Tuesday 21 December 2010

We are born into the World
Like a blank canvas
And every person that crosses our path
Takes up the brush
And makes their mark
Upon our surface
So it is that we develop
But we must realize there comes a day
That we must take up the brush
And finish the work
For only we can determine
If we are to be
Just another painting
Or a Masterpiece
[author unknown]



Monday 13 December 2010

'All Nature faithfully' - But by what feint
Can Nature be subdued to art's constraint?
Her smaller fragment is still infinite!
And so he paints but what he likes in it.
What does he like? He likes, what he can paint!
- Nietzshe -
The basic meaning of the term "art" has changed several times over the centuries, and has continued to evolve during the 20th century as well. Danto describes the history of Art in his own contemporary version of Hegel'sdialectical history of art. "Danto is not claiming that no-one is making art anymore; nor is he claiming that no good art is being made any more. But he thinks that a certain history of western art has come to an end, in about the way that Hegel suggested it would.”
The "end of art" refers to the beginning of our modern era of art in which art no longer adheres to the constraints of imitation theory but serves a new purpose. Art began with an "era of imitation, followed by an era of ideology, followed by our post-historical era in which, with qualification, anything goes... In our narrative, at first only mimesis [imitation] was art, then several things were art but each tried to extinguish its competitors, and then, finally, it became apparent that there were no stylistic or philosophical constraints. There is no special way works of art have to be. And that is the present and, I should say, the final moment in the master narrative. It is the end of the story."
 Arthur Danto was an art critic for The Nation from 1984 to 2009, and has also published numerous articles in other journals. In addition, he is an editor of the Journal of Philosophy and a contributing editor of the Naked Punch Review and Artforum. In art criticism, he has published several collected essays, including Encounters and Reflections: Art in the Historical Present (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990), which won the National Book Critics Circle Prize for Criticism in 1990; Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992); Playing With the Edge: The Photographic Achievement of Robert Mapplethorpe (University of California, 1995); and The Madonna of the Future: Essays in a Pluralistic Art World (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000) and Unnatural Wonders: Essays from the Gap Between Art and Life.))
Arthur Coleman Danto - (born 1924) American art critic, and professor of philosophy. He is best known as the influential, long-time art critic for the Nation and for his work in philosophical aesthetics and philosophy of history, though he has contributed significantly to a number of fields. His interests span thought, feeling, philosophy of art, theories of representation, philosophical psychology, Hegel's aesthetics, and the philosophers Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Arthur Schopenhauer.

Thursday 9 December 2010

Today, I'm crushing on Dan Witz

http://www.danwitz.com/index.php?article_id=54

Chiaroscuro in art is characterized by strong contrasts between light and dark, usually bold contrasts affecting a whole composition. It is also a technical term used by artists and art historians for using contrasts of light to achieve a sense of volume in modeling three-dimensional objects such as the human body.(wiki)


What an amazing painter!

Hermano & Deli. caption: Brooklyn, NY. 2007 oil and mixed media on canvas. 38"x48"

Highland Park, Ill. 2006 oil and mixed media on canvas 38x 52

Dan Witz video - street art
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4FUHSii6OQ&feature=player_embedded#!
Today I was busy to preparing (Christmas decoration) for Metal galleries spaces for Victorian Christmas celebration on Saturday. We, together with girls from Metal, made paper garlands, old fashion Christmas decoration and decorated tower space for Santa Grotto! It was fun! I am looking forward to see Victorian Christmas in Metal!  


Wednesday 8 December 2010

‘Peace & Harmony’

Liverpool to host Lennon candle light vigil on December 8th 2010 



Beatles fans from all over the UK will be make their way to Liverpool on 8th December to mark the 30th anniversary of John Lennon’s death with a candlelit vigil set to take place at the city’s European Peace Monument, dedicated to John. They will be led in song on the occasion by local singers and musicians.

WHERE – EUROPEAN PEACE MONUMENT, CHAVASSE PARK, LIVERPOOL, UK
WHEN – WEDNESDAY 8TH DECEMBER, 8PM – 9.30PM GMT

Since its unveiling by Julian & Cynthia Lennon on Lennon’s birth date (October 9th), the monument - entitled ‘Peace & Harmony’ - has become a popular focal point for visitors to the Beatles home city looking to celebrate Lennon’s life and message of peace through his music.

