Showing posts with label Focus on people. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Focus on people. Show all posts
Sunday, January 27, 2008
You won't find green grass in an art gallery, but you will be able to look into the neighbour's garden...
0 comments Posted by seiinod at 1:02 AMIs the grass always greener in your neighbour's garden? Many of you may have experienced living abroad for short or longer journey... It is always interesting to see yourself in another framework. You get used to some of the things you may find there (In my case, here in the UK, a few things come to my mind such as the tiny skirts and hum... let me think about it...) and some you will never get used to.
There is something that I still can't cope with here... I tried really hard, I promise! But I can't get over it: The open curtains.
Let me explain... For me, the concept 'home' is deeply linked with this other concept called 'privacy', or 'retreat' and I can tell you that I have great difficulties not to stop to watch what happens in these thousand houses I pass everyday when I am on the way to work.
People laying on their bed or sofa watching TV, having a can of beer, getting prepared for the party... They would be French I wouldn't care. But they are not and I want to know everything about them in the 2 1/2 seconds allowed by the social communitarian rules that would lead the police to my house for 'weird act of voyeurism' if I'd be watching for too long. So instead of leading a digital SLR raid at night to frame these people, I prefer going into an art gallery!
Sometimes Preston homes ring a Richard Billingham's bell in my mind... Do you know him? He was shortlisted for the Turner prize in 2001 but shined among the YBA's (Young British Artists is a group promoted by Saatchi that appeared on the contemporary art scene in a really famous exhibition called 'sensation' that promoted new stars such as Hirst, Sarah Lucas, Tracey Emin, The Chapman Brothers and many others...).
When discovered, Richard Billingham was seen as a poor child of the Midlands who came over a dramatic familial mediocrity through the use of a camera. His mother, Liz, tattooed and obese; his father, Ray, alcoholic and his brother, Jason who is a drug addict... The pictures are usually untitled and are talking about the artist roots; a family album and certainly not related to any political critique or anything like that.
I mentioned it earlier in this blog but I think that, no matter the subject you cover through your artwork, it has to address the network of social relationship that compose the contemporary art world. In this particular case I think Billingham allow gallerists, curators, critics [...] visitors to access to a world that they would not see otherwise. In the particular setting of the gallery, it is highly recommended to stay in front of these 'windows' opened by Richard's camera... highly fashionable indeed. No worries, the police this time won't come to knock on your door; this is institutionally authorized voyeurism!
Who cares about these middle class people? I mean the ones who got a job, one or two kids and a mortgage? I just imagine in 2o years time when the economical, social and cultural centre of gravity will definitely be set between China and India... Would Chinese artists come to the old Europe to take pictures of the last middle class families as we do now with the first middle class Chinese families?
So... from our perspective, Billingham's pictures are fantastic...right? But when it came to produce a second serie of photographs, the artist who was obviously the centre of the press and critics attention, failed to hit his target a second time... He chose to picture the city area he came from. Pretty pictures that did not work...
The art world has a thousand of similar tales to tell. Looking at one of the last issues of PHOTO magazine, I was amazed by a serie of pictures taken by jessica Dimmock. Taken on the apartment at 4 W. 22nd St, NYC. Drug addiction, violence, love, sex, friendship, poverty...
Jessica Dimmock - the ninth floor"The images that garnered Dimmock her F Award, as well as and Inge Morath Prize and PDN's Marty Forscher Fellowship Fund, are compassionate yet disturbing portraits of lives stifled and consumed by addiction" says the other blog... As a European, 25 man potentially middle class, passionated with photography and visual arts in general... with no drugs addiction nor major problems in life... I agree.
Saturday, January 5, 2008
A beauty... Theo Jansen - When the art escapes from the artist - My present for 2008
0 comments Posted by seiinod at 11:50 PMHappy new year everybody! I would like to start the year 2008 with a deeply optimistic post, a present for you.
What is a blog? It could be a lot of things in fact... From entertaining a network of friends to sharing your last Fish Sauerkraut recipe. I would love to think that mine is a way to help you to stay in touch with contemporary art 'actuality' revisited from the specific angle of the cultural differences... I read blogs, websites, magazines, books, watch TV programs all night long... come out with something I found interesting that I would like to share... And if you like it, you come back on my blog. As simple as this!
So let's start with something really catchy: Theo Jansen and the Beach animals!Theo Jansen is an artist and sculptor, living and working in the Netherland. "Since 1990 he has been working on a new creation: skeletons made of electric-conduits which walk on windpower. These animals have evolved into several generations over the last twelve years. Eventually he wants to put the anima Is out in herds on the beaches, where they live their own lives".
Here are a few pictures of these animals:
"Ok fair enough... Plastic tubes on the beach... Looks like Blackpool!" I hear you say...
Then you shall watch this, and consider it as my present for the new year:
You want to know how these thing works? (They walk, are mechanically able to recognize water, storms and to react... to survive... Breathtaking!):
Here is a link to the official website:
http://www.strandbeest.com/
I sincerelly hope that you will like it as much as I do. See you soon! I am going for Scotland and Lake district for a week... Want to join me? :-)
I sincerelly hope that you will like it as much as I do. See you soon! I am going for Scotland and Lake district for a week... Want to join me? :-)
Saturday, December 22, 2007
Bearlin - Mark Wallinger, bears, war protest and a pince of Turner prize
0 comments Posted by seiinod at 5:12 PMBerlin, 5th of December 2006 Zoologischer Garten, calls attention to world media. Knut is born. Rejected by his mother at birth, this baby polar bear was the first polar bear cub to survive past infancy at the Berlin Zoo in over thirty years. Raised by zoo keepers, he became a major "touristic attraction".
