Everest Recycled

November 29, 2012 / / No Comments

 

(Reuters) – Fifteen Nepali artists were closeted for a month with a heap of 1.5 metric tons (1.7 tons) of trash picked up from Mount Everest. When they emerged, they had transformed the litter into art.

The 75 sculptures, including one of a yak and another of wind chimes, were made from empty oxygen bottles, gas canisters, food cans, torn tents, ropes, crampons, boots, plates, twisted aluminum ladders and torn plastic bags dumped by climbers over decades on the slopes of the world’s highest mountain.

Kripa Rana Shahi, director of art group Da Mind Tree, said the sculpting – and a resulting recent exhibition in the Nepali capital of Kathmandu – was aimed at spreading awareness about keeping Mount Everest clean.

“Everest is our crown jewel in the world,” Shahi said. “We should not take it for granted. The amount of trash there is damaging our pride.”

Nearly 4,000 people have climbed the 8,850 meter-high (29,035 feet) Mount Everest, many of them several times, since it was first scaled by New Zealander Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay Sherpa in 1953.

Although climbers need to deposit $4,000 with the government, which is refunded only after they provide proof of having brought the garbage generated by them from the mountain, activists say effective monitoring is difficult.

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text and image courtesy of Reuters.com

Anthony Gormley | “Model”

November 29, 2012 / / No Comments

(Reuters) – Britain’s foremost living sculptor Antony Gormley wants us to get inside his head with his latest work “Model”, a 100-tonne steel maze of cubes and squares, dark corners and splashes of light on show at the White Cube gallery in London.

The giant grey-black work, based on a human form lying down, is entered via the right “foot”, and combines the fun of an adventure playground with the unnerving quality of a labyrinth often plunged into darkness.

For the first time, the Turner Prize-winning artist who has always been preoccupied with the human form allows us to get inside, and draws parallels between the body and the architectural spaces we inhabit.

“I think we dwell first in this borrowed bit of the material world that we call the body,” Gormley told Reuters, standing beside the imposing structure made up of interlocking blocks.

“It has its own life that is unknowable. But the second place we dwell is the body of architecture, the built environment,” he added.

“We’re the most extraordinary species that decided to structure our habitat according to very, very abstract principles of horizontal and vertical planes.”

Model has plenty of surprises. The more nimble visitor can crawl through its left “arm”, which is a passage around three feet high, or clamber on to a roof bathed in light.

“There are places that you wouldn’t necessarily know are there,” Gormley said. As if to prove his point, he disappeared into a large raised “aperture” invisible in the darkness.

Sound also plays a part, with the resonance of voices and rumble of footsteps giving clues to the size of each space.”

Full story

image and text courtesy Reuters.com

Judy Chicago: Deflowered

November 29, 2012 / / No Comments

Judy Chicago: Deflowered

The American feminist artist Judy Chicago, who is best known for The Dinner Party, 1974-79, an installation of 39 dinner place settings for mythical and historical women, returns to London for the first time in more than 20 years to show her work at the Riflemaker Gallery (13 November-22 December) and the Ben Uri Gallery (14 November-10 March 2013), her first UK museum show. Chicago’s early works on paper will occupy Riflemaker’s three floors, as well as the acrylic work Birth Hood, 1965, and pieces from The Dinner Party. “We wanted to explore Chicago’s influence on contemporary art,” says Tot Taylor, the gallery’s director.

“At a time where one of the dominant influences in contemporary practice appears to be art created ‘from a female perspective’ it might be said that Judy Chicago built on the work which had been done by Georgia O’Keeffe and Louise Bourgeois”

Full article @ The Art Newspaper

image courtesy of Riflemaker Gallery

STAGESIX

November 18, 2012 / / No Comments

STAGESIX a resource site for HSC Visual Arts educators, students and the broader education community is now live. This site is part of project REWIRE and is currently in it’s initial phase of development. To get an overview of what STAGESIX is about click here or click on the STAGESIX graphic in the sidebar.

Yung Ho – Materialism

November 17, 2012 / / No Comments

This is lengthy but very much worth sitting through.