The monument represents Liverpool's ever physical focal point for fans of Lennon and The Beatles to congregate and remember the artistic and creative legacy of the world icon. 




The vigil of remembrance will form a counterpoint to the ‘Lennon Remembered – The 9 Faces of John’ concert taking place at Liverpool’s Echo Arena the following day (Thursday 9th December). All profits from the concert are being donated to regional charities Alder Hey Imagine Appeal, Radio City’s Cash For Kids and the Mathew Street Festival. The evening event will close the enormously successful John Lennon Season that is taking place right across the city.

Created by American artist Lauren Voiers, the striking ‘Peace & Harmony’ monument features a white feather at its apex; a detail created to the express wishes of Lennon’s son Julian. As Julian comments, “One of the things my father said to me was that should he pass away, if there was some way of letting me know he was going to be ok, it was by, in some shape or form, presenting me with a white feather.” 

Jerry Goldman, MD of The Beatles Story comments:

“Although the European Peace Monument has only been on public display for just over a month it’s already taken on a global significance of its own. People from all over the world are coming to the city to pay their respects and consider Lennon’s message of peace through his music.

“The city is very excited that we finally have a focal point at which to remember Lennon and look forward to a vigil that will reach out to people the world over.” 




The vigil at the Lennon Peace Monument will take place at 8pm on Wednesday 8th December on Chavasse Park, Liverpool ONE, Liverpool L1 8LT, overlooking both The River Mersey and The Albert Dock. 





http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/dec/06/turner-prize-susan-philipz 

 I read this article about Turner Prize winner - Susan Philipsz. I expected bright and fresh opinion from Adrian Searle. No...just plain article...
I like comments more then exactly article.
Do I like winner's work? Yes. Firsly because she is woman artist and then...because I like. 


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWeKzTDi-OA&feature=player_embedded#!


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMsXrKUA0BQ&feature=related 

"You art critics should be ashamed of yourselves – and the Turner Prize thrown in the river finally, drown the fucking thing. An "artist" with a bland voice sings a few trad songs, that she has appropriated, adding nothing except some word substitution, ('cause no one makes anything anymore, or has the skills to do so, 'cause that is un-hip) and has them played back under some bridges – get's 25,000 quid – nice work if you can spin it with some artspeak (she's obviously learnt that bit). So we get more ubiquitous sound in an already over saturated world of sonic play back – great achievement. Any solo voice or instrument sounding in the reverb created by concrete evokes "place, space, memory and presence" and all the other nonsense that art critics, who know nothing about music, blurt out. As to saying it is "disembodied" –our entire ipod music culture is disembodied – that's the wretched problem and one of the principle reasons for the decline of live music (in the sense of musician makes music, makes some sort of living). Now if she actually had stood there for 8 hours, day after day, and sung this stuff along with all the drunks, random thugs, and homeless – OK she would be worth a few bob in her hat for risk. There is no risk here, nobody is putting themselves on the line. It's insidious sonic wall paper and much more deadening than the original inventors of muzak had in mind. If this is art, then we can't get more mediocre. It's an insult to all the buskers who struggle to make a living, and even bigger insult to genuine innovative musicians like Sony Rollins who played for years in all kinds of weather on the Brooklyn Bridge creating something new."(The Guardian, comment from article Turner Prize winner Susan Philipsz: an expert view by Adrian Searle, author of comment ROSENBERG, viewed 8 December 2010)



Judges switched on as Turner Prize goes to the Creed of nothingness, by Fiachra Gibbons, The Guardian, 10 December 2001

"Fittingly, it was the pop star Madonna, the queen of three-minute culture, who was on hand at Tate Britain to present the prize to Creed, who has his own band, owada - a punk outfit whose numbers like Nothing can last a whole five seconds.
In true superstar style, she upstaged him, giving Channel 4, who were broadcasting the ceremony live, kittens by declaring, "I want to support any artist who not only has something to say but the balls to say it... At a time when political correctness is valued over honesty I would also like to say right on motherfuckers!" The man with his finger on the bleep did not get there in time. Creed - warned by the singer that your "20 grand won't go far in this city" - responded to chants of "switch off the lights" with a typically minimal "thank you".


