Art and Conscience | Ai Weiwei

September 20, 2014 / / No Comments

‘Trace’ Ai Weiwei@Large

Screen Shot 2014-09-20 at 2.58.59 pmImage courtesy of New York Times

Ai Weiwei stands as an artist of exceptional personal integrity whose story is an extraordinary one to say the least.

I’ve admired his work and practice since I first saw some installation shots in 1999.

This year sees him installing works in the notorious Alcatraz prison as part of the @Large exhibition organized by For-Site. His installation ‘Trace’ consists of 176 portraits of political exiles and prisoners of conscience put together using a staggering 1.2 million Lego pieces. Out of the things that so many children have used to build and manipulate imaginative scenarios and environments Ai Weiwei constructs a tableau that serves to remind us of those who have either been imprisoned or exiled for actively resisting or exposing the wiles of oppressive regimes.

Read the full story here

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…….

GAZAART-1-master675-v3

Read the full article from KHAN YOUNIS here

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.

Interview with Marcel Duchamp

April 4, 2013 / / No Comments

Coinciding with the current exhibition on Marcel Duchamp at the Barbican, London, ‘The Art Newspaper” have released an  interview with the artist from their March 1993 issue which up until now remained unpublished.

This is a fascinating insight into Duchamp’s thinking

“Two years before Marcel Duchamp’s death in 1968, the Belgian director, Jean Antoine, filmed an interview with the artist in his Neuilly studio in the summer of 1966.

This was shown on French-speaking Belgian television in 1971 in the programme “Signe des Temps” (Sign of the Times). When the Video Library was set up ten years ago by the non-profit-making association, Jeunesse et Arts Plastiques, I suggested to Jean Antoine that he keep a U-matic video copy. A copy was stored in the Video Library of the non-profit-making association, Jeunesse et Arts Plastiques.

Apart from being broadcast on Belgian television, the interview has been shown several times to the mainly student audience of the association, but the text has never been published.

This transcript, edited for The Art Newspaper, is the most faithful rendering possible of the way Marcel Duchamp expressed himself. It is a remarkable document that gives us a fresh and immediate insight into his mind. Michel Baudson. @” The Art Newspaper

duchamp-bicycle-smiling

Read the full interview here

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.

Read the full story

text and image courtesy of Reuters.com

HSC Visual Art Resources

July 19, 2012 / / No Comments

Every now and then something comes along that has all the hallmarks of becoming a future place of pilgrimage in the educational landscape. Emily Portmann’s new Stage 6 Visual Art WordPress blog site is just that.

HSC Visual Art Resources is Portmann’s response to the need for an articulate, concise and informative repository of case study resources for HSC Visual Art students and teachers.

Recently launched and still in it’s infancy HSC Visual Art Resources is already flush with quality content that is organized into a systemic and logically sequential flow of information that addresses the work of each cataloged artist in terms of biographical information, ‘Conceptual Framework’ breakdown, ‘Frames’ breakdown and relevant ‘Practice’ references along with a healthy selection of supporting images.

As Portmann so succinctly put it

“HSC Visual Art Resources’ aim is to become a data base of relevant artists explored as case studies for both teachers and students. Teachers can access new contemporary artists in which to add to their own programs and course content, whilst students can access this information as inspiration for their own artmaking (particularly in reference to their HSC Body of Work, BOW’s) as well as for their theoretical studies of art criticism and art history.” @http://hscvisualartresources.wordpress.com/

Emily Portmann is an acclaimed photographer entering a promising educational career.

I would certainly encourage any teacher and/or their students to do themselves a great service; visit the site and select any artist under ‘Recent Post’s’ in the right sidebar and enjoy the journey.

New Art in the 21st Century videos on PBS

May 2, 2012 / / No Comments

“The sixth season of “Art in the Twenty-first Century”, a biennial of art films, begins on 13 April on the US public television channel PBS. Four hour-long programmes over four weeks will document the work of 12 artists and one collective.

Programme one, “Change”, looks at the life and work of the US photographer Catherine Opie, the Ghanaian-born Nigerian resident El Anatsui and the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei. Opie is filmed making photographs of the Lake Erie shoreline in her hometown, Sandusky in Ohio. Taken at the same spot at different times of the day, the photographs were commissioned by a hospital”. The Art Newspaper

 

New art district | Argentina

May 2, 2012 / / No Comments

“The Cuban artist collective Los Carpinteros is showing three large-scale installations at Buenos Aires’s Faena Arts Centre in May. They have created a new site-specific sculpture especially for the arts centre’s 700 sq ft “Sala Molinos” exhibition space and are also installing two earlier works—a Piper Comanche single-prop plane pierced by arrows and a sprawling shantytown neighbourhood built entirely from corrugated cardboard. The exhibition, which runs from 17 May to 1 August, is the second such commission for the two-year-old kunsthalle after Ernesto Neto’s enormous hanging sculpture O bicho suspenso na paisagen in 2011. Neto’s work was funded as part of the centre’s Faena Arts Prize, Latin America’s biggest award for visual artists, which has its second edition this year.” Read more.

The Art Newspaper

ArtExpress at the AGNSW

March 11, 2012 / / 1 Comment

I was at the AGNSW leg of the 2011 ArtExpress exhibition recently and had the opportunity to snap a few images on my phone. Any art teacher here in NSW knows what this is about and should be deservedly proud that senior high school students have the opportunity to have their talents nurtured by such a group of committed educators. For anyone from outside NSW see my post at Adobe Education Leaders for a fuller explanation of the selection process. Of course it’s wise to remember that the curatorial decisions of the various galleries are just that and may not necessarily represent the best of the pool of works put aside for the curatorial teams.

On another note, the show at the Armory Gallery at Newington is the biggest of the exhibitions with Bodies of Work from over 60 students on display. I saw the show last week and it’s truly worth the visit. The Armory show is themed around representations of the landscape and as usual there’s some extraordinary work there. The students, their parents and teachers are no doubt justifiably proud.

Small faculty promo…we have 3 students from Wyndham College in that show and one at AGNSW

These exhibitions speak highly of the quality of art education in NSW.

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See the full selection of works from the Art Gallery of NSW

I’ll be posting slide-shows from other venues in the coming weeks.

Moroz Ice City

February 4, 2012 / / 1 Comment

“Russia’s brand new hyped-up Moroz City (Frost City) comes courtesy of the annual Snow Architecture Festival, which set the challenge of building an entire city made of ice and snow from the ground up to more than 100 architects, sculptors, artists and volunteers from all over the country as well as Ukraine, Serbia, Estonia, Finland and Belarus. It now stands at Moscow’s Sokolniki Park measuring 2500 square-meters and complete with 500 chunks of ice and 1000 blocks of snow.”  Artshub

Read the full article here

Unfortunately the links to the official website and video from Artshub are broken but a quick search for “Moroz City” will land quite a few hits.

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images courtesy of Telegraph.co.uk