by 19th century science books, Ruff’s 'zycles' present abstract contours based on “cycloids,” the mathematical curves obtained from rolling one curve along a second, fixed curve. Particularly interesting to Ruff was Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell’s (1831-1879) treatise on electro-magnetism, accompanied by copperplate engravings of magnetic fields. Ruff found these delicate traceries, while not intentionally aesthetic, suggestive of minimalist drawings.

To explore their visual and spatial possibilities, Ruff used a three-dimensional rendering program to translate the algebraic formulae of the cycloids — regarded in mathematics as “the most aesthetic of curves” — into computer-generated imagery. The resulting virtual structures display the intricate linear filigree of cycloids as they would appear in space. The spiraling formations, always faithful to their mathematical origins, evoke a multitude of forms: the trajectories of planets, cascading ribbons, line drawings, or musical vibrations.

The works in the cassini series are based on photographic captures of Saturn taken by NASA’s 'Cassini-Huygens Spacecraft', which launched in 2004 and completed its initial four-year mission in June 2008. The spacecraft orbited around Saturn to provide the first in-depth, close-up study of the planet and its domain, including its rings, moons, and magnetosphere, the enormous magnetic bubble that controls its planetary movement. Ruff acquired these black and white raw images from NASA’s website, where they were broadcast directly from the spacecraft and made available for public download. Through computer manipulation, Ruff infused each gray-scale image with saturated color. The resulting chromogenic prints transform the originals into visual statements that both capture the sweeping enormity of planetary structures while still distancing themselves from concrete forms, evocative instead of abstract and minimalist compositions.

Thomas Ruff (born 1958, Zell am Harmersbach, Germany) is known for his exploration of the mechanical production of images, and how technical mediation can influence a picture’s expressiveness. His telescopic views of the night sky, Sterne, printed from pre-existing negatives; his provocative nudes borrowed from pornography websites; Substrat, his colorful manipulations of Japanese manga and anime; and his jpegs demonstrate Ruff’s approach to reinventing existing images. Together with zycles and cassini, these serialized considerations draw attention to the abstraction that occurs when the visually explicit is re-imagined.

He was the subject of solo museum exhibitions at Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Museum für neue Kunst, Freiburg; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Mu˝csarnok Kunsthalle, Budapest (all 2009); Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; Sprengel Museum, Hanover (all 2007). His work is held in the collections of many major museums, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; The Art Institute of Chicago; Essl Museum, Klosterneuberg; Dallas Museum of Art; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.;

National Museum of Photography, Copenhagen; Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. He was the 2006 recipient of the Infinity Award for Art presented by the International Center of Photography, New York, and in 2009 Aperture published jpegs, a large-scale book dedicated exclusively to this monumental series. The artist lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany.

Drawings by Eduardo Arranz-Bravo

2010-02-11T20:17:00.000-05:00

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Preparatory Drawings by Eduardo Arranz-Bravo at Franklin Bowles Galleries

Eduardo Arranz-Bravo, 'Allons enfants', 2009. Oil on canvas, 79 X 79. Photo: Courtesy Franklin Bowles Galleries.

NEW YORK, NY.- Franklin Bowles Galleries announces the opening of "Arranz-Bravo: 2010". The joint exhibition features works on canvas and paper along with a series of unusual sculptures and preparatory drawings done while the artist was in residence at the Mercer Hotel located in the SoHo area of New York City in 2008.

Eduardo Arranz-Bravo first came of age as an artist in the 1960’s and his aesthetic was inspired and nurtured during the emergence of American Pop Art. Arranz-Bravo was a friend to contemporary luminaries Richard Hamilton and Mel Ramos; he also collaborated on many projects and happenings with the Spanish pop artist, Rafael Bartolozzi. Working and exhibiting closely for over ten years, Arranz-Bravo and Bartolozzi brought back a new level of realism which emphasized formal subjects with a critical and ironic twist. In later years, the work of Arranz- Bravo evolved to include more elements of abstraction, although he seldom strayed from his humanistic roots.

The Arranz-Bravo Foundation, located just outside Barcelona in L’hospitalet, was inaugurated in September 2009. The new director, Albert Mercade, will be organizing several exhibitions in 2010 in keeping with one of the foundation’s core missions: to work with the younger generation of Spanish artists, to support their artistic visions, and to sponsor exhibitions which promote their latest achievements. Arranz-Bravo, is very open to new trends in artistic expression and understands the need for ongoing dialogue with all generations of artists – past, present, and future. In 2010 the Foundation will feature a cataloged exhibition of self-portraits painted by Arranz-Bravo throughout his career.

Eduardo Arranz -Bravo has exhibited steadily since his early days with Rafael Bartolozzi at Sala Gaspar and has been represented by the Franklin Bowles Galleries in the United States since 1997. Over the course of his career Arranz-Bravo has garnered many accolades and achievements, including the Gran premio and Medella de Oro at the International Biennale in Ibiza. He represented Spain at the XXXIX Venice Biennale, and was chosen as one of only three artists to help promote the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games through artistic work. His participation in this project resulted in the acquisition of 27 works by the Museo Olimpico in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Currently the artist lives and works in Barcelona and Cadaques, Spain. His work is included in numerous public collections including the Museo Nacionál Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain; Skidmore Art Museum, Saratoga Springs and New York, USA; Museo d’Art Modern, Barcelona, Spain; Museu de Arte Moderna, São Paulo, Brazil; and the Museu d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona, Spain. Recent works of note are two important public sculpture commissions both located in "L’Hospitalet : L’Acollidora" (The Welcoming Woman) installed on a main street of the city, and the "Pont de la Libertat" (Bridge of Liberation) which spans a major crossroads in the city.

Pam Anderson: Ghosts from a Middle Place

2010-02-11T20:08:00.000-05:00

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Kathryn Markel Fine Arts Presents Pam Anderson: Ghosts from a Middle Place

Pam Anderson, 'Seed Lesson #41: Plant Flowers Instead', 2008. Mixed media on paper, 33 x 30 inches. Photo: Courtesy Kathryn Markel Fine Arts.

NEW YORK, NY.- Kathryn Markel Fine Arts presents Ghosts from a Middle Place, the first solo exhibition of works on paper by Pam Anderson.

Drawing meaning from everyday events, Pam Anderson's delicate drawing and collage works on paper explore the space between sentiment and artistic formalism. For this exhibition Anderson addresses the events that arise from that middle place of a woman after 40, and losses met: loss of parents, of the ability to conceive, of partners and parts (breast cancer). The given is that life goes on, and her work evidences that there are events to the goings on that merit attention. She says of her work, 'My works on paper, by appropriating and adding to the collected 'evidence' of my life, pay homage to art's unique ability to give permanence to the fleeting.' Through the medium of drawing and pencil sketch Anderson expresses a sense of being candid without getting obscene, of addressing sentiment without getting sentimental. The stitched pieces of blue, white and sand colored papers that form the landscapes of Anderson's stories suggest that they would prefer to shrink away; by nature the work is shy; taken from an internal place and made into a thin skin of armor delicately knit together. The collage is an object which derives from an external place; it is not made from the artist but collected, placed, and given meaning by the artist. There is something jocular and revealing about this element and yet its dimension to the whole is lonely. Anderson's works on paper chronicles and commemorates personal events as an abstract narrative; her art protects the event giving it durability against the sweep of the everyday.

Pam Anderson lives and works in Richmond, Virginia. She received her MFA from Washington University and currently teaches drawing, painting, and Picturing Memoir at The Collegiate School in Richmond. Anderson exhibits extensively throughout Virginia and has several works in public and private collection.

The exhibition will be on view February 11 - March 13, 2010

Pop Life: Good Business is the Best Art

2010-02-10T07:00:00.002-05:00

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Pop Life at Hamburger Kunsthalle Proves that Good Business is the Best Art

The photography 'Spiritual America IV' featuring Brooke Shields by US artist Richard Prince is part of the exhibition 'Pop Life' at the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, Germany, 09 February 2010. Some 320 works by artists such as Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst are on display in the exhibition running from 12 February to 09 May after it was successfully presented in the London Tate Modern Gallery. EFE/Marcus Brandt.

HAMBURG.- The exhibition Pop Life takes Andy Warhol’s famously provocative claim that “good business is the best art” as the starting point for a completely new interpretation of the legacy of Pop art and the influence of its chief protagonists. Pop Life shows the various ways in which artists since the 1980s have engaged with the mass media, often involving the deliberate creation and cultivation of an artistic persona as a ‘brand’. The exhibition features works by Andy Warhol alongside key pieces by Keith Haring, Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Richard Prince, Martin Kippenberger, Tracey Emin, Takashi Murakami and others. Some 320 exhibits will be on display, including paintings, drawings, photographs, magazines, sculptures, videos, merchandising products, spatial installations and a shop.

Pop Life argues that Andy Warhol’s most radical lesson is reflected in the work of artists of subsequent generations who not only reproduce everyday culture in their artworks but also strategically infiltrate this realm, appropriating the mechanisms of the market, the mass media and the omnipresence of advertising in order to reach an audience far beyond the confines of the art gallery. The conflation of culture and commerce is commonly regarded as a betrayal of the values of modern art; Pop Life, on the other hand, shows that for many artists who came after Warhol, the fusion of the two realms is the only possible means of interacting with the modern world.

One of the central themes of the exhibition is the performative aspect revealed by the self-presentation and role perception of artists within the spheres of the mass media and the art business. The artists themselves are actively involved in key areas – among other things as forgers, celebrities, publishers, art dealers, gallerists, business owners, curators, TV presenters, even auctioneers. They smuggle themselves in disguise into the operating systems of product and information circulation, exposing these mechanisms without having to take a personal stance. Here in lies the ambiguous content – affirmative and critical at once – of Pop Life.

The exhibition begins with an examination of Andy Warhol’s late work, looking at his various roles as a television personality, an advertising icon and the publisher of Interview magazine – typical activities for that time. Highlights include a number of works from the initially controversial series that became known as the Retrospectives and Reversals. As reprisals of his own celebrated images of pop icons from the 1960s, these works prefigure installations by artists such as Martin Kippenberger or Tracey Emin. Like Warhol, these artists openly embrace the self-mythologizing impulse: they consider the creation of their public persona and its distribution as a brand to be one of the fundamental tools of their profession.

Pop Life includes reconstructions of Keith Haring’s Pop Shop and Jeff Koons’s series Made in Heaven, which is rarely presented in its entirety. Haring opened the Pop Shop on New York’s Lafayette Street in 1986 to market his branded artistic signature in the form of merchandising products – including T-shirts, toys and magnets – that were aimed at the widest possible audience. In his series Made in Heaven, first shown at the 1991 Venice Biennale, Jeff Koons publicly celebrates his marital union with the Italian porn star Ilona Staller, also known as La Cicciolina.

Several rooms in the Hamburg edition of Pop Life are dedicated to Martin Kippenberger. One special presentation that will only be shown here features early works from the collection of Gisela Stelly Augstein, a Hamburg-based filmmaker whom the artist much admired. With this display of black-and-white photo-paintings from Kippenberger’s series Un Tedesco in Firenze, along with the ‘Ideentafeln’ (idea panels), and numerous letters and postcards to Stelly Augstein, the exhibition allows visitors to experience at close quarters the early stages of his development into a skilful self-promoter and social analyst. Following in the tradition of Dada and Fluxus, Kippenberger’s provocative, mocking attacks were aimed at dismantling the traditional concept of art.

A further section of the exhibition is devoted to the so-called ‘Young British Artists’, with particular emphasis being placed on their early activities. These include the shop opened by Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas in London’s Bethnal Green district, where the two artists created and sold their work. Renowned pieces by Gavin Turk are featured here alongside selected works from Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, Damien Hirst’s spectacular auction that took place in September 2008 at Sotheby’s in London. A specially commissioned new installation by the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, who has set up his own multinational company to distribute his art, will be shown in one of the final rooms of the exhibition.

Anselm Kiefer Installation - Palmsonntag, 2007

2010-02-09T07:30:00.000-05:00

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Anselm Kiefer Installation an International Coup for the Art Gallery of Ontario

Anselm Kiefer, Palmsonntag, 2007, 44 panels of mixed media on board, fiberglass and resin palm tree, clay bricks and steel support, dimensions variable. ©2010 Anselm Kiefer. Courtesy of the Gagosian Gallery. Photograph © Joshua White.

TORONTO.- Acclaimed international artist Anselm Kiefer’s monumental installation Palmsonntag (Palm Sunday) is coming to the Art Gallery of Ontario this March. Kiefer, known for his epic themes and operatic flair, will be adapting and adding to the installation for its Canadian premiere at the AGO, opening March 4 and continuing through August 1.

Palmsonntag is composed of a 60-foot-long palm tree, cast in fiberglass and resin, that lies on its side across the Gallery floor, surrounded by a cycle of 44 massive panels hanging in rows on the walls above. The panels, eight of which Kiefer is creating specifically for the AGO exhibition, combine paint, plaster, mud, wood, human hair, dried plant materials and rusted chastity belts, among other materials — forming a massive collage of images at once unnerving and expansive.

Palmsonntag blends religious symbols, ancient text scrawled in multiple languages, and images of fossilized decay in a work that deals with life, death and rebirth in equal measure, says AGO Curator of Contemporary Art David Moos. “Palmsonntag is an installation of profound impact,” says Moos. “It must be seen, felt, and encountered. Its historical reach and epic vision are signatures of one of today’s most important living artists.”

“Anselm Kiefer is a major artist, an innovator and a visionary,” says AGO Director and CEO Matthew Teitelbaum. “The AGO is proud to be a key destination for major international artists like Kiefer; Palmsonntag is an ideal addition to our spring season of contemporary art on the leading edge.”

Anselm Kiefer was born in Donaueschingen, Germany in 1945. His works, often enormous in scale, are thematically rich with historical, spiritual and political allusions. His paintings and sculptures are in the collections of virtually every major museum of contemporary art in the world, including the MOMA, the Tate and the Louvre.

Anselm Kiefer: Palmsonntag will be installed in the AGO’s fifth-floor galleries, which will be closed for the month of February to prepare the space for the work. Earlier versions of Palmsonntag have been shown at the Grand Palais in Paris and at the Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles.

