Gilbert and George have been amongst my favourite artists for quite a while, and I am thrilled, of course, about the Tate Modern’s major retrospective (watch the movies on that site!). Here another nice feature where they talk about some of their art works.
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“It’s bleak, depressed, run down - and local artists are selling works for a million dollars. Gordon Burn goes to Leipzig to see why the art world is flocking to a mill in the former GDR” - story
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I am quite deeply fascinated by the art of Edith Derdyk. The only thing that, for me, takes away some of the beauty, is being given a description like “15.000 meters of black cotton line, 9.000 stapples [sic!] and 3 days of setting up”. I do believe that these pieces are quite intricate, and providing this kind of information is a bit like telling people that they also have to admire it, because it’s a lot of work (note how this appears to cater to the quintessential modern confusion about art and craft: Since we’re all so lazy, we are led to believe that something that is a lot of work must be a piece of art; but the amount of time the production of an art piece takes is not what makes it art).
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I love going to modern/contemporary-art museums (actually I enjoy modern/contemporary art much more than “old masters”), and I am especially fond of what photo-realistic plaster cast art (there might be an actual art-world term for it, but I’m not aware of it). Since I came across another nice example of such art this morning, I thought I’d point out some of the artists that I’m aware of. Shown above is a piece of work by Patricia Piccinini, who has produced installations (such as the absolutely fantastic “We Are Family”) and photography (for example “Nature’s Little Helpers”), using her creatures in staged photography. My favourite is probably Thunderdome with its subtitle “It is possible that these two females are attracted to the noise and smell of the drag racing.”
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If you think the statement ‘public art can be fun’ is weird have a look at this.
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“The trucks arrived weeks ago, hauling away scores of the abstract sculptures and contemporary paintings Kenneth L. Freed had bought through the years. The time had come. Freed, one of the city’s most passionate contemporary collectors during the 1990s, was ready to sell.” (Story; found here)
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“The painter’s hands have grown clumsy and heavy, too heavy to hold a brush. They lie placidly on his thighs, two tools that broke one after the other. But the artist Jörg Immendorff still paints on, working on several paintings at a time. He paints on without his hands, as if the illness that paralyses his muscles could not harm him. He paints for his life, against time, the time he has left.” - story
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I am quite amazed about the consistent quality and scope of The Guardian’s art section. Not only do you get exposed to a surprisingly large variety of art (covering photography regularly), you also get to see actual opinions from smart people and, often, artists themselves. What else could you ask for? Not convinced? Well, then stuff you can look at at the time of this writing. Here’s an incomplete list: Loretta Lux talks about what she thinks is her best shot, John Currin’s new work is being dissed (“The naked truth is that art-porn no longer shocks” - but it sells!), there is an article about Norman Foster’s redesign of Dresden main train station, about Damien Hirst’s art collection, and if you haven’t seen their feature about Inge Morath’s road trip, it’s about time.
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“Celebrated as one of the most influential figurative painters of our time, Chuck Close has remained a vital presence by focusing exclusively on portraiture, a genre often under-recognized in contemporary art.” (source) Also see this page and this article.
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What I find interesting about the controversy described in this article is that it teaches us a few lessons (provided we are willing to be taught one). For example, what does it tell us about the art world that so many people simply refuse to believe a painting by Jackson Pollock could be bought - with a tremendous amount of luck - at a thrift store? And what does it tell us about the art world that some people (the people at the thrift store) think the painting is worth $7, whereas others (some of the appraisers) think it’s worth about one million times more than that? And if, as Thomas Hoving claims in the article, the painting was not done by Jackson Pollock but by someone who “had a house in some sunny part of the world, Palm Beach or something, and wanted an abstract painting, maybe like a Pollock, in colours that would have fit the room”, why would that someone’s work then worth so much less than a painting by Jackson Pollock, despite the fact that the painting in question and Pollock’s paintings look as if they were done by one person?
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“The Isenheim Altarpiece was executed for the hospital chapel of Saint Anthony’s Monastery in Isenheim in Alsace […] The work of Grünewald expresses the torment of the early sixteenth century more fully than that of any other artist. […] [It] was painted before Luther nailed his theses to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral in 1517, but it is painted by a man who, like Bosch, used his great technical powers to express a simple, unmistakable message of emotional intensity and terrible realism.” (source) - It might appear odd that I’d link to this, but somehow, I recently managed to stumble upon quite a few references to the altarpiece (for example in Michael Kimmelman’s The Accidental Masterpiece), so I thought I’d look it up. And terribly realistic it is.
