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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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

Banksy in New York | Better out than in

October 20, 2013 / / No Comments

Banksy’s one month art residency stint in New York seems to have stirred the Big Apple from its deep sleep and has already provoked Mayor Bloomberg into condemning the artist and the NYPD into actively seeking his arrest for defacing public property. The public embrace him and the police chase him, it could only happen in New York. What would Robert Hughes have to say if he were still alive?

Check out this very cheeky animated gif 

Get the inside on the kind of nutters roaming the streets of New York including the Mayor here

The news of the residency was out and about in the artworld before it came to to public attention after the news media picked up on Banksy’s stall (post event) where signed original works were being sold to an unsuspecting public for $60. Video footage was released on the Banksy NY YouTube channel

Follow the full story at Banks’y website

 

 

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Images courtesy of Design Boom

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

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