Anselm Kiefer: Palmsonntag opens in conjunction with the contemporary sculpture exhibition Sculpture as Time: Major Works. New Acquisitions. — also opening March 4. The rest of the AGO’s winter exhibition season focuses on new and established masters of contemporary art, and includes the exhibitions Wangechi Mutu: This You Call Civilization?, Rembrandt / Freud: Etchings from Life and Françoise Sullivan: Inner Force – Winner of the 2008 Gershon Iskowitz Prize at the AGO. Additionally, King Tut: The Golden King and the Great Pharaohs continues until April 18.

Shaped by War: Photographs by Don McCullin

2010-02-09T07:26:00.000-05:00

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Shaped by War: Photographs by Don McCullin at The Imperial War Museum

Cuban Missile Crisis protester with sign facing police line, London, 1962. Photo: ©Don McCullin.

MANCHESTER.- Imperial War Museum North in Manchester presents the largest ever UK exhibition about the life and work of Don McCullin, one of the world’s most acclaimed photographers, to mark his 75th year. Many items are on public display for the very first time.

For more than 50 years, McCullin’s images have shaped our awareness of modern conflict and its consequences. His courage and integrity, as well as the exceptional quality of his work, are a continuing inspiration and influence worldwide. A unique collaboration between McCullin and the Imperial War Museum, this major new exhibition contains over 200 photographs, objects, magazines and personal memorabilia, and shows how war has shaped the life of this exceptional British photographer and those across the globe over the last half-century.

The exhibition examines McCullin the man, with an extraordinarily uncompromising drive to be on the frontline and document events as they unfold, the influences on his work and his impact on others. It reveals the moral dilemmas of bearing witness to and photographing conflict. Set in the context of world events and major changes in photography and journalism which have occurred in his lifetime, items on display for the first time include his US Issue Army Helmet worn in Vietnam, colour photographs from El Salvador, 1982 and Vietnam, 1972 and his most recent work, documenting the former Roman Empire.

Newly commissioned footage by the Imperial War Museum featuring Don McCullin reappraising his life as a photojournalist provides an intimate insight into his experiences in his own words. Most black and white images have been handprinted by McCullin himself and are stunning examples of his darkroom skills. Key images will also be displayed via lightboxes, banners and projections - methods that have never before been used to display his work.

McCullin’s most iconic black and white photographs of the major conflicts of the last 50 years are displayed together with his perspective on more recent events. Key turning points in his life are examined. These include his early years (experiencing evacuation, the Blitz, National Service in the RAF Photographic Unit), his discovery of photojournalism (early commissions for The Observer and reports of Berlin in 1961 and Cyprus in 1964), his seminal work for The Sunday Times Magazine (including Vietnam, Biafra, Bangladesh and Northern Ireland) and the changing approaches to journalism McCullin faced. Meanwhile documents on display from the Imperial War Museum’s Archive tell the full story of his controversial exclusion from the 1982 Falklands Conflict.

The exhibition explores how, indirectly, conflict continues to shape Don McCullin and his work today including cultural change in Britain, landscapes of England, still life photography and recent Roman Empire project.

A major new book Don McCullin: Shaped by War accompanies the exhibition and is published by Jonathan Cape in association with the Imperial War Museum on 4 February. Southern Frontiers, a new collection of photographs from Don’s journey across the boundaries and landscape of the Roman Empire (some of which feature on public display for the first time in the exhibition) is also published by Jonathan Cape on 4th March.

‘Shaped by War: Photographs by Don McCullin’ is presented in a landmark building that is itself a visionary symbol of the effects of war. Imperial War Museum North (IWMN) was designed by world-renowned architect Daniel Libeskind to represent a world shattered by conflict. IWMN’s Special Exhibitions Gallery is an extraordinary and compelling space, unrivalled in the UK. It is one of the largest temporary exhibition galleries in the country with two aluminium-clad walls that pierce the exhibition space, and a ceiling that plummets in one corner and swoops upward in another.

Exhibition Celebrating JG Ballard's 'Crash'

2010-02-09T07:22:00.001-05:00

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Gagosian Presents Major Group Exhibition Celebrating JG Ballard's 'Crash'

Douglas Gordon, Self-Portrait of You + Me (Jayne Mansfield), 2007. © Douglas Gordon. Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery. Photo: Rob McKeever.

LONDON.- Gagosian Gallery London will present 'Crash,' a major group exhibition opening on 11 February 2010, which takes its title from the famous novel by JG Ballard.

Ballard's novels stand among the most visionary, provocative literature of the twentieth century, with his ominous predictions regarding the fate of Western culture and his insights into the dark psychopathology of the human race. This exhibition is a response to the enormous impact and enduring cultural significance of his work, following his death in spring 2009. Highlighting Ballard's great passion for the surreal and his engagement with the artists of his own generation, 'Crash' includes examples of his specific inspirations as well as works by contemporary artists who have, in turn, been inspired by his vision.

Ballard's first published short story 'Prima Belladonna' appeared in 1956, the same year as the celebrated Independent Group's exhibition 'This is Tomorrow' at the Whitechapel Gallery, which marked the birth of Pop Art in Britain. It was here, and in the work of Surrealists such as Salvador Dali and Paul Delvaux, that Ballard found the seeds of what he called a 'fiction for the present day'. With its dystopian depictions of the present and future, its bleak, man-made landscapes and the recounting of the psychological effects of technological, social and environmental developments on humans, his work has resonated strongly among other writers, filmmakers and visual artists. The exhibition 'Crash' brings together works by artists tuned to the Ballardian universe, from his contemporaries such as Ed Ruscha, Richard Hamilton, Andy Warhol and Helmut Newton, to younger artists such as Tacita Dean, Jenny Saville, Glenn Brown and Mike Nelson.

List of artists: Richard Artschwager, Francis Bacon, JG Ballard, Hans Bellmer, Glenn Brown, Chris Burden, Jake & Dinos Chapman, John Currin, Salvador Dalí, Giorgio de Chirico, Tacita Dean, Jeremy Deller, Paul Delvaux, Cyprien Gaillard, Douglas Gordon, Loris Gréaud, Richard Hamilton, John Hilliard and Jemima Stehli, Roger Hiorns, Damien Hirst, Dan Holdsworth, Carsten Höller, Edward Hopper, Allen Jones, Mike Kelley, Jeff Koons, Roy Lichtenstein, Vera Lutter, Florian Maier-Aichen, Paul McCarthy, Adam McEwen, Dan Mitchell, Malcolm Morley, Mike Nelson, Helmut Newton, Cady Noland, Claes Oldenburg, Eduardo Paolozzi, Steven Parrino, Richard Prince, Robert Rauschenberg, Gerhard Richter, Ed Ruscha, Jenny Saville, George Shaw, Cindy Sherman, Piotr Uklański, Andy Warhol, Rachel Whiteread, Christopher Williams, Jane and Louise Wilson, Christopher Wool and Cerith Wyn Evans.

Turkish Contemporary Art

2010-02-09T07:18:00.002-05:00

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Sotheby's Presents Its Second Sale of Turkish Contemporary Art

Works by Haluk Akakce also feature in the sale, Another Station, estimated to sell for £8,000-12,000. Photo: Sotheby´s.

LONDON.- After the success of Sotheby’s inaugural auction of Turkish Contemporary Art in March 2009, which realised a total of £1.3 million and attracted bidders and buyers from across the globe, Sotheby’s London announced that it will stage its second sale in this collecting category, on Thursday, 15 April, 2010. The forthcoming sale will present new and existing collectors with an opportunity to acquire important pieces from this exciting and expanding area of the art market by both modern masters and cutting-edge contemporary artists of Turkish origin.

Discussing the forthcoming auction and the Contemporary Turkish Art market, Ali Can Ertug, Senior Vice President, said: “Over the course of the past year the Turkish art market has continued to expand and develop, and following the strong results of our inaugural Turkish Contemporary Art Sale in March 2009, we are delighted to present our second dedicated sale in this category in April. With last year’s Biennial, which was enthusiastically attended by artists, curators, critics and collectors from across the globe, Istanbul’s vibrant art scene continues to flourish and we very much look forward to returning to this culturally energetic city in March when we will showcase a select group of works from the upcoming sale.”

Dalya Islam, Deputy Director, commented: “With our second sale, we are pleased to have been able to expand the number of artists represented and offer an even wider range of material by both the modern masters and the up-and-coming generation. Featuring works by artists that performed well in the last sale, the auction will also include new artwork that is set to excite the collecting community. As this market is still relatively young, it continues to present alluring opportunities for collectors to acquire high quality works of contemporary art at an affordable price.”

Sale Highlights:

Untitled, Fahrelnissa Zeid

One of the most important highlights in the sale is Untitled by Fahrelnissa Zeid. The doyenne of Turkish art, darling of the Paris social circuit, London’s favourite hostess and one of the first female artists to exhibit at the ICA in the 1950s; Fahrelnissa is not only one of the most important Turkish artists, but is arguably one of the most important female artists of the 20th Century. Her work Untitled will be offered at £300,000-500,000.

Illustrated on the front page is Untitled by Mubin Orhon, one of the leading abstract expressionist artists on the Turkish market, which carries an estimate of £60,000-80,000.

Hale Tenger’s We Are So Lightly Here, is to be offered with an estimate of £25,000-35,000. Sotheby’s inaugural Turkish Contemporary Art Sale saw bidders from around the world compete to acquire two works by Tenger, both of which sold to international buyers.

Abidin Elderoglu lived and studied in Belgium and his Un Altro Siren, which comes from a Belgian collector, carries an estimate of £12,000-18,000.

Canan Tolon lives and works in San Francisco and her painting, Glitch VI, comes to sale from a British consignor/collection and is estimated at £12,000-18,000.

Two works by Haluk Akakce also feature in the sale, Another Station, estimated to sell for £8,000-12,000, and Breakfast, £8,000-12,000.

Canan Tolan, Glitch VI

Photographic Representations of Food

2010-02-09T07:01:00.000-05:00

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Getty Announces Survey of Developments in Photographic Representations of Food

William Eggleston (American, born 1939), Memphis, Negative about 1971; Print 1980. Dye transfer print. Image: 40.6 x 50.8 cm (16 x 20 in.)© Eggleston Artistic Trust. Gift of Caldecot Chubb, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

LOS ANGELES, CA.- The J. Paul Getty Museum presents In Focus: Tasteful Pictures, a survey of important technological and aesthetic developments in photographic representations of food, on view at the Getty Center from April 6–August 22, 2010.

Photographers have been enticed by the subject of food since the earliest years of the medium. Drawn entirely from the permanent collection, the works in this exhibition provide an overview of the Getty Museum’s world-renowned collection of photographs through the subject of food. The images span a period of 150 years, from the mid-19th century until today. The exhibition features both masterpieces and lesser known works. Among the photographers featured are Roger Fenton, Adolphe Braun, Edward Weston, Bill Owens, Martin Parr, and Taryn Simon. Several works are recent acquisitions, on view for the very first time.

“This exhibition contains a wide variety of images that showcase both appealing and not-so-appealing aspects of food,” said Virginia Heckert, associate curator, Department of Photographs, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and curator of the exhibition. “The title ‘Tasteful Pictures’ refers both to the subject of food and aesthetic preferences, particularly how the latter may have shifted over time.”

Among the selection of works in the exhibition is William Eggleston’s captivating photograph Memphis (1971), which frames a white-frosted square of freezer haphazardly stocked with a jumble of “tasty” frozen food items. The inclusion of ice-encrusted walls and adjectives announcing “artificially flavored” transforms the promise of plentiful choice into the compromise of convenience. Eggleston adopted a casual, snapshot-like style when focusing his 35mm camera on ordinary, even banal, objects and situations, demonstrating that compelling compositions could be created from the least attractive of subjects.

For Cuisine (Kitchen), Man Ray utilized the cameraless photogram process to animate his image of a roasted chicken on a bed of rice. The coiled spring he placed atop a sheet of photographic paper while exposing the print creates a spiral that suggests both an oven heating element and a world modernized by electricity. Commissioned by a utility company in Paris in 1931, the image was intended to promote domestic uses of electricity.

On view for the first time since it entered the Getty’s collection in 1999, is Floris Neusüss’ Supper with Heinecken (1983), a large-scale photogram that depicts the progress of a dinner party with exposures at the beginning and end of a meal that was enjoyed over the course of several hours in a room lit only with a darkroom safelight. Shadowy images of dinnerware, cutlery, wine bottles and glasses, spaghetti, grapes, eggs, a loaf of bread, and a corkscrew can be seen, as well as residue created by foods and liquids spilling onto the paper that was then developed and fixed.

Other selections from In Focus: Tasteful Pictures include American photographer Weegee’s Bagels, Second Avenue (1940), which depicts a New York baker rushing freshly made bagels to a restaurant in the dark predawn hours, and a group of 24 untitled images from Martin Parr’s arresting British Food series (1995), among them a half-eaten plate of food, fork, and knife resting casually on the plate, as if in mid-meal.

The exhibition includes a broad range of photographic processes, from salt, albumen, carbon, and gum bichromate prints made in the nineteenth century to gelatin silver and platinum prints made in the twentieth century. Examples of contemporary color photography can be found in dye transfer and Chromogenic prints.

In Focus: Tasteful Pictures will be the sixth installation of the ongoing “In Focus” series of exhibitions, thematic presentations of photographs from the Getty’s permanent collection. Previous exhibitions focused on The Nude, The Landscape, The Portrait, Making a Scene (staged photographs), and most recently, The Worker.

Upcoming “In Focus” shows include In Focus: Still Life opening in September 2010, which explores the ways in which still life has served as both a conventional and an experimental form of photography during periods of significant aesthetic and technological change. Also upcoming is In Focus: Trees, opening in February 2011.

Celebrity Photographer Felice Quinto Dies

2010-02-09T06:58:00.000-05:00

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Quinto, a renowned celebrity photographer and the likely model for the character Paparazzo in Federico Fellini's 1960 film 'La Dolce Vita,' has died. AP Photo.

ROCKVILLE, MD (AP).- Felice Quinto, a renowned celebrity photographer and the likely model for the character Paparazzo in Federico Fellini's 1960 film 'La Dolce Vita,' has died. He was 80.

Quinto died of pneumonia on Jan. 16 in Rockville, his wife, Geraldine Quinto, said Monday.

Quinto often was referred to as the 'king of the paparazzi' — a term derived from the character in 'La Dolce Vita' — and he pioneered some of the aggressive tactics that celebrity photographers use to this day.