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There’s a wonderful article about Weimar Republic painters in the new edition of The New Review of Books, which, alas, is not available online, so you’ll have to buy the magazine. The article discusses in quite a bit of depth several of the painters of that era - plus the background of the Weimer Republic, and it’s of particular interest for anyone who admires August Sander’s work. If you compare the paintings with Sander’s photos, on the surface there are no similarities whatsoever.
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Check out this cool interview with Lucian Freud, one of my favourite painters.
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As was entirely predictable, German artist Carsten Höller’s new art installation at the Tate Modern is causing quite the fuss. “Carsten Holler (sic!) has built five enormous, stainless steel slides swooping down into the hall, including one that falls five storeys from the top floor.” (story) See some pictures here. More here, with some “criticism” right at the end. You know I can’t help but applaud Carsten Höller’s work for the simple reason that he’s somewhat of my twin brother (albeit the successful one), what with him being a (former) scientist, “bespectacled and geeky, with a bulging forehead” (source).
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“When she was asked to be a Turner Prize judge for this year’s competition, Lynn Barber was thrilled. A year later, that has changed. On the eve of the 2006 show she reflects on how months of seeing banal and derivative work have left her depressed about the state of contemporary art in Britain.” - story
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The work of Gerhard Richter, probably Germany’s most influential contemporary painter and one of my own personal favourite artists for a long time, can now be found on a dedicated website.
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“There was a time when the critic felt obliged to explain why video and photography might be art, what an installation is, to unpack Duchamp’s importance and to remind readers who Joseph Beuys was. This no longer feels so necessary. The incomprehensible and the indefensible can look after themselves. What we really want to know is who went to the opening, how much money the artist got for the show, and which architect did their house for them. But describing what something looks or felt like, running with the thoughts it provokes, asking why it may or may not be worth looking at, still feels worthwhile, and more interesting than telling you that Damien [Hirst] has said he’d like to hit me, that there were years when Tracey [Enim] didn’t speak to me, and that a stuckist wrote in recently, telling me why I’d got art all wrong, that I hang out with the wrong crowd, but that my heart might be in the right place (this last bit is worrying). Art provokes and deserves something more than silence. Only mediocrity deserves the silent treatment, the critical cold shoulder.” - art critic Adrian Searle
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In The Guardian, Jonathan Jones asks “But where are the images of 21st-century conflict?”. It’s certainly an interesting read, but to me, it appears that Jonathan Jones misses a few points. I don’t want to go into too much detail - in part lest you read the article with my eyes.
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“Southern China is the world’s leading center for mass-produced works of art. One village of artists exports about five million paintings every year — most of them copies of famous masterpieces. The fastest workers can paint up to 30 paintings a day.” - story
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Over at Edward Winkleman’s blog (btw one of the finest art blogs around - if you’re not familiar with it), in one of his most recent posts, Edward discusses whether explanation destroys art. Regardless of whether you agree with him, it’s worth the read - as are probably most of the comments.
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“A historic interview conducted by Andre Müller in 1979 with Arno Breker, Hitler’s favourite sculptor” - well worth the read.
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Ron Mueck’s artwork are photo-realistic sculptures, often quite large. This site has more examples, and this page tells you everything about one particular example. Jonathan Jones is not impressed, though.
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“What does a totalitarian regime expect from its artists? Jane Portal explores the role of art in North Korea.” - “A picture must be painted in such a way that the viewer can understand its meaning. If the people who see a picture cannot grasp its meaning, no matter what a talented artist may have painted it, they cannot say it is a good picture.” (Kim Jong-Il) Funny, I have heard similar comments in the West from people who criticize modern art.
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“In principle, the idea is good, in principle it’s very important that it be executed: the work of sculptor Arno Breker should be exhibited, its creation, aesthetic and political impact should be debated. Breker’s oeuvre, demonised for decades by academics and unduly idealised by others, played, for a few years, a very influential role in German cultural history.” - story
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At the Dumbo Arts Center, exhibition “Point of Purchase” is opening on July 29 (can’t find a link - see Brian Ulrich’s page). Apart from Brian, who has been one of my favourite photographers for a while (as regular visitors will certainly know), I found two other participants whose work looks very interesting: Stefanie Nagorka builds sculptures at Home Depot. Zoë Sheehan Saldaña creates art involves cross stitching and sewing - have a look! Very cool!
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It’s probably inevitable in a society that places money above everything else to find this: “For the last several years, two professors at New York University’s Stern School of Business, Michael Moses and Jiangping Mei, have been compiling data that allows them to track the long-term performance of fine art.” (full story)
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“It’s naive, obsessive and often done with no skill at all. Why are we so entranced by outsider art?” asks Philip Hensher about an exhibition that left Adrian Searle disturbed: “Meet the misfits”.