 

Tuesday 7 December 2010

"What they don’t understand about birthdays and what they never tell you is that when you’re eleven, you’re also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two and one. And when you wake up on your eleventh birthday you expect to feel eleven, but you don’t. You open your eyes and everything’s just like yesterday, only it’s today. And you are—underneath the year that make you eleven.
Like some days you might say something stupid, and that’s the part of you that’s still ten. Or maybe some days you might need to sit on your mama’s lap because you’re scared, and that’s the part of you that’s five. And maybe one day when you’re all grown up maybe you will need to cry like if you’re three, and that’s okay. That’s what I tell Mama when she’s sad and needs to cry. Maybe she’s feeling three.
Because the way you grow old is kind of like an onion or like the rings inside a tree truck or like my little wooden dolls that fit one inside the other, each year inside the next one."

Sandra Cisneros (Woman Hollering Creek: And Other Stories)


Monday 6 December 2010


A few lines from Jim Jarmusch. I'm not sure about celebrating creative thievery, but i do like his openness to finding inspiration in the everyday.

Monday 29 November 2010

red and black wolves around the city

There are Bienial wolves all around the city center, they pop up in lots of places. They are mostly black but I spotted this red one at the Bluecoat Gallery. What they mean?

Love this description: "The wolves echo an eternal, universal city yet describe something feral and disruptive of everyday experience".
http://www.thisistomorrow.info/viewA...aspx?artId=495

Interesting... and a bit of irony there too. Of course the symbol of Rome, known as the eternal city, is the wolf suckling the twins Romulus and Remus. But I am not sure the Liverpool wolf is meant to be related to the wolf of Rome is it?

Wednesday 24 November 2010

FACT and Mike Stubbs bed-in

I am envy. 
I did applied to the ‘Bed-in’ in the Bluecoat but…not successful…
Never mind. Maybe next time.
I think this is very interesting project.

Tuesday 23 November 2010

History of Photography lesson and Ernest Shackleton polar expedition in Maritime Museum


rnest Shackleton, a British polar explorer, hired Frank Hurley to record, in still and moving pictures, an expedition to Antarctica, the last unexplored region on Earth. By 1914, Norway had beaten England to both the North and South poles. Now, as war loomed in Europe, Shackleton determined to win for England another polar prize: a trek across Antarctica on foot. Hoping to partly finance the expedition through advance sale of photographic, movie, and story rights, Shackleton hired Hurley.
By seeking beauty in icy bleakness, Hurley changed expedition photography forever. Instead of routinely recording day-by-day activities, Hurley chose to tell a dramatic story. He produced a saga that endures in his stunning photographs.
From England the Endurance sails southward via Madeira, Montevideo, and Buenos Aires. There she loads supplies and picks up both Ernest Shackleton, leader of the expedition, and Frank Hurley, an Australian photographer who will film the expedition for Shackleton’s fund-raising Imperial Trans Antarctic Film Syndicate. Hurley had been photographer and filmmaker for Australian explorer Douglas Mawson’s 1911 expedition. Shackleton had picked Hurley after seeing his film of the Mawson expedition, “Home of the Blizzard.” Kodak contributed equipment to the expedition and exhibited Hurley’s photos in Kodak stores.
On South Georgia, Hurley shows how he works: He and two expedition officers carry some 40 pounds of camera gear up a mountaintop so that he can photograph the Endurance at anchor far below, surrounded by a wondrous snow-streaked landscape.
Hurley writes in his diary several days after the Endurance encounters the Weddell Sea ice, “All day we have been utilizing the ship as a battering ram.” Hurley clambers up a mast to get photos of the ship, which is “shattering the floes in grand style.” Where most men see nothing but ice and water and peril, Hurley inevitably sees beauty. To him, icebergs are “magnificent forms.” One day he aims his camera at “a fine cuniform mass 200 feet high.” In his diary he describes what he did next: “I photographed.”