He would hide in bushes, wear disguises and zip around Rome on a motorcycle, taking photos that appeared in gossip publications around the world.

Quinto was born in Milan in 1929 and befriended Fellini while living in Rome in the 1950s. According to his wife, Fellini asked Quinto to play a photographer in 'La Dolce Vita,' but he declined because he was making more money taking pictures. He briefly appeared in the film as a bystander.

'By the time Fellini came out with his movie, it was already about four years that I had been doing photography,' Quinto told the Dallas Morning News in 1985.

In 1960, Quinto snapped a picture of actress Anita Ekberg — who appeared in 'La Dolce Vita' as a starlet hounded by Paparazzo — kissing a married movie producer at a cafe in Rome.

Quinto told ABC News in 1997 that Ekberg shot arrows at him as he stood outside her house at 5 a.m. One nicked Quinto's hand, and another struck a photographer's car.

Quinto married Geraldine Del Giorno, an American schoolteacher, in 1963, and moved to the United States that year to work for The Associated Press. His assignments for The AP included John F. Kennedy's funeral and civil rights marches.

However, he was best known for his celebrity photography. He worked at the famed Studio 54 nightclub in the 1970s, and was Elizabeth Taylor's personal photographer for a time.

He retired in 1993 and lived quietly with his wife in Montgomery Village. He published a book of his Studio 54 photography in 1997, and some of his photographs have been shown in museums.

Quinto voiced few regrets about the celebrity culture he helped create.

'People are human,' he said in 1997. 'They want to see these pictures, and there is too much money to be made.'

Copyright 2010 The Associated Press.

Renee Stout is David C. Driskell Prize Winner

2010-02-09T06:30:00.003-05:00

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High Museum of Art Names Artist Renee Stout as David C. Driskell Prize Winner

Renee Stout's mixed-media works examine the impact of the African Diaspora and the traditions of her African heritage. Photo: Mary Noble Ours.

Visit Stout's web site at http://www.reneestout.com/

ATLANTA, GA.- The High Museum of Art has named artist Renee Stout as the 2010 recipient of the David C. Driskell Prize. Named after the renowned African American artist and art scholar, the Driskell Prize is an annual award that recognizes a scholar or artist in the beginning or middle of his or her career whose work makes an original and important contribution to the field of African American art or art history. Based in Washington , D.C. , Stout works in a variety of media including photography, sculpture, painting, drawing and printmaking. As the sixth Driskell award recipient, Stout will be honored at the Driskell Prize Dinner in Atlanta on Monday, April 19, 2010.

“Renee Stout is a visual artist fully incorporating every available resource to create works relevant to both past and present,” said Michael E. Shapiro, Nancy and Holcombe T. Green, Jr. Director of the High. “Her ability to draw upon the implications of the African Diaspora and highlight African culture through her imaginative and distinctive art exemplifies the qualities of a David C. Driskell Prize recipient. We are pleased to support her vision and development through this award.”

Stout’s mixed-media works examine the impact of the African Diaspora and the traditions of her African heritage as well as the themes of self-exploration, empowerment and healing. Using a variety of media and visual languages—including African aesthetics and secondhand materials—Stout pieces together narratives that tie history to contemporary society.

Traveling Root Store #2 (Madam Ching Goes High Tech)

Imaginary characters recur in Stout’s work, adding whimsy and humor to the challenging and often depressing subject matter. The character Madame Ching appears in many works, including the 1993 piece “Traveling Root Store #2: Madame Ching Goes High Tech,” in which Stout pits a vintage doctor’s bag, vials and herbs against Madame Ching’s new-age custom computer. The keyboard on the computer is altered to Madame Ching’s needs, with various buttons being replaced to assist her in reaching deities. Also present in many works is Stout’s alter-ego Fatima Mayfield. “Fatima Mayfield, a fictitious herbalist/fortuneteller, is the vehicle that allows me to role-play in order to confront the issues, whether it’s romantic relationships, social ills or financial woes, in a way that’s open, creative and humorous,” said Stout.

Renee Stout received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Carnegie Mellon University in 1980 before moving to Washington , D.C. , where she began to study her African American heritage, the wellspring of her subsequent work and career. As an arts advocate, Stout served on the panel of the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities as well as George Washington University’s panel “Art School, Confidential: Rethinking Art Education.” In 1999 she won the Anonymous Was a Woman award and her second Pollock-Krasner Foundation award. Recent awards and recognition include the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant and a fellowship as the first artist-in-residence at Johns Hopkins University (2009). Throughout her career, Stout’s participation in numerous solo and group exhibitions has been met with international success. She currently lives and works in Washington , D.C.

The selection process for the 2010 recipient of the Driskell Prize began with a call for nominations from a national pool of artists, curators, teachers, collectors and art historians. The final winner was chosen from these nominations by review-committee members Richard Powell, John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art History, Duke University ; Jacquelyn D. Serwer, Chief Curator, National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution; and Michael Rooks, Wieland Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, High Museum of Art, Atlanta.

Fatima and Black 9 (2007)

Flow TV - Vo. 11, #7

2010-02-08T20:36:00.000-05:00

We want to let you know that the new issue of Flow: A Critical Forum on
Television and Media Culture is available at http://flowtv.org.

This issue features columns from Meghan Sutherland, David L. Andrews,
Max Dawson, Lucas Hilderbrand, David Parry and Michael Peterson,
Laurie Beth Clark, and Lisa Nakamura.

This issue's columns in brief:

"Thinking the Box" by Meghan Sutherland (http://flowtv.org/?p=4772)
Rethinking television aesthetics and industrial production through
ABC?s Conveyor Belt of Love.

"The Olympic Games and the Politicization of Everyday Life" by David
L. Andrews (http://flowtv.org/?p=4753)
A look at the often-brutal power dynamic undergirding the Olympics and
its media history.

"Face to Face with the E-Waste of Tomorrow at the 2010 Consumer
Electronics Show" by Max Dawson (http://flowtv.org/?p=4756)
One media scholar?s reportage of and reaction to the 2010
International Consumer Electronics Show.

"Phonography: Lessons Learned from Teaching Audio Technologies" by
Lucas Hilderbrand (http://flowtv.org/?p=4766)
Reflections on teaching cultural studies of sound technology and
popular music.

"Not So New: Thoughts on Emerging Media" by David Parry
(http://flowtv.org/?p=4771)
From card catalogs to status updates, the use of the term ?new? in
relation to media is less than rigorous and potentially dangerous.

" 'I See You?': Gender and Disability in Avatar" By Michael Peterson,
Laurie Beth Clark, and Lisa Nakamura (http://flowtv.org/?p=4784)
In addition to critiquing Avatar's representations of gender and
disability, the authors also consider the reasons for the film's
widespread popularity.

Interested in supporting Flow? Click HERE (http://flowtv.org/?page_id=2143).

FlowTV is now on Twitter! Follow Flow's Twitter page at:
http://twitter.com/flowtv
FlowTV is also on Facebook! Get updates on your news feed by becoming
a fan: www.facebook.com/FlowTV

We look forward to your visit and encourage your comments.

Best wishes,

Flow Editorial Staff

Pop Art from the Collection of Valencia's IVAM

2010-02-08T08:14:00.001-05:00

Artdaily.org - The First Art Newspaper on the Net: "Pop Art from the Collection of Valencia's IVAM Travels to Cuba

HAVANA.- The IVAM (Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno) and the SEACEX (Sociedad Estatal para la Acción Cultural Exterior de España) openning today, February/5/2010 this co-production with the collaboration of the Embassy of Spain in Cuba and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Cuba.

The Pop Art exhibition at the IVAM Collection is curated by chief curator of the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg (USA) William Jeffett, and the Director of IVAM, Consuelo Ciscar.

The exhibition brings together 59 works of different techniques and media including paintings, photography, works on paper and sculptures. These works have been selected from the extensive exhibition devoted to Pop Art held at the IVAM in 2007 and that following its exhibition in San Juan (Puerto Rico), Fortaleza (Brazil) and Buenos Aires (Argentina) are presented now in the National Museum of Fine Arts of Cuba.

The works of Pop Art in the Collection of the IVAM, which are among the most outstanding in Europe, focus on the European contribution to Pop Art, complemented by some examples of American artists and including some precursors of this style and actual Pop artists. The collection comprises a large number of the different artistic positions and they are grouped in a flexible manner under the umbrella of the term Pop.

The catalogue published for the exhibition contains over eighty works by Richard Hamilton, Equipo Crónica, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, Valerio Adami, Sigmar Polke, Eduardo Arroyo and others, and texts by William Jeffet, Consuelo Císcar, Santiago B. Olmo, Clare Carolin and Lluís Fernández, along with a selection of critiques about Pop Art.

The Collection of the IVAM provides a broad, comprehensive overview of Pop Art and the presence of its legacy in the most recent contemporary creations. It focuses on the artists who influenced the development of the avant-garde movements in Spain, including the important contribution made by Spanish artists to that trend. And we say trend because of the different international manifestations of Pop Art that took place simultaneously in several countries rather than something that stemmed from a single source. Manifestations that can be grouped in categories that go from the precursors of Pop Art like Richard Lidner or artists of the Independent Group like Robert Hamilton or the American precursors Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg or Claes Oldenburg to the artists of New Realism like Martial Raysse, and New Image with works by James Rosenquist, and Narrative Figuration with works by Gilles Aillaud, Hervé Télémaque, Valerio Adami and Eduardo Arroyo, Realismo Crítico represented by the work of Equipo Crónica, Equipo Realidad and Juan Genovés, among other trends, including the legacy that has tinged the cinematographic photography of Cindy Sherman or John Baldessari.

Be that as it may, Pop Art was never a programmatic movement directed by a coherent group that expressed their ideas in manifestoes, but rather a nexus of different groups and critical stances that resorted to images from mass production as their point of departure and that presented important variations according to their geographic and cultural background.

Although in many aspects it is the heir of the historic avant-garde movements, Pop Art constitutes one of the first examples of postmodern art practice thanks, precisely, to its appropriation of images already in existence. Collage and photomontage, along with Marcel Duchamp's ready-mades and similar works or creations of Surrealism, are important artistic antecedents. In fact, a series of Pop artists were directly linked to the latter movement (Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Hervé Télémaque). But more than anything else, Pop was the result of the growth of the consumer society that took place in the nineteen fifties and sixties: the new reality that captured the attention of the younger generation.

The British Independent Group, active from 1952, devoted itself to studying and reinterpreting popular culture and the impact of the mass media on society. Some relevant British Pop artists originally involved in the Pop movement produced a kind of painting or sculpture that does not fully develop their own presuppositions of the fifties. Nevertheless, American Pop emerged spontaneously without a group or manifestoes or an agenda, as a series of individuals that came together by chance through the first exhibitions that dealt with the phenomenon. In its treatment of popular consumerist culture and its figures, characters and products, there is a systematic appropriation and a creation of icons by means of a visual operation that consists in shifting them from the banal context of everyday life to the territory of painting, exhibitions, museums, in other words, to culture.

Josep Renau, who uses collage and photomontage techniques to criticise the American society, appropriating ordinary everyday images of the media and popular culture, has been considered a forerunner or a pioneer of Pop aesthetics, above all because of the influence he had on the work of Equipo Crónica and Equipo Realidad, who used the same techniques in painting to establish a critical interpretation of the images and icons that configure the visual culture of Spain at that time, but also turn their critical glance towards the past and history. However, this resorting to history, the painting of the past or cult cinema, which we find in both Equipo Crónica, Equipo Realidad and Eduardo Arroyo, is not limited to the cultural sphere in Spain but involves permanent interrelationship between popular culture and high culture. This is something that did not follow the initial premises of Pop Art, but in the eighties even Warhol was using images from paintings by Munch, De Chirico or Leonardo's Las Supper in his works.

The strategies of Pop provided a (not only visual but also intellectual) framework that, thanks to the contradictions enclosed in this iconographic encyclopaedia, constituted a point of departure for political and social reflection about the present. This point of departure allowed Pop to survive in neo and post formulations. Pop Art, in its broadest sense, left the avant-gardes the legacy of a narrative that is still vital for the aspirations of emerging artistic movements today.

The Singh Twins

2010-02-08T08:07:00.001-05:00

Artdaily.org - The First Art Newspaper on the Net: "

Exhibition of Work by The Singh Twins Announced at the National Portrait Gallery

The Killing Game, 2002. ©The Singh Twins.

LONDON.- Work by The Singh Twins will be on display at the National Portrait Gallery for the first time in March. The twin sisters are contemporary British artists whose award-winning paintings explore issues of social, political, religious and multicultural debate. The display will offer a contemporary response to the concurrent exhibition, The Indian Portrait 1560-1860, and The Singh Twins have created a new Gallery trail to draw links between their work, The Indian Portrait 1560-1860, and the Gallery's permanent Collection.

Using a narrative, decorative, symbolic and witty 'Past Modern' (as opposed to Post Modern) style, The Singh Twins have revived the Indian miniature tradition within modern art practice. They say: 'Our work bridges many worlds, the ancient and the modern; fusing both Western and Eastern aesthetic elements ... using an ancient art form to deal with contemporary issues. Our aim is to introduce wider audiences to the beauty, richness and continuing value of our heritage within contemporary art and society.'

Pool of Life (2008)

Twenty-seven works will be on display including Arts Matters: The Pool of Life (2008) which was commissioned by Liverpool City Council and celebrates the city's status as European Capital of Culture in 2008; Partners in Crime: Deception and Lies (2004), featuring George W. Bush and Tony Blair following the invasion of Iraq in the aftermath of 9/11; and The Greatest (2002) depicting Muhammad Ali in the conventional style used for depicting royalty within the Mughal School of the Indian miniature tradition. Also on display will be the award winning The Making of Liverpool, The Singh Twins' first animated film, which combines the Indian miniature tradition with the latest digital technology to show the history and changing identity of the city.

The new Gallery trail by The Singh Twins will link their work with The Indian Portrait 1560-1860, and the Gallery's permanent Collection. The trail will highlight how The Singh Twins are influenced by both Indian and Western portraiture in terms of themes, art practice, technique, pose and gesture, iconography and symbolism. The Singh Twins say: 'one of our main aims as artists to challenge generally accepted notions of heritage and identity. In particular, what we believe to be the generally held but false perceptions of division between east and west, modernity and tradition in art and society'.