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“David Hensel, a sculptor from Sussex, submitted to the Royal Academy summer exhibition a piece that consisted of a large bronze laughing head mounted on a plinth of slate and kept in place by a support shaped like a bone. Pleased to have the piece accepted as item 1201 in the catalogue […] Hensel was dismayed on visiting the show to find that his effort had been decapitated; he was represented in the exhibition by what looked like a dog’s toy on a paving stone. It turned out that the head had become separated from the support during unpacking. […] The sculptor David Mach, a selector for the summer show, was even on record praising the ‘minimalist’ qualities of the bone-on-slab display. And as the faces of traditionalists aped the roaring mouth of Hensel’s missing head they were given even more cause to cackle when it turned out that the bronze bonce had not simply been left behind in a storeroom but had gone before the selectors as a separate art-work and been rejected. Yet another bone thrown to the anti-modernist dogs is the fact that the plinth with the bit on top is now expected to sell for far more than the original price of the whole combination. For the provisional wing of the watercolourists association this will prove that modern Britart combines artistic indiscrimination with financial idiocy.” - story
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Christopher Bucklow (bio) is probably most well-known for his Guests series. Find another page with samples and bio here.
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“Henry Darger died in 1973 in a Catholic mission operated by the Little Sisters of the Poor. He was buried in a paupers’ cemetery. He had no family or friends. The neighbors in his north Chicago apartment building remembered him as an odd, unkempt man who scavenged through garbage cans and talked to himself in numerous voices. […] Unknown to his neighbors and to everyone, Darger had been creating and compiling a massive literary and graphic body of work since 1909. […] Central to Darger’s work is his 15,000 page, 12 volume, single-spaced, typewritten epic entitled The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, as caused by the Child Slave Rebellion.” - Realm of the Unreal: A Page About Henry Darger Inevitably - these days, apparently even the life of a hermit artist needs to be spiced up for the amusement of the masses - the book about his art and life (find a review here) contains some speculation about the murder of a young girl. Update (14 Jan 2005): There’s an entry on metafilter with lots of additional links, which appeared just a few days after this one. Conscientious well ahead of the crowd? Or maybe Conscientious visitors not quite as conscientious? Update (3 April 2006): I had the chance to see some of Henry Darger’s art works yesterday, and it was an interesting experience. I didn’t quite expect the pieces to be so big. And the details are amazing and, partly, very weird. Also, plenty of his sketches contain drawings of strangled little girls.
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From the WTF Department: Spanish performance artist Santiago Sierra “is inviting Germans to come and be symbolically gased with car exhaust fumes in a former synagogue. Jewish leaders and media commentators say he is belittling the Holocaust and insulting its victims.” (story)
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I’ve filed Eleanor Antin under art because even though she has done a fair amount of photography, her work clearly covers a much wider area (also see this page).
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“A physicist who is broadly experienced in using computers to identify consistent patterns in the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock has determined that half a dozen small paintings recently discovered and claimed by their owner to be original Pollocks do not exhibit the same patterns.” (story)
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“Gilbert and George, the rude old men of British art, will lead the UK presence at the 2005 Venice Biennale.” (story from The Guardian). Here’s the Wikipedia’s entry about them; if you want it more serious (kind of un-Gilbert-and-George’ish) go here. Also don’t miss this article. Late last year, I managed to see one of their pieces in London, and I admit I wasn’t quite prepared for it: I knew the pieces are quite colourful and impressive, but I had no idea of how they actually work when you see them - they’re huge. Their latest series is called “Sonofagod” (subtitled “Was Jesus Heterosexual?”), described in an article aptly entitled We’d hate to offend. Needless to say, some people did get offended (this link for Americans who think that only in the US members of parliament have nothing better to do than to harrass artists). I do like Gilbert and George’s response to this: “the artists say that the works are not offensive. Gilbert: ‘Christians are abusive to humans - to women, to queers. They threaten us with hell.’ George: ‘That’s offensive, not us.’” They might have a point there. (updated entry)
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“Ignored by the establishment and derided by critics, Robert Rauschenberg may just be the most important American artist of the last century, argues Robert Hughes.” (story) For more see this American Masters page, and then there’s the big show at the Met.
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“Vik Muniz takes well known images remembered from endless reproductions and recreates them from memory, using household materials like sugar, chocolate, and thread. He then uses the camera to record them. Muniz creates a witty and uncanny effect by translating well-known images into strange visual puzzles.” (source) Find more images and/or information here, here, and here.