Because Berlin loves Bears... You can find thousands of them, both in very official places and in some of the oddest corners of the city. Among many of them, reappropriated by artists, advertisers and therefore tourists, the black bear on Berlin's flag is the one that conclusively binds the animal with it's cultural identity.
Walk along Unter den Linden and try to define a taxonomy of the many "by-products" which shows the bear in countless funny situations... Mugs, T-shirts, pens, postcards... Bring something from Berlin? Bring a bear! So, what would be the ultimate tourist experience if not getting transformed into a bear?
And here comes the winner of the Turner Prize which, each year, awards a contemporary artist living or working in the U.K.:
In the framework of his performance called 'Sleeper' (double agent in the cold-war espionage context), Mark Wallinger dressed as a bear, walked on the huge ground floor space of the Neue National gallery for ten consecutive nights.As written in the exhibition catalogue "The work develops the artist's interest in the idea of transmutation by exploring the mechanics that underpin Berlin's civic symbolism."
I think that Knut (who sleeps in a cage 15 minutes by walk away from the gallery), would tell you a lot about what it is to be a stranger adorning the local cultural attributes if he could talk.
The title also gives clue to the viewer to understand the artwork. Although divided for many years, the city is currently building an identity based upon both east and west cultures. Berlin shows to millions of tourists, its scars as a solid proof of it's notorious history (fragments of wall, differences in the architecture style of buildings on both sides...), but do not exhibits what is left to the city's consciousness as those things do not record on photographic film. I believe that the artwork comes here more than with everything else as a channel of communication, an interface that makes all this reflection... recordable.
The 'sleepers' were double agents forced to adopt plausible disguises, to adopt foreign customs in order to gain locals' trust.
I guess that this artwork will have a specific impact on those who lived and/or worked in a foreign country... Imagine what happened in people's mind when the wall felt down from this perspective; when you become a stranger in your own home... But people from Berlin would tell you this sad tale better than me.
In fact, and although sleeper's footage is currently exhibited at Tate Liverpool, this is not this artwork that the Turner Prize jury awarded. The winner project is called State Britain and recreates the peace campaigner Brian Haw's anti-war protest in Parliament Square. You probably saw it if you visited London and therefore Big-Ben, two steps away from Brian Haw's camp. Precise in every details, from the tea-making area to the numerous banners, flags, photographs and posters, Wallinger apparently hired 14 people for six months to source the materials and carefully weather and age them to a state of complete authenticity.But at the end,... what makes all this so special? Look at the picture of the artwork below:
Can you see the black tape line drawn on the Tate gallery's floor, behind the artist? It appears that this line defines exactly the actual zone of exclusion drawn in May 23 2006 following the passing by parliament of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act that forbade unauthorised demonstrations within a kilometre of Parliament Square!
The artwork stands exactly on this line... How clever... Therefore, it becomes 'outlaw' but culturally approved by the government and therefore untouchable, which brings back to life the Brian Haw tools for protestation. Moreover, it attracts the attention of the media and demonstrates how art and language can be powerful!
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Did you read the contemporary art news recently? Ever heard about Jeff Koons? Well Jeff Koons is responsible of the production of the most expensive piece by a living artist ever auctioned. How much? $23.6 million... A sculpture of a stainless steel heart hanging from a golden bow. The previous record for a living artist was Damien Hirst's "Lullaby Spring," which sold for $19.5 million last June at Sotheby's in London . Hirst's piece was a stainless steel cabinet containing 6,136 handcrafted and painted pills.
The Koons work was bought by the Gagosian Gallery, "Hanging Heart," nearly 9 feet tall and weighing more than 3,500 pounds, is from Koons' "Celebration" series, inspired by celebratory milestones such as birthdays and anniversaries.Yes Koons rules... But why? "This is just ridiculous" I hear from my left... "I do not care from the right"... Fair enough, I will give a small explanation anyway:
Koons belongs to a generation of artists that (we thought...) knew their pick of popularity in the 80's. Such as Hirst mentioned above or Maurizio Cattelan he offered to the world a new medium of art: After the Canvas, the Sculpture, the performance the ready-made, the Installation... they used the Market!!!
The Challenge was, once this new medium discovered was to manipulate it and to exercise its full possibilities. Jeff Koons technique is based on highlighting 'banalities' (a name of one of his best series): Hoover enlightened by neon, giant balloon-dog or kitsch porcelain sculptures of Michael Jackson; Koons wants to understand why and how products of mass consumption are glorified.
To simplify it places him between Marcel Duchamp (the ready-made influence: well-known for the masterpiece fountain... an urinal which tells so much about the art market) and Andy Warhol (the pop culture and critique of the mass consumption); but Koons artworks are not ellitists and he would like to talk about things that everybody can recognise easily.
He was a pioneer and still is... was really controversial by being the first artist cultivating his image by employing image consultants... This guy married the ultra-kitsch porn star Ilona Staller!!!!
In conclusion hanging heart costs $23.6 million and this price is part of what the artwork meaning if you still follow. Got it? It talks about the ridiculous price that people can spend in 'banalities' and it speaks pretty loud don't you think so?
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