London born twin sisters Amrit and Rabindra studied Art at University College of Chester (now called University of Chester) and Manchester University. Their work has been the subject of nearly forty solo exhibitions, including those at the Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art, Birmingham City Art Gallery, Leeds City Art Gallery, The Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool and the National Gallery of Modern Art in both Delhi and Mumbai. The Singh Twins were artists in residence for the Commonwealth Games 2002 and their work has been published in nine books including Twin Perspectives, Worlds A-Part and the Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History.

Contemporary Connections: The Singh Twins will offer a contemporary response to the major exhibition The Indian Portrait: 1560-1860 (11 March - 20 June 2010), the first ever exhibition devoted to Indian portraiture which will include 60 outstanding portraits drawn from collections in the UK, USA and Europe. The exhibition sets out to show that Indian portraiture, an area of artistic achievement overlooked in Britain, should be seen alongside other outstanding portraits from around the world.

'Pep Art' Pioneers Willardson and Swerman

2010-02-08T08:02:00.001-05:00

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'Pep Art' Pioneer David Willardson and Marshall Swerman at Rebecca Molayem

David Willardson and Marshall Swerman, Elvis #2.

NORTH HOLLYWOOD, CA.- The Rebecca Molayem Gallery in West Hollywood will be opening a solo exhibit on February 13, 2010 from 6-10 PM of the newest work from “Pep Art” pioneer David Willardson in collaboration with digital impressionist and photographer, Marshall Swerman. Willardson and Swerman’s “IKONXART Series” renders American and International superstars like Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Elvis Presley, And Warhol, Audrey Hepburn, Amelia Earhart, the Beatles, Muhammad Ali and others. All are represented in larger-than-life scale that reflects their influence on global pop culture and history. Willardson’s use of rich texture, bold colors, and accentuated movement working with Swerman’s creative digital manipulations offer a unique perspective on the scope and meaning of fame and power.

The impetus for the “IKONXART Series” came after a serendipitous meeting between David Willardson and Marshall Swerman, whose original photographs of Andy Warhol and his New York “Factory” piqued Willardson’s imagination. The two began collaborating on bold and dramatically colored portraits of Andy Warhol and other “Factory” members like Edie Sedgwick.

Willardson and Swerman have since cast their artistic gaze onto American and international icons that have personally influenced and inspired them. The Boys, a 10’ x 4’ vibrant tribute to The Beatles, was inspired by Cirque du Soleil’s performance, Love in Las Vegas. “I was marveling at the beauty and magic of the performance,” Willardson recalls, “when suddenly the image of this painting appeared to me. By the time Love ended, I had painted the entire piece in my mind…each brushstroke, each splash of color and began working with Marshall as soon as I returned to Los Angeles.”

David Willardson is recognized as the premier air-brush artist in the United States. Over a span of seventeen years, he created the seminal poster art for Disney’s timeless animated films of Bambi, Cinderella, Snow White, The Little Mermaid, Aladdin and the Lion King. After ending a successful career as commercial artist to focus on fine art, Willardson became the creator and creative force of the “Pep Art” movement, an innovative new genre where cultural icons are rendered with an unprecedented infusion of color, personality and energy. Willardson’s work has been featured in numerous galleries, books, interviews, record & cd covers and magazines and his work is in personal collections throughout the world.

"I’m certainly a product of the pop art movement," Willardson professes, "but I also have a great love for action painting. My work is about energy, action, and boldness, I combine pop culture imagery with my love for music, and movement."

Marshall Swerman, fine art photographer, has been published worldwide having had solo exhibits in New York City, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Martha’s Vineyard. Swerman is currently working on completing three projects: “Factory and Friends Series” featuring his unpublished photographs of Andy Warhol and his Superstars. When spending time at Andy’s “Factory” in the 60’s, Swerman was fortunate to be possibly the only photographer to take formal portraits of Andy. Swerman also was featured in one of Warhol’s renowned films his 24 hour feature, “Four Star.” Swerman’s other projects include: “Dead Cars and Other Body Parts,” a photographic journey of stripped and abandoned cars and “Flower Power to Armed Love – the 60’s in NYC,” covering the hippies, yippies, drugs, sex, drugs and rock & roll on the Lower East Side and West Village of NYC.

In addition to introducing the iconic and inspirational “IKONXART” portraits, the exhibit opening on February 13 will feature a live performance painting by Willardson and a live music performance by world-renowned singer/ songwriter Michelle Shocked, known for her soulful lyrics and passionate voice.

The “IKONXART Series” will be on view from February 13 to February 27 at the Rebecca Molayem Gallery located at 306 N. Robertson Blvd., West Hollywood, CA 90048. To confirm exhibit opening attendance on Feb. 13th please call 310-652-2620.

Der Blaue Reiter Retrospective

2010-02-08T07:59:00.000-05:00

Artdaily.org - The First Art Newspaper on the Net: "

First Major Retrospective of the Work of Der Blaue Reiter Ever Held in the Netherlands Opens

Wassily Kandinsky, Holland – Strandkörbe, Mai/Juni 1904, 1904, oil on canvas on board, 53,5 x 32.8 cm, collection Lenbachhaus München.

THE HAGUE.- In the early 20th century, a group of artists caused a huge furor in the Munich art world. Calling themselves Der Blaue Reiter, the artists produced expressive, brightly coloured, lyrical paintings which were to prompt the development of Expressionism in Germany. The core members of the group were Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky and kindred spirit Franz Marc. Although the group was so important for the later development of modern art, this exhibition at the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag in spring 2010 will be the first major retrospective of its work ever held in the Netherlands. Many of the works were seen earlier as part of the successful Kandinsky exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) played an important pioneering role in the development of painting. His explosive compositions, inspired by experimental music and primitive folk art, roused strong emotions and incomprehension among art critics, public and fellow artists. When he met Franz Marc, Kandinsky immediately recognised a kindred spirit who shared his interest in and ideas about painting and music. Just two days after they first met, they were already attending an Arnold Schönberg concert together. It was the start of a close friendship and in 1911 they set up Der Blaue Reiter (‘The Blue Rider’), swiftly attracting the adhesion of artists like Gabriele Münter, Alexej von Jawlensky, August Macke, Marianne von Werefkin and Heinrich Campendonck.

The group was highly diverse, both in style and membership. Yet there are common features; the Expressionism of Der Blaue Reiter is poetic and shows influences of Russian fairytales and traditional folk narratives. The artists worked instinctively, generally using bright colours, and were fascinated by nature and animals. This interest is reflected, for example, in the imposing, lovingly depicted horses that often fill Franz Marc’s paintings, evoking warm emotions in the viewer.

Kandinsky went his own way within the group. He felt there was a clear intuitive relationship between sound and form. This belief became an important starting point in his work and would eventually lead to what is now generally regarded as the world’s first abstract painting. The series of Improvisations and Compositions, in which the viewer can almost hear the sounds of music, are fine examples of Kandinsky’s quest for the ultimate amalgam of painting and music.

With the outbreak of war in 1914, the group disintegrated. Kandinsky left his partner Gabriele Münter and returned to Russia. Macke and Marc were called up to fight at the front, where they perished in the trenches. The tension and uncertainty of the times can be clearly felt in the paintings made immediately before and during the First World War.

The exhibition also looks at the artists’ life stories and the relations between them. The rare historical documents on show include photographs taken of Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter during their visit to the Netherlands in 1904 and never previously exhibited.

This exhibition, full of masterpieces by Kandinsky and the artists of Der Blaue Reiter, is the result of close cooperation between the Gemeentemuseum and Munich’s Städtische Galerie im Lehnbachhaus. It will be accompanied by a lavishly illustrated catalogue containing essays by Doede Hardeman, Annegret Hoberg, Helmut Friedel and Franz Kaiser. The exhibition is part of the Holland Art Cities event.

earlly music animation

2010-02-07T17:58:00.002-05:00

Visual-Music Culture – Research: "

By
Ryan
|
Published
February 6, 2010

I’m currently going through the reading for my Visual Music Studio class, and I investigated a few of the early films referenced in the reading. Two of my favorites were Opus I (1921) by Walter Ruttmann and An Optical Poem (1937) by Oskar Fischinger.

After watching Busby Berkely’s Dames (1934), I immediately thought of Michel Gondry’s music video for The Chemical Brother’s song Let Forever Be (1999).

I knew of Harry Smith because of his folk music compilations, but I was floored after watching his Early Abstraction pieces. The film exercises from the Whitney brothers were not only advances in visual music but point toward the many possibilities of electronic music.

I enjoyed seeing John and James Whitney’s innovations in automated processes with hand drawings, with a massive jump from their early experiments to pieces such as Yantra and Lapis. Stan Brakhage’s The Dante Quartet (1987) illustrates his abilities in rhythm, pacing, and mixing of colors and movement that “creates an almost hallucineogenic world, a realm somewhere beyond nameable things”.

Reference

Wiseman, Ari, Judith Zilczer, Kerry Brougher, and Jeremy Strick. Visual Music: Synaesthesia in Art and Music Since 1900. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2005.

This entry was posted in 2010 Spring, Visual Music Studio and tagged Film, Visual Music Culture. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.

Mooi Indie

2010-02-07T17:50:00.000-05:00

from pravdakino:
Visual Art Lecture Series: Mooi Indie: "

Starting Saturday, February 6, 2010, Salihara, an everything-posh-cultural-centre in South Jakarta organises a series of lectures about Indonesian visual arts --means, painting. The catalogue notes, 'These public lectures will provide a general overview, mapping and introduction to Indonesian visual artists, as well as to the various styles in their work.' By inviting senior curator and/auctioneer, the lectures wish to explore 'the developments in the creation of visual arts --in which the works of artists in a certain time period have their own characteristics which differ from previous periodor or those that follow.'

On their first series, Salihara invited Amir Siddharta, an established auctioneer, to present Mooi Indie. Here is the excerpt:

Mooi indie (lit. Hindia Molek or beautiful Hindia) is a terminogoly used extensively by Sudjojono (arguably the speaker of Indonesian visual arts before and during Independence) to degrade the paintings produced by European and few native painters during 19th and 20th century. It's kind of colonial gaze enforced by scientist, archeologist and then painters on viewing Indonesia (Hindia Belanda) landscape. Generally, mooi indie's aesthetic favour romantic, naturalistic landscape, given preference for scene of green mountain,shimmering reflection of sky fondling with the golden sunshine. Mooi indie's iconography includes its emphasis on landscape painting, with special attention to three elements:mountain, paddy field, and coconut tree.

Mooi indie tends to portray country areas:hazy morning, the golden sun shining above green paddy field or beautiful blue beaches with beautiful women wearing red shawl or topless Balinese women bringing their Hindu-offerings. This view is correct, according Sudjojono, for those of foreign people (means: Dutch colonial) and tourists who never see coconut trees in their country.

The following is the list of mooi indie artists:

Paul Wichers, Leo Eland, Mas Priyadi (Sudjojono's teacher), Alfred Hardokin, Payen, Wakidi, Sudjono Abdullah, Abdullah Soeriosoebroto (the father of famous painter, Basuki Abdullah).

Sudjojono indicated that those mooi indie painters are:

1. foreign, particularly Dutch colonial painters, who live only 2-3 years in Indonesia

2.those who were money-motivated artists

3.local painters who imitate European second-grade painters who were technically sound but did not know whatever they were doing

Actually during this period, there is a famous collector named Renault (a paint enterpreneur) who had an impressive collection of European modernists, among other Picasso and Marc Chagall. Renault frequently exhibited his collection in his Bataviaasche Kunskring (1935-1938, now Buddha Bar building) that finally (or I suppose), influence such 'modernist' painter like Sudjojono.

As Sudjojono established Persagi (Indonesian Painters Association) in 1937/1938, he launched a battle against mooi indie aesthetic and chose more 'nationalistic' approach. His ambition is to portray ..'the beauty and the passion of new world, new nation, the beauty of independent country...'. In his view, the painters should paint not the romantic scene of colonised country but to paint the sight of sugar factories, the skinny peasant working hard under their Dutch boss, cars owned by rich Colonialist, and other 'realistic' things. 'Our reality, is art that 'realiteit, the contemporary truth, NOT from the glory in Majapahit or Mataram era'.

We could contextualize this view in the history of Indonesia/Hindia Belanda paintings, or what is famously called 'Colonial school'. Most paintings are made for scientific, administrative or archeological purpose. That's why most were not signed. For example: Trading Post, Castle of Batavia and Landscape near Bogor (all are oil on canvas). Some painters were prominent, ex. Jacob Dick van Henwerdeen and Raden Saleh. A native Indonesian with European training, Raden Saleh was the first Indonesian painters using 'European' aesthetic, particularly European romantism (Delacroix anyone?)

His paintings are mostly about hunting scene, wild animals, and some scenes from Indonesian anti-colonial struggle (among other: Penangkapan Pangeran Diponegoro, his masterpiece). Raden Saleh also worked as historical painters whose task is to portrait Dutch colonial government leader, for example. General Daendels. He learnt from his master, Nicholas Paneman. During 1880s, Hindia Belanda was introduced to Realism paintings, whose ambition is to portray daily lives. ex. Courbet. A decade before, plein air paintings was popular in Europe and then in Java when tube and box easel were introduced. These equipments enable painters to paint in the open air and arrange many travels to non-European destinations (in France, I presume, the explosion of South France travel that in some extent, are typical subject of French Impressionist). Some European painters travelled to Java, ex. Beynon.

Amir Siddharta classified mooi indie into several categories:

-landscape painting

-genre painting (daily lives)

-figure painting

-fantasy, ex. Walter Spies

European influence to Indonesian painters:

-Adolf ==> Basoeki Abdullah

-Walter Spies ==> Anak Agung Gede Sorbat

-Bonnet ==> Dewa Putu Bedil

Mooi indie paintings are mostly collected by Dutch colonial officers, tourists, and of course, Indonesian first president, Soekarno.

