….Hélio Oiticica’s Mythical World

January 8, 2017 / / No Comments

“PITTSBURGH — I’ve heard Caetano Veloso’s 1968 song “Tropicália” hundreds of times. My parents, who are Brazilian, played it when I was growing up, and it embodies most everything I love in music: an eclectic mix of samba, bossa nova, and rock. Some might say it’s the song that launched the career of Veloso, who that same year would be jailed, together with fellow musician Gilberto Gil, by Brazil’s military dictatorship. Tropicália became the chosen name for the Brazilian artistic movement of the time that was anarchist in spirit and disillusioned by the modernist projects of the preceding decade that soured under the oppressive regime………….”     Read more

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Hélio Oiticica, “PN1 Penetrable (PN1 Penetrável)” (1960), oil on wood @Hyperallergic

Egyptian Surrealism and the Quest to Define Modern Art in Egypt

January 8, 2017 / / No Comments

“The calls to revise the canon of art history have grown louder in the last few years, but the research, curation, and collection of art from regions that have long been overlooked or ignored is a slow process. Egyptian modern art appears to be the latest to undergo this process of rediscovery and integration into the larger history of art. Two major traveling shows (one beginning at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the other at the Palace of Arts in Cairo) are reexamining this period and prominent Egyptian modern artists, including George Henien, Hamed Nada, Ramsis Yunan, ‘Abd al-Hadi al-Gazzar, and Van Leo……..

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Inji Efflatoun, “The Girl and the Beast” (1941) @ Egyptian Surrealism and the Quest to Define Modern Art in Egypt.

Bruce Nauman…..a dark room

January 8, 2017 / / No Comments

“As much as we might feel that our lives are lived these days at breakneck speed, Bruce Nauman’s work suggests otherwise. “Films,” for Nauman, “are about seeing.”

………..Bruce Nauman began working with video in 1968, after a move from San Francisco to New York. He’d been working with film, but found it difficult to find a good processing lab on the East Coast. Around this time Nauman had his first show at the Leo Castelli gallery. The gallerist knew of the artist’s interest in video, so he put up $1200 for some equipment and gave Nauman a year to work with it……”  Read more

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The Power of Painting | Clifford Still

December 8, 2015 / / No Comments

“Still believed in the power of painting, and that belief was a major subject in an interview with Thomas Albright in the March 1976 issue of ARTnews. Following his major gift of 28 paintings to SFMOMA, Still spoke to Albright about why he continued to make art, what it was like to be a part of the New York School, and how he dealt with Jackson Pollock when he was drunk. The full interview follows below. —Alex Greenberger” @ ArtNews

Read “A Conversation with Clifford Still”

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The Rise of the Private Art “Museum”

May 29, 2015 / / No Comments

From the New Yorker, an interesting look at a number of private art museums in Europe. In the face of the inability of public galleries to compete with private buyers in a market dominated by auction houses and the consolidation of art as commodity it’s no small surprise to see an escalation in the number of private art museums, including our own MONA.

Read the full article here

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“This building isn’t meant for art,” Christian Boros said. “How the art fights against the ugly building is very interesting to me.” Credit Photograph by Wolfgang Stahr/laif/Redux

Image courtesy @ The New Yorker

Art and the Middle East Conflict

September 10, 2014 / / No Comments

Gaza Strip — The images of so many houses destroyed, so many bomb blasts, even so many bodies wrapped in burial shrouds can begin to blur together, indistinguishable. But Belal Khaled, a young photojournalist and painter in this southern Gaza town, saw symbols and stories in the smoke all around him…….

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Read the full article from KHAN YOUNIS here

Art + Jazz

September 10, 2014 / / No Comments

Here are some interesting and quintessential album covers influenced by Modern Art aesthetic.

The delicate relationship between art and music is given the full treatment in this article 

Abstract: Jazz Uncovered

Columbia Records, 1959
Clef / Verve Records, 1952
Prestige Records, 1956

Read the full article here at BBC Arts

The Value of an Arts Education

May 29, 2014 / / No Comments

10 Things that Art Teaches

1. The arts teach students to make good judgments about qualitative relationships.
 Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it
 is judgment rather than rules that prevail.

2. The arts teach students that problems can have more than one solution
 and that questions can have more than one answer.

3. The arts celebrate multiple perspectives.
 One of their large lessons is that there are many ways to see and interpret the world.

4. The arts teach students that in complex forms of problem solving 
purposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity. Learning in the arts requires the ability and a willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds.

5. The arts make vivid the fact that neither words in their literal form nor numbers exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.

6. The arts teach students that small differences can have large effects.
 The arts traffic in subtleties.

7. The arts teach students to think through and within a material.
 All art forms employ some means through which images become real.

8. The arts help students learn to say what cannot be said.
 When students are invited to disclose what a work of art helps them feel, they must reach into their poetic capacities to find the words that will do the job.

9. The arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other source 
and through such experience to discover the range and variety of what we are capable of feeling.

10. The arts’ position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young 
what adults believe is important.

SOURCE: Eisner, E. (2002). The Arts and the Creation of Mind, In Chapter 4, What the Arts Teach and How It Shows. (pp. 70-92). Yale University Press. Available from NAEA Publications. NAEA grants reprint permission for this excerpt from Ten Lessons with proper acknowledgment of its source and NAEA.

Artists pull out of the 18th Sydney Biennale

March 1, 2014 / / No Comments

“………The five Australian and international artists – Libia Castro, Ólafur Ólafsson, Charlie Sofo, Gabrielle de Vietri and Ahmet Ögüt – said in a statement they were withdrawing from the Biennale “in light of Transfield’s expanding management of Manus Island and Nauru immigration detention centres” and in response to the death of Mr Berati.

“We have revoked our works, cancelled our public events and relinquished our artists’ fees,” the statement said.

“We see our participation in the Biennale as an active link in a chain of associations that leads to the abuse of human rights. For us, this is undeniable and indefensible.”

A larger group of artists wrote to the Biennale board last week, demanding it sever ties with Transfield Holdings.

The five boycotting artists claim the board and Transfield indicated “there will be no movement on their involvement in this issue … that the issue is too complex, and that the financial agreements are too important to re-negotiate”.

The artists asked the Biennale of Sydney to acknowledge the protest by registering their withdrawal on its website and displaying signs at the site of the four absent projects. Two of the artists had submitted a joint work.

“In the pervasive silence that the government enforces around this issue, we will not let this action be unnoticed,” the artists said……..”.

Extract courtesy SMH

Read the full story and more here here and here