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What do you call the art of Cédric Tanguy? The images look like paintings mixed with photography mixed with digital art. Quite interesting actually - are these visual remixes? (thru ashley b)
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“A survey comparing mental health and the number of sexual partners among the general population, artists and schizophrenics found that artists are more likely to share key behavioural traits with schizophrenics, and that they have on average twice as many sexual partners as the rest of the population.” - article “What a pile of crap. Those responsible should be shot. Better still, they should be forced to have several thousand sexual partners. Preferably schizoid artists, bad, ugly, psychotic ones. Then shot.” - riposte
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German painter Eberhard Havekost does “Photoshoprealism”, as it is called in this article, which disapprovingly concludes that “this kind of art obviously doesn’t want to be asked questions of meaning - it’s just playing with the mask of coolness. But as anyone who has spent an evening in an extremely cool venue wearing extremely cool sunglasses and the super-cool military look knows, coolness and boredom are closely related.” See more examples here.
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Alyssa Monks’s artworks are painted photographs. I leave this question for the theorists: What is the relationship between photography and painting?
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“Years ago I came across a tiny, misshapen oval grey painting, by the late Blinky Palermo, at ARCO, Madrid’s international art fair. […] I cannot say what exactly Palermo’s painting meant, if it means anything at all. This is just the sort of thing suspicious viewers might take as evidence that, for more than a century, artists have been making their work in bad faith, pulling the wool over people’s eyes and having a laugh at our expense. This prejudice is hard to budge, even though it is nonsense; not least because no one would go to all that trouble and invest so much of themselves in perpetrating such a gigantic and elaborate confidence trick. Unless, that is, the whole scam were itself a conceptual artwork, or a bogus new religion.” - Adrian Searle on contemporary art
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Jody Zellen is a visual artists whose “photography” portfolio contains many digital collages. Interesting stuff. (thanks, John!)
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“Thousands of colour photographs of art treasures, commissioned by Hitler at the height of World War II, have been published on the internet. [Note: The site appears to be only in German, and it’s utterly cumbersome to navigate through. The images are amazing, though. - JMC] As the Allies bombarded Germany, Hitler ordered photos to be taken of the greatest artworks before they were lost forever. Many were subsequently destroyed. […] The photographers, working between 1943 and 1945, used the most up to date technology available to take more than 60,000 photographs. […] The slides were passed to the Central Institute for Art History in Munich and the Marburg Photographic Archive, and in 2002 the archivists began to digitize the pictures.” - BBC story
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More photorealistic painting: The work of Linden Frederick. (thanks, Greg!)
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Those who have frequented this weblog on a regular basis will not be surprised by my appreciation of the paintings of William Steiger.
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“Michael Burges has achieved in doing what artists have strived to do for centuries: transcending the picture.” - story
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“Image appropriation is a genre of art that is often questioned for its originality and ethics. […] Image appropriators like Sherrie Levine, , who credits the original photographer of her reproductions with titles like ‘After Walker Evans,’ etc., breathe new life into artworks that many might not otherwise see. Levine has appropriated photographs by Walker Evans and Edward Weston, sculptures by Constantin Brancusi and Marcel Duchamp, and paintings by Vincent van Gogh, among others.” I’m not that sure I would agree with the “new life” bit there. However, here’s a little stinger: “Duchamp, along with Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Cindy Sherman, has also appropriated work from various media.” So what are we to make out of this? This page looks like it was set up for law students, but it contains lots and lots of links, some to legal pages, some to actual art work. So what about Duchamp’s “Mona Lisa” or Warhol’s Micky Mouse? Or Thomas Ruff’s manipulations? And is the law really the appropriate means to deal with this kind of stuff? (thanks, Harlan!)
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Jacqueline Devreux’ paintings (see more here) evoke photographic imagery. Isn’t it interesting how many people accept this kind of work, but if somebody did this kind of stuff with a camera and Photoshop people would react quite differently? What does that teach us about “art”? (seen at gmtPlus9)
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“There must be good reasons when gallerists start talking about miracles and proclaiming Leipzig as the world’s art capital. There must be more to it that the hustle and bustle of the art market when American collectors learjet over to Leipzig to plough through studios and galleries. Something major must have happened if suddenly thousands of dollars changing hands for the offerings of third year students. What’s going on in Leipzig at the moment is prosaic, gobsmacking, and obvious at the same time.” - story
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Art for a bored society of affluence: For her latest show artist Pinar Yolacan covered old women with all kinds of meat and then took their photos. Now we can say that we have finally seen that, too. Phew! (seen at gmtPlus9)
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