Note: many questions arise as mooi indie is basically political label coined by Sudjojono to launch his nationalistic ambition. Neverthelles, there is several questions that are left unanswered. I google some sources and recommend the following sites for more study:

1. http://www.asianart.com/articles/fast/index.html

2.http://senirupa.net/mod.php?mod=publisher&op=viewarticle&cid=6&artid=123

TERRITORIFIC! - territory and territoriality

2010-02-07T17:43:00.002-05:00

from Netfilmmakers’ Blog: "

Territorific! Workshop in Hongkong

By Annette Finnsdottir
Sunday February 7, 2010

Presented by Videotage

TERRITORIFIC! A nightcamp collaborative new media art workshop on territory and territoriality

– Call for participation – Date: March 3-5 (Wed, Thu, Fri), 2010 Time: 1800-2300 on all nights (with light dinner provided) Venue: Videotage Address: Unit 13, Cattle Depot Artist Village, 63 Ma Tau Kok Road, To Kwa Wan, Kowloon, Hong Kong Workshop Leaders: Annette Finnsdottir(IS/DK), Rune Søchting(DK), Zeenath Hasan(IN / SE) *FREE OF CHARGE, APPLICATION REQUIRED Application Deadline: February 20th 2010 (Sat)

TERRITORIFIC! is a 3-night workshop for practicing artists and art students to explore the themes of territory and territoriality through accomplishing a series of collaborative works in the fields of new media, performance, and sound art. We are now inviting interested artists and art students based in Hong Kong to join our visiting artists from Denmark and India for a territorific artistic exploration! Through exploration of the characteristics and ideas of territory, the artists raise questions like what the materiality of the territory is, how borders are marked and how virtual and physical spaces are crossed and mixed. The primary goal of the workshop is to create a fruitful collaborative platform for artistic investigation. During the 3 nights of the workshop, activities for provoking thought and sharing of ideas will be carried out. The ultimate task of the camp is to produce and perform interventions in public space. The three facilitators will provide input in the form of thematic talks where different aspects of the theme listed below are introduced. These will become the background for dialogue and collaboration among participants.

——————————————————-

The three key components of the workshop are free improvisation, social media and public space. Possible working direction is outlined below. While these components will be at the core of the discussions, participants are encouraged to build up associations of ideas freely.

Free Improvisation Participants could work towards a joint collaboration based on ideas adopted from free improvisation and performance, creating social interaction in a closed environment. Group discussions led by the artists will explore the theme ‘Territory and Territoriality’ in a conceptual approach.

Social Media Participants could create interventions on web 2.0 platforms, with an investigation into how the realm of social media has changed our notion about public and private space. Are we able to define and re-define territories online? What could be the strategies to overlap online and offline territories and create artistic interventions in the public spaces of Hong Kong and the world of web 2.0?

Public Space Participants could work with performative, sonic and visual interfaces in the public realm. The territorific space in the physical and virtual domain will be the platform for either small intimate personal actions or an elaborate dispersed set of connected actions, all as a result of a collaborative and a personal reflection. The participants are free to use all three components or focus on one of them during the workshop. ——————————————————-

The effort in Territorific! is to gather a seemingly diverse set of art practitioners in an impulsive yet concerted set of activities. Participants will explore the terrain building up in the discussion through hands-on artistic activity. In this conceptually-driven workshop, participants will be immersed in an intensive collaboration and the efforts will be documented throughout the way. Participants should agree with being included in audio visual documentation of the workshop. The compiled documentation will be distributed to the participants.

——————————————————-

FACILITATORS The workshop will be facilitated by three artists: Annette Finnsdottir, Rune Søchting and Zeenath Hasan. Annette, Rune and Zeenath are media practitioners and their works are concerned with space making, virtual imaging, making media with people. While they work with various formats including installation, net video, intervention, performance, they will share their ways of working with workshop participants and generate activities that enable hands-on research into the realization of new media approaches. Since collaboration is an emphasis in the workshop, participants are expected to be involved in developing the workshop format through the 3 vinights and bring their individual experiences and knowledge to the gathering.

Annette Finnsdottir (IS/DK) video-artist, director of Netfilmmakers (www.netfilmmakers.dk) Annette is a lecturer in New Media design, curator and videoartist. In her work and network she explores interactive and performative interventions within and across virtual and physical spaces. She has developed video and performance work based on eventscores and worked with memory and traces within the virtual world Second Life. She is the inititator and creative director of Netfilmmakers (http://www.netfilmmakers.dk) a non-commercial online gallery for netvideo and netart. Annette Finnsdottir holds a MA in Visual Culture with BA in Film- and Media Science and is furthermore educated as a screenwriter from The National Danish Filmschool.

Rune Søchting (DK) artist, composer, coordinator for the Nordic Sound Program (www.vaesen.dk) Rune works in the intersection between music composition, performance and installations with a main focus on sound. In his work he incorporates a number of different techniques as well as technologies. He has made numerous installations, field recording projects as well as composed music for videos and live music for performances and dance-performances that have been shown around Europe. Rune has a BA in Literature and an MA in Modern Cultural studies with a Master’s thesis on the philosophy of sound from Copenhagen University. Alongside his artistic practice he teaches the theory and history of experimenting with sound in numerous workshops and as courses at Art Academies and universities. Since 2007 he is the coordinator for Nordic Sound Art Joint Study programme, a pan-Nordic Master’s level program dedicated to sound-based art within the visual arts.

Zeenath Hasan (IN/SE) media-artist, ph.d. researcher in new media (www.zeeniac.net) Zeenath involves herself in the people centered practice of exercising the potential of media technologies for socially appropriate intervention. The studio from where she conducts her doctoral research on the role of media in a democracy is located in the School of Arts and Communication, Malmö University. She was born in Kolkata and currently resides in Malmö. She has trained in the MS Communications programme at Manipal, Karnataka and in the MA New Media Studies programme at the University of Art and Design Helsinki. She has worn the labels of Information Architect, Interface Designer, Design Researcher, Cultural Producer, and Media Artist and Researcher. She also runs a 1-person design research firm.

——————————————————-

SCHEDULE

Night 1 Meet At CROSS practices Introduction / Presentations by facilitators / Workshop plan / Presentations of individual practice by participants venue: videotage

Night 2 Drawing borders with sounds Lectures + Research activity: How can borders be drawn with sounds? venue: start at videotage, then proceed to places where people listen

Night 3 When the physical and the virtual meet in public space… Lectures + research activity: Mapping social media spaces in the city venue: start at videotage, then proceed to a locus of transitions

——————————————————-

PROSPECTIVE PARTICIPANTS We invite artists and art students with a background in artistic work in the fields of new media, performance, sound art. Due to limited participant intake, submit a brief description of your background, your works, your artistic practice to zeenath.hasan@gmail.com. Include a few examples of your works with visuals if possible. Application deadline: February 20th 2010. Applicants will be engaged in an email communication with workshop facilitators prior to the workshop. Participants are requested to bring along their own equipment as required to develop and present their works. A projector and projection screen will be available at the workshop venue. Resources required for the resultant productions is to be pooled on the initiative of the workshop participants. ENQUIRY: Ms Hilda CHAN / 2573-1869 / info@videotage.org.hk ——————————————————-

SUPPORT Travel for workshop facilitators is supported by the Danish Art Council. Accommodation is supported by Dawei Charitable Foundation Limited

and Art and Culture Outreach.

Large-Format Colour Prints by Steve Macleod

2010-02-07T08:20:00.000-05:00

Artdaily.org - The First Art Newspaper on the Net: "

Stunning, Large-Format Colour Prints by Steve Macleod Announced at Atlas Gallery

Steve Macleod, 'The Island of the Fay', 2009. Photo: Courtesy Atlas Gallery.

LONDON.- Atlas Gallery will present Scottish photographer Steve Macleod’s debut exhibition ‘Blackwater’. Stunning, large-format colour prints depict the landscape surrounding the river Blackwater through seasonal changes and shifting light. Dark, ominous woodlands with deep shadows contrast with lush landscapes bathed in radiating light. Macleod uses the landscape as a vehicle to describe his state of mind, reflecting the extreme highs and lows he experiences. Taking inspiration from a long tradition of landscape photography, Macleod interprets the medium in a new, fresh way. The technically perfect prints are not only unique in their aesthetic but also rare in their production. The entire process from camera to finished print is controlled and mastered by the photographer.

By methodically visiting the same sites along the river course, Macleod repetitively shoots the same subjects through the seasons in direct relation to the way he feels, translating his emotional state through the lens. Always waiting for just the right moment, shooting at dawn and dusk, until each object or detail of foliage is caught within its own atmosphere. A cathartic process, he uses the changes in light and atmosphere as a form of expression for his changing moods. During dark periods, he wades through a muddled mind, confused and frustrated. He finds solace in the landscape, engulfed in its sub-dawn greyness. Macleod’s emotionally charged photographs of dark woodlands have a weight, sombre yet profoundly meditative. In stark contrast, the bleached out, ethereal images represent the artist’s high, frenetic moods. During these moments, Macleod pushes the boundaries of his photography. Objects become unreadable, and we are forced to squint into the glare. Lacy structures of trees are lost in a diaphanous milky haze.

Macleod has worked as a professional printer since the early 1990s with some of the world’s leading photographers such as David Bailey and Mario Testino, collaborating and consulting beyond what is normally required. He has gained an international reputation in this area and published several books on the subject. This knowledge and experience is evident in his photographs, which are technically flawless. Working in a traditional way, he uses a weighty 5x4 Field camera and controls colour temperature and effects wholly within the camera, rather than through Photoshop. He uses early 1950s lenses, which are uncoated and lead to small aberrations, creating a softness in the image with elements of flare. He takes advantage of all the movements in the camera such as back-plate shift and lens tilt to abstract the composition, creating ambiguities of scale. Maintaining a narrow depth of field, elements of the foreground are often as sharp as the background. Large areas of the composition are blurred producing a sense of movement and an experience more akin to human memory and visual experience. In contrast, sections are captured in prosaic detail enticing the viewer into the depths of the image through the surrounding mist.

There are no signs of human presence in Macleod’s landscapes, only adding to their dream-like state, summed up best in ‘The Island of the Fay’. An ethereal image bathed in a deep purple light and velvet tones, its title taken from a story by Edgar Allen Poe about a fictional island paradise. This island can never be reached, the harder you search, the further away it becomes. True of the image itself that seems more impossibly beautiful, the longer you stare. Macleod’s sublime images are a platform for contemplation. He remains true to his own inner visions and his desire to portray a world that was created from within himself.

Steve Macleod was born in Thurso, in the Scottish Highlands, 1965. He trained as an Engineer at Dounreay Nuclear Power Station before working offshore on Oil Platforms. In 1988, he decided to abandon this and pursue his interest in art and photography, and enrolled at Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen. Due to his interest in history and politics, Photojournalism became a natural choice and whilst still at college, he worked in Eastern Europe covering stories on social unrest and underground cultures. Macleod graduated in 1992 with a BA (hons) degree in Photography and the following year completed a Masters Degree in Photographic Theory and chemistry. After graduating, he moved away from Photojournalism but continued to work as a successful commercial photographer, and staged exhibitions of his personal photographic projects. Macleod currently works as Creative Director at Metro Imaging, London, whilst pursuing his personal photographic projects.

The exhibition opens on March 12 and runs through April 24, 2010.

Three Recent Works by Cy Twombly

2010-02-07T08:16:00.000-05:00

Artdaily.org - The First Art Newspaper on the Net: "

Three Recent Works by Cy Twombly Showcased at the Portland Art Museum

Cy Twombly, Untitled, 2007, from Blooming, A Scattering of Blossoms & Other Things. Acrylic on panel, The Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica. ©Cy Twombly. Courtesy: Gagosian Gallery.

PORTLAND, OR.- Among the most important and influential artists of his generation, Cy Twombly has used mark-making and written language as the core of his artistic practice since the late 1950s. Twombly’s work has come to define an important branch of gestural abstraction that conflates painting and poetry, line and word.

The exhibition showcases three recent works—two virtuosic paintings and a bronze sculpture—that illuminate the artist’s continuing engagement with process and content, the immediacy of materials, and the continuum of history. Physical and emotional effects converge in the saturated color and vigorous surfaces of these recent paintings to suggest the transience of pleasure and life. The artist’s instinctive and intuitive brushstrokes coax poetry from the interaction of the pull of gravity and the liquidity of paint, dazzling the viewer’s senses.

Living and working in Gaeta, Italy and Lexington, Va., the 82-year-old Twombly continues to create challenging new bodies of work in painting and sculpture. His work has been the subject of two recent retrospectives at Tate Modern, London, and the Art Institute of Chicago, and is in private collections and public institutions internationally.

The exhibition opens on February 6 and runs through May 16, 2010 at the Portland Art Museum.

Waste and Recycling in Contemporary Art

2010-02-07T08:14:00.000-05:00

Artdaily.org - The First Art Newspaper on the Net: "

Exhibition Examines Waste and Recycling in Contemporary Art

A young person looks at photographs on view at Centro de Arte y Naturaleza. EFE/Álvaro Calvo.

HUESCA.- The first notions that usually come to mind when considering garbage, waste and deterioration are generally negative, when not outright nauseating. We are aware of the physical and chemical processes of the matter around us, beginning with the cycles of nature itself, including industrial processes, technical constructions and manufactured consumer items, and ending with the very materiality of the human being as a living organism. This crisscrossing of elements and activities-which, after all, is what makes the human being civilized and cultural, negotiating and struggling to domesticate and exploit the landscape and the ecosystem, the planet, in short-generates endless reactions, overpopulation and overproduction, upsets and imbalances, and therefore waste, before which we often do not know how to react or that, metaphorically, but also in the practical reality, we end up sweeping under the rug and looking the other way.

The visual arts look many different ways, and although they usually attract many views because of their connotations of beauty, taste, aesthetics, etc., the multiple and relational vision of contemporary artists has also wanted and known how to look under the rug at the theme of garbage and waste. In fact, throughout the 20th century, since the first collages and assemblages with the refuse and found objects of cubism, Dadaism and surrealism, to the practices of conceptual art, Nouveau Réalisme, Arte Povera, land art, and other movements from the 1960s and 70s, which focused on the material, the organic and the conflicts between what is natural and what is produced, the truth is that the idea of waste is not at all strange to the art world.

Inherent to the concept of waste, over time the term recycling has also appeared, and it has become increasingly mainstream since the energy crisis of 1973. Since then, recycling has turned into a catchphrase we apply both to the new cycles of use and reuse waste affords us after it has been separated and reprocessed, and to the idea that an artist has to recycle his or her oeuvre and style in order to more effectively meet the demands for novelty that seem to be at the very root of artistic activity, the exhibition circuit and the market.