“In the China of the recent thirty years, materialism swung from an ideology without a material basis to a pure act of material production and consumption without meanings, which makes today an interesting moment to reexam tangibility in architecture.

Originally from Beijing and educated both in China and in the US, Chang received Master of Architecture degree from the University of California at Berkeley in 1984. He has been practicing in China since 1992 and established Atelier Feichang Jianzhu (FCJZ) in 1993. He has won a number of prizes, such as First Place in the Shinkenchiku Residential Design Competition in 1987, a Progressive Architecture Citation Award in 1996, the 2000 UNESCO Prize for the Promotion of the Arts, and the Academy Award in Architecture from American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2006. He has published eight books and monographs so far, including one in English/French entitled Yung Ho Chang / Atelier Feichang Jianzhu: A Chinese Practice and one in Italian entitled Yung Ho Chang: Luce chiara, camera oscura. He participated in many international exhibitions of art and architecture, including five times in the Venice Biennale since 2000. He has taught at various architecture schools in the USA and China; he was a Professor and Founding Head of Graduate Center of Architecture at Peking University from 1999 to 2005; he held the Kenzo Tange Chair at Harvard in 2002 and the Eliel Saarinen Chair at Michigan in 2004. Since 2011, became a Pritzker Prize Jury member”. @ Vimeo

Ai Weiwei: Art / Architecture at Kunsthaus Bregenz

November 17, 2012 / / No Comments

“The Kunsthaus in Bregenz / Austria explores the architectural work of Ai Weiwei with a solo show titled Art / Architecture. While not as widely presented as his artistic oeuvre, Ai Weiwei’s work in the field of architecture is extremely important for the artist because of the collaborative – that is social and political – aspect of it.

On three floors of architect Peter Zumthor’s Kunsthaus building, the exhibition focuses on Ai Weiwei’s collaborative architecture projects such as the Beijing National Stadium (known colloquially as the Bird’s Nest), developed in collaboration with the Pritzker price winning architects Herzog & de Meuron, but also numerous projects with lesser known architects.”@ Vernissage TV

 

Read more here

Bejing Design Week

November 17, 2012 / / No Comments

“Since the debut in 2009, Beijing Design Week 北京国际设计周 has become an annual International celebration of design and creativity in China, a model set for local communities, and a cultural event for the World. The event is organized into several sections and areas.

The 751 D-Park Tank is one of the premier cultural and creative clusters in Beijing, blending its old industrial landscape with design, fashion and promoting International design exchanges. In exhibition there are works by Design Lobby, Yi Jian Zhai by Space Magazine, Unmade in China, Crystal Design Architects, Republic Space, Nike Flyknit Collective, as well as Dutch Design on the Move”. @ Vernissage Art TV

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Yung Ho Chang @ UCCA and Che Guevara @ Three Shadows, Beijing (China)

November 17, 2012 / / No Comments

“In Beijing’s 798 Art Zone, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) presents ‘Yung Ho Chang + FCJZ: Material-ism’, the first retrospective of the pioneer of contemporary Chinese architecture. UCCA shows over 6 installations, 40 models and 270 drawings charting the cross-disciplinary work of Yung Ho Chang and his practice Feichang Jianzhu (FCJZ). Chang and FCJZ transform the UCCA Great Hall into six courtyard-like modules inspired by the ‘hutong’, the traditional Chinese neighbourhood network of narrow alleys between tile-roofed courtyard houses.” Vernissage TV

 

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@ Tate Modern | A Bigger Splash: Painting after Performance

November 17, 2012 / / No Comments

“When painting’s enduring relevance is debated, performance art is often pitched as its polar opposite: one a venerable, hallowed tradition of object making, the other its provocative, ephemeral nemesis.

But Tate Modern’s new show explores a long history of interaction between them that has led to a fertile strand of contemporary art.

“Quite a lot of artists have a painting practice that only comes about because of an engagement with performance,” says Catherine Wood, the Tate’s curator of contemporary art and performance.”  Read the full article here

sourced @ The Art Newspaper

Painting meets performance: Helena Almeida’s Inhabited Painting, 1975