Waste and recycling are, then, the two concepts around which this exhibition is conceived. These two terms to be addressed through the selection of works of a number of of artists who sometimes present us with ingenious visual results (for example, Vik Muniz Chus García-Fraile and Diet Wiegman); whereas others play with spectacle and provocation, yet with undercurrents pointing to the excesses of consumer society (in the case of Chris Jordan and Ester Partegàs); still others elicit protest against environmental degradation, yet they do so deploying a combination of audacity, alienation and poetics (in the case of Basurama, Donna Conlon, Mark Dion and Regina José Galindo).

Artists: Basurama, Donna Conlon, Mark Dion, Regina José Galindo, Chus García Fraile, Chris Jordan, Vik Muniz, Ester Partegàs, Diet Wiegman.

The exhibiton runs from February 5 through May 9, 2010 at Centro de Arte y Naturaleza.

Marcel Dzama's Outrageous Work

2010-02-07T08:11:00.000-05:00

Artdaily.org - The First Art Newspaper on the Net: "

Critical Survey of Marcel Dzama's Outrageous Work on View in Montreal

Marcel Dzama, We Shall Be Given Back to the Old Disharmony, 2009. Oil on board, 22,9 x 30,5 cm. Avec l’aimable permission de l’artiste et David Zwirner, New York. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner, New York.

MONTREAL.- While Vancouver and Toronto may have boasted the most vibrant art scenes in Canada in the 1980s and 1990s, Winnipeg took over in the 2000s, spurred on by artist Marcel Dzama. He quickly carved out an international reputation for his unclassifiable, disconcerting art that reveals a fanciful, anachronistic world. Marcel Dzama – c(Of Many Turns), which offers a critical survey of his haunting yet outrageous work, is the largest solo exhibition of Dzama’s art by a public gallery. It will be presented at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal from February 4 to April 25, 2010.

Of Many Turns

The exhibition contains some sixty pieces produced over the last three years, including several new works specially created for this event. It comprises a sketchbook, drawings, collages, dioramas, paintings and films, and examines the artist’s favourite themes: nostalgia, early modernism and the relationship between irony and cynicism, politics and subjectivity.

The title Aux mille tours (Of Many Turns) is taken from the prologue to the Odyssey, where Homer introduces Ulysses as “Polytropos,” a man of many twists and turns. Like Ulysses, Dzama’s art is elusive, prolific and multifaceted. His works draw on a rich repertoire of artistic and literary references, from prewar children’s book illustration and Marcel Duchamp to James Joyce and Dante. He also often refers to childhood experiences in his hometown, Winnipeg: landscape, wildlife, the family farm.

Dzama’s strange works elicit a feeling of ambivalence as, nightmare-like, they present recognizable elements in disturbing, violent or even erotic surroundings. His world has something surrealistic about it, like the famous Goya etching The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.

You’re sure to be swept away on a most extraordinary odyssey.

Marcel Dzama was born in Winnipeg in 1974. He began drawing his own comics as a child. He took up painting at high school and enrolled at the University of Manitoba in 1996. With some fellow students, he founded The Royal Art Lodge, a group of artists who meet weekly to create musical performances and collective works, and at the same time pursue solo careers. While he was still at university, Dzama caught the eye of the Richard Heller Gallery, in Santa Monica, California, with an exhibition at the Fate Gallery in Winnipeg. In 2000, Winnipeg’s Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art organized a one-man show of Dzama’s works, called More Famous Drawings, that travelled across Canada, with a stop at the Saidye Bronfman Centre in Montréal. Dzama was featured here again as part of the CIAC Biennale in 2002.

Marcel Dzama has had a number of prestigious exhibitions around the world. His works can be found in the collections of such major museums as MoMA and the Guggenheim in New York, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington and the Tate Modern in London. The Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal is especially proud of its acquisition last year of a spectacular work by the artist: a fresco of 300 ceramic sculptures titled On the Banks of the Red River, 2008, and shown here for the first time. Dzama has lived and worked in New York since 2004. He is represented by the David Zwirner Gallery, New York.

Destroyed Modernist Homes

2010-02-07T08:08:00.000-05:00

Artdaily.org - The First Art Newspaper on the Net: "

Photographs at Auburn University Chronicle Destroyed Modernist Homes

Chris Mottalini, The Micheels House #3, 17 x 23 ½ inches.

AUBURN, AL.- Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art opens a new exhibition of photographs by Chris Mottalini entitled After You Left, They Took It Apart: Demolished Paul Rudolph Homes.

The exhibition, on view Feb. 6 through April 17, features a series of haunting images that record the demise of three abandoned houses designed by world-renowned architect Paul Rudolph, who earned his Bachelor’s degree at Auburn University.

Rudolph, who died in 1997, was one of the 20th century’s most iconoclastic architects. Originator of the Sarasota Modern style of architecture in Florida, he studied at Harvard after graduating Auburn and later became dean of the school of architecture at Yale University. Best known for his starkly geometric, concrete building design termed “Brutalism,” his residential works shared the same modernist aesthetic while reflecting regional and vernacular influences.

By exploring these neglected paradigms of modern design, Mottalini found poignancy and no small measure of irony in the startling contrast of high modernism laid to ruin. Photographed in some cases immediately prior to the homes’ demolition, his images are the last “portraits” of Rudolph’s striking creations.

Mottalini’s photographs have appeared in numerous publications worldwide and have been included in recent exhibitions at the Santa Monica Center of Art in Barcelona, Spain and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, Ill. This is his first showing in Alabama.

Lady GaGa Study Guide: C Magazine,

2010-02-06T17:59:00.002-05:00

C Magazine, International Contemporary Art:

contemporary feminisms
Winter 2009

Jeanine Oleson, The Greater New York Smudge Cleanse,
Fall 2008. a series of public performances (Federal Hall event, November 3, 2008).
Photo: Khaela Maricich

C Magazine
PO Box Stn B
Toronto, On
M5T 2T2
Canada

C SCHOOL

Study Guides

Jen Hutton's God and the 'Gaze': A Visual Reading of Lady Gaga

Emily Roysdon's Ecstatic Resistance

Additional Resources

Readings, sources and links

EDITORIAL

Contemporary Feminisms by Amish Morrell

FEATURES

God and the 'Gaze:' A Visual Reading of Lady Gaga by Jen Hutton

Istanbul: Hale Tenger and Muruvvet Turkyilmaz by Deborah Root

Ecstatic Resistance by Emily Roysdon

Who Was That Woman? by Helena Reckitt

ARTIST PROJECTS
O.H.F + U.S. A = M.F.A and Positive/Negative Space by Onya Hogan-Finlay

EXHIBITION REVIEWS

Iris Haussler: He Named Her Amber by Kate Steinmann

Yvonne Singer-random objects: random thoughts by Sarah Aranha

Francis Alys: Fabiola by Stephanie Rogerson

Lorraine Field: Vanishing Point by Sara Hartland-Rowe

Ars Memoriae: Eve K. Tremblay's Book People by James Campbell

Colette Whiten by Leah Modigliani

BOOK REVIEWS

The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art, by Eileen Myles
by Amish Morrell

The F Word, Essays by Alissa Firth-England Candice Hopkins, Karen Henry, and an interview with Lisa Steele by Firth-England. Artists' works by Lisa Robertson and Kristina Lee Podesva.
by Ginger Scott

Report on the New York Art Book Fair

by Miles Collyer

Te Wei (1915-2010) - Chinese Animator

2010-02-06T17:51:00.001-05:00

from my five year plan.:

6 Feb/100

It can hardly be called a tragedy when a 94 year old man dies, especially one whose life was as accomplished as Te Wei’s.

Who, you say?

Te Wei, the greatest of the great Chinese art animators of the Shanghai animation studio. One of the incontrovertible artistic masters of animation.

I had the good fortune of learning about Te Wei from a man who knew him, David Ehrlich. In my final term at Dartmouth, I fulfilled a National Cinemas requirement within my Film Studies major with a class inauspiciously titled ‘Asian Animation.’ Wary of Japanese cartoons about robots and the entire culture of anime fandom in the United States, I had low expectations for the class, despite Ehrlich’s reputation as a terrific teacher and his own masterful talent as an animator. We touched, briefly, on Japanese animation, though in those classes we spoke of craftsmen like Osamu Tezuka and his experimental animation in the 1980s and Kihachiro Kawamoto, whose incredibly intricate puppet animations of Japanese folk narratives are haunting and uncanny.

Half the class though was dedicated to Chinese animation, and to a few particularly key figures: A Da, Hu Jinqing, and the greatest of them all, Te Wei.

Te Wei only directed four films in his life. Each is an important work. I’m going to post two of them here and talk briefly about them, but it’s better to let the films speak for themselves.

His second film is among the most popular and enduring works in Chinese animation, Where is Mama?, which was his first experiment in integrating traditional Chinese visual culture into animation. It’s cute, it’s fun, and it portends greatly of the work to come. Since this video is untranslated, you should simply know that the film is about a group of tadpoles searching around their pond trying to determine which adult is their mother. As the figurature is rather abstract, it helps to know this in advance.

The second is Feeling from Mountain and Water (1988), on which Te worked for decades. It’s available for viewing in two parts here:

As in his third film, The Cowherd’s Flute (1963), Te draws upon the visual economy and poetry of Chinese shan shui, brush-and-ink landscape paintings designed to reflect Chinese elemental theory. The Cowherd’s Flute is good. This one is better. Here the narrative is slowed down. It’s ethereal. Te is addressing mortality and the life cycle. Feeling from Mountain and Water is a monster of a film, a work that’s so magnificent in its artistry it’s hard to find other points to compare it to. Within animation, I can only think of another short work which represents such an epochal statement within the craft, Yuri Norstein’s Tale of Tales (1979).

I have David Ehrlich, who recently retired from teaching this past semester, to thank for introducing me to this moving work. David’s love for art and personal expression in all forms has been an inspiration to every single student who ever took a class with him, and I wish him the best.

I hope that you take the time to watch these films. They’re slow, at first glance boring, but if you pay attention to it, the art of Te Wei – the attention to line, shape, fluidity of motion, and the manipulation of time and negative space as formal elements within animation are masterful.

So as I said above: the death of Te Wei is no tragedy. It is simply a loss. A tremendous loss.
"

'America at Work'

2010-02-06T08:39:00.000-05:00

Artdaily.org - The First Art Newspaper on the Net: "

Harn Museum of Art to Present Timely Exhibition 'America at Work'

Mather & Company, "One Leak Can Sink a Ship, Stop the Leaks", 1924. Lithograph on paper. 44 X 36 inches. Lent by Ronald, Elizabeth and Lauren DiFilippo.

GAINESVILLE, FL.- At a time when the nation is struggling to recover from an economic recession, the Harn Museum of Art presents a timely exhibition examining the American workforce from a previous generation. Opening June 8, America at Work: Art and Propaganda in the Early-20th Century will feature approximately 50 graphic works related to labor issues and demographics, popular culture, immigration trends and national identity during the first half of the 20th century. The exhibition will feature iconic work incentive posters produced by Mather and Company, as well as WPA prints.'

“Work is a dominant concern for most Americans today, just as it was during key periods in our past,” said Dr. Rebecca Nagy, director of the Harn Museum of Art. “With America at Work, the Harn is able to connect people with history through works of art and design that remain relevant today. I think our visitors will find these posters and prints just as engaging as they were more than fifty years ago.”

The exhibition will include a group of 30 Mather Work Incentive posters from the mid-1920s, designed to motivate workers, improve productivity, and strengthen morale. The lithographs address workplace behavior with bright, bold graphics and messages such as “Don’t make excuses, make good,” and “Let’s play to win.” At a time when the workforce was undergoing profound change, these posters also functioned as vehicles of propaganda to promote solid American values such as integrity, loyalty, efficiency and teamwork.

Complementing the posters is a selection of about 20 prints created during the Great Depression of the 1930s and 40s. During this period, the Federal Art Project—a division of the Works Progress Administration—provided work relief and materials for unemployed artists. Among the artists featured in the exhibition are key figures in American printmaking such as Don Freeman, Jacob Kainen, Leonard Pytlak, and Joseph Vogel. Some of the selected prints, such as Vogel’s Another Day, address negative aspects of work, unemployment and homelessness. Others, such as Freeman’s Money Magnet, present themes drawn from everyday life and humorous situations, reinforcing the idea that life goes on in spite of great economic hardship.

“The powerful and engaging works in this exhibition provide visual testimony of a period in American life that witnessed both economic success and upheaval” said Dulce Román, curator of modern art. “They convey messages celebrating and reinforcing American morale and values that are especially relevant today.”

America at Work will be on display until Sept. 5.

Wall with Maya Seignior Glyphs

2010-02-06T08:37:00.001-05:00

Artdaily.org - The First Art Newspaper on the Net: "

Wall with Maya Seignior Glyphs Discovered at Archaeological Zone

The discovery adds up to the sarcophagus recently uncovered by specialists. EFE/Héctor Montaño/INAH.

CHIAPAS, MEXICO.- A wall with a rich glyphic text that includes the complete name of the ruler that founded one of the most important Maya military seigniories was discovered in Tonina Archaeological Zone, in Chiapas. Epigraphists point out that the finding will bring in new information regarding Maya grammar, since it shows linguistic features yet to be deciphered.

The discovery adds up to the sarcophagus recently uncovered by specialists of the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH). The wall dated in 708 AD was detected at El Palacio; a stucco portrait of K’inich B’aaknal Chaahk, the most powerful seignior of the ancient Maya city, was found as well.

Dr. Juan Yadeun Angulo, coordinator of Tonina Conservation and Research Project, declared that K’inich B’aaknal Chaahk forged “one of the greatest military seigniories of Maya history before Mexica people arrived to the region”.

Two vaulted rooms found with the wall and portrait are part of El Palacio or Casa de las Luciernagas (Palace or House of Fireflies), an architectural complex at the Acropolis, which is “one of the greatest pyramidal structures of Mexico and the world”.

Dr. Carlos Pallan Gayol, director of INAH Acervo Jeroglifico e Iconografico Maya, Ajimaya (Maya Hieroglyphic and Iconographic Heap), who has dedicated to study the recently found wall, declared that it is important because it confirms that The Palace was the power seat of K’inich B’aaknal Chaahk, the 6th of 14 (known to present) rulers of Tonina.

“This wall is fundamental to understand a chapter of Tonina history between 680 and 715 AD, when the 6th seignior appears in the dynastic sequence of the site. To present, it is known that K’inich B’aaknal Chaahk was the ruler with greater politic and hegemonic power in Tonina, a city known in its times as Po’ (white in Mixe-Zoque language)”, he explained.

Behind the stuccoed wall with hieroglyphs that represent 2 dates corresponding to March and June of 708 AD, is located the seat of a throne, the only of 4 found at El Palacio placed in a very private and restricted location.

Pallan, also part of INAH National Coordination of Archaeology, remarked the good conservation state of the wall which, besides the fine-modeled stucco hieroglyphs, maintains most of its blue and reddish pigments.

“The seignior might have seated behind the wall to converse with foreign dignitaries and other characters, clearly establishing the rank difference with them. K’inich B’aaknal Chaahk was the personification of political power and had a sacred character as well”.

The wall, considered Pallan Gayol, will bring in valuable information for different fields, since it contains historical data, as well as mythological and linguistic information”, he concluded.

Bahman Jalali: 1944-2010 - Iranian Photographer

2010-02-05T20:49:00.001-05:00

Iranian Photographer and Artist Bahman Jalali: 1944-2010: "

Payvand Iran News

Iranian Photographer and Artist Bahman Jalali: 1944-2010

By Syma Sayyah, Tehran

Bahman Jalali

Ustad
Bahman Jalali was an internationally acclaimed
photographer and renowned artist. He had a gentle manner that touched all of
those that came to know him, he was good hearted, observant, a private and
simple man, but an expert in his field.

He was liked and respected as a teacher and photographer by his colleagues, contemporaries
and by his many students and without a doubt has influenced many young
photographers deeply. He was known as a war photographer and covered the
Iranian Revolution, and published two books Khorramshahr and Days of Blood, Days
of Fire. He was also involved in making documentaries but he is mostly known
for the time and devotion that he bestowed on his students and as a real good
ustad (teacher) to photographers, photojournalists and his students at the
universities that he has taught for many years. He was easily the most popular
professor as many students desperately wished to have him as their tutor.

He had collected a large collection of glass negatives from Golestan Palace, and
published these in a very interesting book of his, 'Visible Treasure'. He was
curator of Iran's first photography museum and he exhibited internationally -
currently he was participating in an

exhibition in Milwaukee. In 2007 he was honoured by the Fundacio
AntoniTapies in Barcelona by a retrospective exhibition.

I worked with Bahman Jalali during the three years of the Kaveh Golestan Photojournalism
Awards for which he was head of the jury as well as a member of the steering
committee. I came to know his gentle yet interesting sense of humour during our
many committee meetings and later during less formal dinners and time we all
spent together along with our mutual good friend Mrs Golestan. I always found
him calm and serene - he spoke his mind, never insisted but let the logic of his
point reveal itself.

Bahman Jalali and Rana Javadi

With his wife, my good friend the photographer Rana Javadi, he lived in a beautiful house
in the centre of Tehran where we all went to pay our respects this afternoon.
From what I saw today, the pain and sorrow of his students was overwhelming, one
of them said to Rana, "I do not know if we are to express our condolences to you
or you to us" - this made everybody there watery eyed as this young man let out
his emotion and cried his heart out along with all of us present.

Bahman had arrived back in Iran from Germany late last night, saying that he wanted to be
under his own lahaf (blanket). On Friday morning he did not feel
well and so they went to the Tehran Clinic, where everything seemed under
control until suddenly at about 3 in the afternoon, he kissed his wife's hand
and smiled and thanked her and a few minutes later left this world for the next,
as calmly and quietly as he was famous for.

He will never be forgotten by all those who loved and respected him and I am sure that
he will be looking after loved ones and his students from high above.

His funeral will take place on Sunday morning, 17^th January, commencing at
Artists Forum and he will be buried in the Artists plot at Beheshte Zahra.

Please join me sending his soul a prayer and we hope that his loved ones and Iranian
photography will be able to bear this loss. We are all surrounded by our
memories of him.

May he
rest in peace.

Stuart Cumberland

2010-02-05T18:21:00.001-05:00

from Ben Lewis TV » Ben's Blog: "

Bloomberg Project Space

Those of you who do not enjoy the artful splodge, the painterly swoosh or graphic squiggle may wish to avert your gaze from these new paintings by twenty-eight-year-old London-based artist Stuart Cumberland. But connoisseurs of the skilfully deployed, looks-spontaneous-but-is-carefully-calculated school of messy abstraction (yes, I have a more analytical terminology for this, read on) will recognise that in these works Cumberland has established himself as one of the most promising painters to have emerged in this city in the last five years.

When Stuart Cumberland showed me these new paintings in his studio last month, he said “I don’t know if any of these are finished yet.” Then he added, “Although my paintings aren’t meant to look finished.”
Continue Reading »

Jeroen Jongeleen’s “culture hacking”

2010-02-05T17:34:00.000-05:00

Paramaribo SPAN: Project:
Paramaribo SPAN is a conversation about contemporary art and visual culture in Suriname. It will conclude with an exhibition in Paramaribo in February 2010, accompanied by a book published in three language editions. This blog is the online component of the project. It is at once a journal, an archive, and an independent creative undertaking. For more information, read our introductory note.

Curators: Christopher Cozier, Thomas Meijer zu Schlochtern
Curatorial advisor, Paramaribo: Marcel Pinas
Contributing writers: Chandra van Binnendijk, Marieke Visser
Project coordinator: Ann Hermelijn
Blog editor: Nicholas Laughlin

Project: Jeroen Jongeleen’s “culture hacking

Friday, February 5, 2010

“Site & Content Specific Art (Practice)”, graffiti by Jeroen Jongeleen in the Palmentuin, Paramaribo; photo courtesy the artist

The Rotterdam-based artist Jeroen Jongeleen, one of the participants in the ArtRoPa exchange programme, spent several weeks in Paramaribo in late 2007 and early 2008. Here the Dutch critic Siebe Thissen describes Jongeleen’s work in Paramaribo, in an excerpt from a longer essay in the Paramaribo SPAN catalogue.

Jeroen Jongeleen’s work in Paramaribo staged an encounter between street images and the visual arts. Jongeleen plastered graffiti slogans in the city where he had spent his youth. With not a little irony, he sprayed the words “art in public spaces” on a neglected little concrete structure in the Palmentuin [Palm Gardens] — a nocturnal haunt for Paramaribo’s junkies.

“Buiten Kunst uit Rotterdam” (“Public Art from Rotterdam”), graffiti by Jeroen Jongeleen in Paramaribo; photo courtesy the artist

Jongeleen also added a monumental feature at the corner of Wanicastraat and Sophie Redmondstraat, close to the US Embassy. UNESCO may have declared Paramaribo’s old, well-preserved city centre a world heritage site, but small wooden workers’ houses, many of which have been neglected, do not enjoy that protection. Jongeleen painted one of those unlisted houses completely white, with window frames in light blue — the colour of UNESCO. His action introduced a new element into the visual culture of Paramaribo: “culture hacking”, or the power of art to react to and comment on the surrounding visual culture.

Painted house at 59 Wanicastraat; photo courtesy the artist

Post-Orientalism in new hues

2010-02-05T17:12:00.005-05:00

Be sure to click through to see El-Siwi's web site.

from Al-Ahram Weekly

The humanist aspect of artist Adel El-Siwi's new exhibition will work magic in the market and gallery alike. The painter pours his heart out to Gamal Nkrumah

The visitor is greeted with On the Strain of Carrying Roses, mixed media on fabriano paper. The delightful painting -- a riot of colour -- is by no means Adel El-Siwi's chef d'oeuvre. And, it might not fetch the top dollar, but is one of his stand-out exhibits at the Horizon One, at the Mahmoud Khalil Museum, Giza. The exhibition runs to well over 100 works, well selected to complement each other, bandied as El-Siwi's most provocative to date. It piles up layers of visual culture peculiar to Egypt.

El-Siwi's latest exhibition is marvellous -- each painting engages the intellect and pleases the eye. In some compositions the paint-work is almost worn away by the constant fine touches that echo the Egypt of yesteryear, but the figures are also reminiscent of Africa.

Africa, also mixed media on fabriano paper, is a dark and mysterious figure of a veiled woman, I believe. It is as if a bolt from the blue strikes her. She has her back to the wall. Her face is a cross between a traditional African mask and the map of the African continent. I sense an undercurrent of misogyny. Maybe I am mistaken.

El-Siwi's name quickens the pulse of dealers and collectors in Cairo and overseas. His nudes mock and tease. However, these are not erotic etchings. Even El-Bit Zooba, his adolescent paramour, tells more of El-Siwi than he lets on. He glares fondly at her. She was the kind of bad girl that boys love to hate. She flirted with all the young fellows of the neighbourhood, and permitted more than a few to fondle her, I presume. 'I can still picture her on the rooftop parading her sex appeal, scantily clad and full of self-confidence. In those days we did not have the hang-ups that we have today and girls openly displayed their femininity without the slightest feelings of guilt or inhibition.'

Zooba is the kind of girl who attracts a whistle of appreciation before her admirers move on to fresh entertainment -- the candy-coated, the pure innocent little things that men eventually wed. In short, Zooba is not the marriageable maiden.

She is at once explicit and intrinsically non-athletic. Her sagging, though far from broad hips, ill-fitting underwear -- or is it a bikini -- sharply contrast with her powerful thighs, colossal calves and swollen ankles. The flat-footed beauty is peremptorily unaware of the shapeless vulgarity of her pectoral area.

The figure of the hard-working peasant, with her bulging biceps and Herculean shoulders, comes across as the very antithesis of the contemporary size zero model. Her protruding lips, swarthy complexion and unkempt hair suggest an untamed primitivism. But then most of El-Siwi's women go considerably further than counter-pointing contemporary standards and ideals of beauty.

' Seated Woman, a nude in ochre, black and white, was sold before the exhibition,' El-Siwi remarks with a glint of mischief in his eyes. 'You see many Egyptians secretly collect nudes,' he chuckles.

The Belly Dancer and the Tabla Player (Drummer), mixed media on wood, is of a different phylum altogether. The broad-hipped bellydancer is actually physically not unattractive; Zooba's very antithesis. She strikes a Pharaonic pose with her hands brushing her hips. She is the type that dances in seedy nightclubs in Downtown Cairo. She makes the most of her femininity, but there are telltale signs of the hard life she leads and the indignities she endures to eke out a living. The drummer, too, is a type. Black man, Nubian his features suggest, sporting an eye-catching shirt with all shades of blue ranging from Prussian to turquoise and cerulean and showing off a matching sapphire ring, perhaps to ward off the evil eye. His eyes are hazel and hers a darker chestnut tint of brown.

He stands on a box. Is he shorter than she is? His feet are smaller than hers are. Yet he is all man, even as she is all woman.

Kharti (Gigolo) is another anomaly: A common figure in contemporary Egypt, the kharti chases wealthy Western women, mostly of the more mature variety -- although if he is lucky he might find himself with a younger girl. This particular blonde is callow, with green eyes and short- cropped hair -- a pitifully colorless figure in a black strapless top and bare-waisted, but no belly button. Her skin has unsightly blotches of russet and leprous white. Skin cancer perhaps? Or perhaps she is just badly burnt by the pitiless scorch of the Egyptian sun?

The kharti is big, burly and brown, obviously proud of his catch. He is no big fish, though. He has acquired some European passport, you can tell from the triumphant glee in his eye. He sports a red wrist band and she holds a bowl with 'Felfela' -- the famous tourist haunt in the heart of Cairo -- inscribed on it in burgundy slip.

Explorer and an Indigenous Girl, yet another mixed media on wood, is again a variation of the man and woman theme. Here the woman is the local indigene, the man a dandy explorer. He has an effeminate, knock- kneed posture and dainty hands, noticeably smaller than those of his native belle. She wears a python for a necklace, anklets and bangles, and egg-shaped earrings. And, horrors of horrors, in sharp contrast to his disheveled black hair and bushy beard, her head is clean-shaven.

The indigenous girl wears lipstick, a curious anomaly. Her eyes are the same sorry sorrel -- the unnatural reddish-brown eyes bespeak of artificially-coloured contact lenses. And in much the same vein, no wild native wears roan lipstick. The pointed, pubescent breasts are authentic enough. Explorer and an Indigenous Girl is a quirky piece of exotica -- the black girl is actually lighter in complexion than the white man. She is as frigid and dispassionate as he is impuissant and unmanly. The indigene wears something vaguely reminiscent of a chastity belt. Or, is it a sheath?

The Price of Happiness conveys a similar detachment between man and woman, accentuated by the blank space separating them. The woman is more ape-like than human. Her explicitly erect nipple is the most prominent pinch of her femininity. The man, a robotic-like Boer with a book -- presumably the Bible -- and a repulsive beer belly and love-handles, towers over his entrapped ape-woman whose slithering repulsion for her mentor is tempered by the erotic possibility of her disconcerted innate desire. The image is the very antithesis of Adam and Eve.

Is this creature being intellectually vacant? Her tight butt that looks anything but comely. It is tight in the sense of being contorted, perhaps with confusion.

Miss Abdeen is arguably the sexiest of the women on show. She wears something -- but one is not quite so sure what. Whatever that body- hugging garment is, it is transparent. Navel and nipples are clearly visible. Less obliquely, so to speak, one is left without clues as to whether below the belly button Miss Abdeen is flaunting her rear or her frontal private parts. If it is her posterior we are gaping at, then she is surely some puissant sorceress. The unnerving blotches of blood red staining her comely cleavage underscore this uncanny suspicion.

Miss Abdeen 's is a tale of navel-gazing. The cleft of her buttock, up front, is a profoundly political statement. It projects the image of a sexually liberated woman in bridal white who rejects the notion of her womanhood as merely a reproductive organ.

Up to now, politics has been all but forgotten. El-Siwi's political leanings, albeit with powerful humanistic undertones, have been brushed under the carpet. Khamis and Baqary is the mirage of a factory, an enormous 250x200cm frame. Khamis -- the elder and wiser of the two -- and Baqary cling haplessly to his mentor; Khamis is attired in the blue uniform of the factory worker -- literally the badge of his blue-collar job. Baqary is draped in a floral-patterned dark robe, like the limp, hanging wing of a fallen angel.

Here El-Siwi bends history to his political purpose. Yet the exhibition goes considerably further than an individual artist's political agenda. 'Rules of abstract painting alone -- those laws devoid of core content and narrative fail to attract my attention,' El-Siwi explains. He is far more interested in works with symbols and codes, forms and values, signs and narratives.

Visual aphorism aside, Archeologist and Unidentified King resonates with the mystique of ancient Egypt. Pre-dynastic Egypt, I hasten to add. The ancient ruler is shrouded in mystery. The golden hue gives the painting a royal air, the very heart of monarchy.

Abul-Seoud, mixed media on canvas, is culturally laden and not entirely in a complimentary sense. This is the symbol of an area in Fustat, the first Arab capital of Egypt. Today it is essentially a run down slum with potters and the piece looks a little like a potsherd. The rough surface accentuates the appearance of grubby fingers working deftly at their trade. It is like a wall that has been stripped down for replastering.

The Miracle of the Orient, in bold colours, is true to its name -- decidedly Orientalist. It is a study on how each generation chooses to preserve a different aspect of the past. The water is turquoise and the sky azure. Gold and vermilion contain elements of humour.

Abu Lamaa and Biju, mixed media on wood, is a nostalgic look at the idealistic past. Comic characters from the past represent an era when Egyptians of all faiths loved and respected one another. The Coptic icon and Islamic miniature represent national unity and tolerance of the other.

El-Siwi confounds us with the unexpected. Essam Mahrus and the Fortuneteller is another nostalgic piece oozing with drama. 'Essam was a personal friend, my classmate, who decided to quit school and became a barber. He died, literally of grief.' An epitaph for a lost era? Perhaps.

Kenneth Anger ‘Invocation of My Demon Brother’

2010-02-05T15:26:00.000-05:00

Kenneth Anger ‘Invocation of My Demon Brother’ « Brask Art Blog: "

Kenneth Anger, ‘Invocation of My Demon Brother’, 1969 (film still)

Sprüth Magers London is delighted to present an exhibition of work by the legendary filmmaker and artist Kenneth Anger his first solo show in London for five years. Making films continuously since the late 1940s and considered a countercultural icon, Kenneth Anger is widely acclaimed as a pioneering and influential force in avant-garde cinema. His groundbreaking body of work has inspired cineastes, filmmakers and artists alike. Many channels of contemporary visual culture, from queer iconography to MTV, similarly owe a debt to his art.

Sprueth Magers

Vanities from Caravaggio to Damien Hirst

2010-02-05T15:24:00.001-05:00

Artdaily.org - The First Art Newspaper on the Net: "

Caravaggio, Saint Francis in Meditation. © Soprintendenza Speciale per il Patrimonio Storico, Artistico ed Etnoantropologico e per il Polo Museale della città di Roma.

PARIS.- Olivier Lorquin, president of the Fondation Dina Vierny – Musée Maillol, in October 2009 appointed Patrizia Nitti as art director of the institution.

The first exhibition to be curated by her is « C’est la vie ! – Vanités de Caravage à Damien Hirst » ( That’s Life ! – Vanities from Caravaggio to Damien Hirst). It will present about 160 works : paintings, sculptures, photographs, videos, jewelry, objects…

Damien Hirst’s diamond encrusted skull, the first icon of the 21st century is symptomatic of the resurgence of interest in the Vanities, brought into the contemporary art world and seen everywhere: books, record covers, design, jewels…

As a metaphor of the spiritual splintering and of the world’s break-up, of a globalized planet prey to the ecological menace, powerless to contain the ferment of ideas it curtails, a parable of the desacralisation of life and death in Western societies, this omnipresence of Vanity, crystallizes the lack of meaning of a

civilization floundering amidst its thirst for control. Our spectator society is renewing with the death’s head, used as early as 1948 by the « Hell’s Angels », that gang of bikers on the Western Coast of the USA, who re-used those images with an aim to protest and anarchy. Counter-culture has become culture.

Even if this theme never ceased to haunt, fascinate, and be a cause for reflection from the mosaicists in Pompey to the engravers of medieval death’s dances, from the painters of Vanities in the 17th century up to the 20th century Surrealists, from neo-Pop Artists until the most recent agents provocateurs of the latest art forms.

Starting with this flamboyance of vanities in contemporary art and going backwards in time, by means of little shown works, even those hidden by famous collectors, the exhibition provides an unusual approach to art history.

It goes well beyond the morbid clichés attached to representations of death, to favor a hymn to life, a joyful philosophy, a final attempt to push back the limits of life.

The Elders’ “Tempus fugit”

We know that in Neolithic times the skull was worshipped, since the discovery of a skull with eyes whitened by chalk in Jericho, that dates back to 7000 years BC. And although it would be foolhardy to date the appearance of such a basic form as that of a dead body, it seems as though it was the Greeks, in Hellenistic times, who were the first in the West, to suddenly dare to represent the skeleton in order to invoke the passage of time and life’s brevity. That is what we find in Virgil’s “Tempus fugit” and in the striking Roman mosaics in Pompey, shown here.

But it was at the end of the Middle Ages, in the 14th and 15th centuries, that the skeletons’ dance of death was invented, as well as the “memento mori”, in which the skull with its unhinged mouth is glimpsed behind the portrait of the deceased! The horrors of the Black Death, combined with the Hundred Years’ War and the new Christian theology of the “Drama of agony” brought horrible death into the field of art. After being collective, death became individual. For a while the Renaissance put a halt to that macabre carnival. But the 17th century re-awakened that celebration in all its violence. With Caravaggio as first witness, who linked his invention of chiaroscuro in the Roman dens of iniquity to a morbid realism. His “Saint Francis”, like, later on, those of Georges de la Tour in France or of Francisco de Zurbaran in Spain, emphasized more strongly the skull in the saint’s hand than the man’s own face, left in shadows.

With the arrival of Still-lifes and, more specifically, the Vanities in Holland at the same time, death took over paintings.

Pietro Paolini slipped a skull into his “Saint Jerome meditating” and Genovesino surrounded a death’s head with the body of a sleeping putto. Nineteenth century Puritanism did not much favor those outpourings, and it took Théodore Gericault, seeking inspiration for his “Radeau de la Méduse”, to paint “Les trois Crânes” as a kind of new Trinity, or the angry Paul Cézanne who brought the genre back into favor when he painted pyramids of skulls in his studio.

The moderns’ “God is Dead!”

Positivism and the industrial age, which saw itself as immersed in progress, thought it had finished with death’s victory.

But the Great War of 1914 recalled all of its pertinence. During the thirties, facing the increase in perils, Pablo Picasso re-found Zurbaran’s inspiration when painting skulls like so many allegories of the modern world. Georges Braque in his “Atelier au crâne”, as though stimulated by “Guernica”, followed suit. As would, much later on, the Catalan Miguel Barceló when he went on to paint skulls in the Mali desert. But the massacres during World War Two and the appalled discovery of the Shoah’s death camps, turned the artists’ attention away from those overwhelming representations! – death was once again collective.

The contemporary artists’ “Who gives a damn about death!”

Post-war, neither abstraction nor its opposite Pop Art – which glorified the consumer society, wanted to renew with the art of death. Andy Warhol however, in the seventies, undertook a series of pink and green skulls. Thus we can understand his collaboration with Jean-Michel Basquiat during the eighties, around the voodoo-type charms of that Black Picasso. In reply to Basquiat’s black magical graffiti came the white magic of Keith Haring’s sinewy strokes.

In Germany, after the very Caravaggio-like vanities of Gerhard Richter, the New Wild painted the Aids years: Georg Baselitz, A.R.Penck and Markus Lüpertz leading the way. Those years are to be found again in Robert Mapplethorpe’s “Self portrait with a cane”. Death is ever present in the very real skulls painted by the Mexican Gabriel Orozco, in “Proposal for a posthumous portrait” by Douglas Gordon, the death’s heads covered in insects by Jan Fabre, or in Yan Pei Ming’s large grey skulls.

At the start of the 21st century, the representation of death has changed in nature.

All fear having been removed, the skull and the skeleton become a motif, a fashionable phenomenon. “Who gives a damn about death!” proclaimed the years 2000, when Marina Abramovic carried around a skeleton on her back, Cindy Sherman covered a skull in flowers, the Chapman brothers personified “Migraine” by means of a rotting Frankenstein’s head.

Does death become us so well?

Ron Mueck's Sculptural Work

2010-02-05T15:18:00.002-05:00

Artdaily.org - The First Art Newspaper on the Net: "

MANCHESTER.- Thanks to the ongoing tour of ARTIST ROOMS, the hyper-real sculptures of celebrated artist Ron Mueck will be on show at Manchester Art Gallery from 4 February to 11 April 2010.

Mask III

Ron Mueck’s sculptural work concentrates on the human form, tenderly portraying people in their most intimate, isolated and vulnerable moments. This exhibition features three of his remarkable, out-of-scale sculptures from the ARTIST ROOMS collection: Wild Man, 2005; Spooning Couple, 2005; and Mask III, 2005.

Following the success of ARTIST ROOMS last year, 21 museums and galleries across the UK in 2010 will be showing 25 ARTIST ROOMS exhibitions and displays from the collection created by the curator and collector, Anthony d’Offay, and acquired by the nation in February 2008. ARTIST ROOMS on Tour with The Art Fund has been devised to enable this collection held by Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland, to reach and inspire new audiences across the country, particularly young people.

As will all the ARTIST ROOMS exhibitions, entry to the Ron Mueck show is completely free of charge. The Art Fund has allocated £250,000 per year of the tour to make this possible.

Stephen Deuchar, Director of The Art Fund, said: 'Ron Mueck is an extraordinary artist whose work generates powerful responses wherever it is displayed. Anthony d’Offay’s vision for the ARTIST ROOMS collection was that it would be encountered by as many people as possible - young people in particular. By taking this extraordinary collection out of London and Edinburgh, ARTIST ROOMS On Tour with The Art Fund is enabling people in and around Manchester to see Mueck’s work on their doorstep and entirely free of charge.'

Australian-born, London-based artist Ron Mueck began his career as a model maker and puppeteer for children’s television – working with creator of the Muppets Jim Henson on shows such as Sesame Street, and on films including Labyrinth. Mueck first made his name as an acclaimed artist when his work was included in the Royal Academy’s 1997 Sensation exhibition alongside works by Young British Artists such as Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and Jake & Dinos Chapman. Since then, Mueck’s works have been exhibited across the world, captivating the public wherever they have been shown.

First Exhibition Devoted to Wyndham Lewis

2010-02-05T15:16:00.001-05:00

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Wyndham Lewis, La Rendición de Barcelona, 1936-37. Photo: Tate, London.

MADRID.- Wyndham Lewis could be described as a “single-handed avant-garde movement”. An accomplished artist, Lewis founded Vorticism, the only English avant-garde movement, and was the author of more than 50 books. In addition he issued manifestoes, edited and published journals and was responsible for a fascinating and strikingly varied body of work that runs from his vorticist, Cubo-futurist and abstract compositions to his most refined portraits.

Surprisingly, however, “the most fascinating personality of our time”, as T. S. Eliot wrote in 1918, and “the greatest portraitist of this or any other time”, as Walter Sickert hailed him in 1932, is still largely unknown to the general public.

A pioneer of abstraction, war artist, major portraitist, novelist, essayist, editor and critic, Wyndham Lewis is one of the key figures in European modernism of the first half of the 20th century.

This is the first exhibition to be devoted to him in Spain, as well as the most comprehensive to be organised anywhere in the world since the retrospective devoted to Lewis (“Wyndham Lewis and vorticism”) at the Tate Gallery in 1956, one year before his death. The present exhibition presents his life and artistic and literary output through more than 150 works and over 60 books, 10 journals and manifestoes.

Between 5 February and 16 May 2010 the newly enlarged exhibition space of the Fundación Juan March in Madrid will be presenting an exhibition devoted to WYNDHAM LEWIS (1882-1957), comprising a complete survey of his artistic and literary output. Not so much a painter who wrote but rather a painter who was also a writer, Wyndham Lewis is one of the key figures in European modernism in the first half of the 20th century and the creator (in 1914) of Vorticism, the only English avant-garde movement.

Wyndham Lewis was a pioneer of abstraction, a war artist, a major portraitist (among his subjects were contemporary writers such as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Rebecca West and many others), a novelist, essayist, editor, literary and art critic, and a founder and editor of cultural and avant-garde publications such as Blast and The Enemy. The present exhibition on WYNDHAM LEWIS presented by the Fundación Juan March is not only the first to be devoted to him in Spain, but also the most comprehensive to be presented anywhere in the world since his death. In 1956, one year before he died, the Tate Gallery in London organised a major retrospective on Lewis and Vorticism. Since then, various monographic exhibitions have been organised, including one on his portraits that opened at the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2008.

The present exhibition at the Fundación Juan March includes more than 150 works of art and over 50 books (first editions of his own writings and others illustrated by Lewis), journals (edited and illustrated by Lewis), catalogues of his exhibitions and a range of accompanying documentation.

The accompanying catalogue is published in two editions (Spanish and English) and includes texts by leading international experts in this field, such as Paul Edwards, author of the major monograph on Wyndham Lewis, and Richard Humphreys, a long-time curator at the Tate Gallery. In addition, there are other texts that relate Lewis to the avant-garde, to war, politics, the intellectual world of his day and even to Spain. These texts have been written by Yolanda Morató, Andrej Gasiorek, Juan Bonilla and Alan Munton. The catalogue includes reproductions and detailed descriptions of all the works on display, in addition to a chronology of the artist, bibliography, list of individual and group exhibitions in which he was involved, and a comprehensive selection of texts by and about Lewis, translated by Yolanda Morató, author of one of the catalogue essays and translator of a number of Lewis’s literary works into Spanish.

The Fundación Juan March is also publishing a facsimilated Spanish edition of the journal Blast, whose first edition (1914) included texts by numerous contemporary writers and friends of Lewis, including Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford and Rebecca West. The project is completed with the publication of Shakespeare’s play Timon of Athens with the illustrations that Lewis prepared for an unpublished English edition of 1912. Lewis’s original drawings, which are on display in the present exhibition, have been included in this bilingual (English and Spanish) version of Shakespeare’s text (by Professor Ángel-Luis Pujante and Salvador Oliva), and are now to be seen as Lewis originally intended.

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