Hurley shifts frequently from still to motion-picture camera. When seals suddenly appear, swimming and splashing around the ship, Hurley grabs his movie camera; he wants to record action. One day, to the amazement of crewmen, he lashes his “cinematograph machine” on the end of the top-gallant yard so that he can get aerial views of the pack ice. Another day he joins a scientific party off to inspect an iceberg seven and a half miles from the ship. He likes to photograph the majestic icebergs with both still and movie cameras. Once, ice began to give way and he almost fell through.
Hurley “is a marvel,” writes Frank Worsley, captain of the Endurance. “[W]ith cheerful Australian profanity he perambulates alone aloft & everywhere, in the most dangerous & slippery places he can find, content & happy at all times but cursing so if he can get a good or novel picture. Stands bare & and hair waving in the wind, where we are all gloved and helmeted, he snaps his snaps or winds his handle turning out curses of delight & pictures of Life by the fathom.”
http://library.thinkquest.org/CR0215022/explorers.htm


What an interesting information was presented today in the lesson about history of photography and photography exhibition in Maritime Museum about arctic explorers and Ernest Shackleton polar expedition!
It had brought to me a lot of memories from my childhood reading. I already don’t remember exactly which books I had read but I remember the name of Jack London only. He wrote about brave people and about Alaska probably.
How pity that nowadays children are too busy and don’t read the books. It is understandable – they read facebook and play computers games.
In my childhood we didn’t have nor the computers but first TV had only two programmes – news and sport. So we had read the books.
I wonder…climate are changing…nobody really know how, what if Gulfstream will change? And will become polar freezing in British islands? I think it is interesting subject for new blockbuster for Tim Burton or Luc Besson?


I think it is pity that I didn’t saw in the Polar exhibition school children. It is should be very interesting for them in my opinion. Maybe I am wrong.
The pictures are amazing! Frank Hurley was a real hero of his time. I can imagine how he loved his hobby (or work?) if he risked his life and in the face of death kept taking pictures and recorded such a difficult expedition.











Sunday 21 November 2010

 Martin Kippenberger's installation is very impressive for me. Amsterdam's stereotipes are sex-drugs-rock'n-roll. But this is my first visit to the Netherland and Amsterdam and I found this place is amazing and beautiful. I heard about art education here in Netherlands. After finished their degree in fine art student are given five years to work as an artists and improving skils and developing art ideas and Dutch government paid them for it during five years! I can believe!
Martin's installation is about drugs in my opinion. I am not surprised - the old town and especially "Red light district" overload by drugs and drugs dillers. I thought about it and I realised that it is probably very difficult for Amsterdam's parents to educate their children about drugs. I don''t know...I think it is wrong. But...there are no legal drugs in Liverpool but anyway are a lot of drug addicted people.


 
Martin Kippenberger, Dortmund (DE) 1953 - Vienna (AT), 1997

Untitled, 1989 Metal, glass, light bulb, cable
Untitled, 1989 Metal, glass, light bulb, lacquer, cable
Untitled, 1989 Metal, glass, light bulb, lacquer, cable
Kippenblinky, 1991 Plastic, cardboard, wood, metal, light bulb

Jetzt gehe ich in den Birkenwald, denn meine Pillen wirken bald / Now I Am Going Into the Birch Wood, My Pills Will Soon Start Doing Me Good, 1991
Cardboard, plastic, offset prints, metal, wood
Collection Estate Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne

Martin Kippenberger’s work centers on the role of the artist in the culture, drawing upon popular culture, art, architecture, music, history and his own life. He was an exceptional appropriator— nothing and no one is sacred—and much of his work can be viewed as self-portraiture, as he adopted, transformed and absorbed his subjects. Birkenwald was first produced as a room- size installation using the trunks of actual birch trees installed from floor to ceiling in his exhibition at Galerie Anders Tornberg in Lund, Sweden, in 1990. The title reflects Kippenberger’s play with language, as he reconstructs a forest complete with over- size pharmaceuticals and branded pills to enhance the journey. Kippenberger typically produced alternative versions of many
of his works, and presented here is the “artificial” and “portable” version using photographic replicas of the original birch trees, together with a selection of Lanterns, which he began to produce in 1988 in the south of Spain. Twisted, bent, turned into a periscope and made split-legged, their anthropomorphic qualities can also be read as self-portraiture.

Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam


It was amesing to seen Liverpudlian girl in Amsterdam's Stedelijk!
I remember her from Liverpool's TATE.
 
Rineke Dijkstra, Sittard (NL), 1959
Lives and works in Amsterdam (NL)

Ruth Drawing Picasso, 2009
6’36” (loop), HD video, color, sound
Collection Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

In Rineke Dijkstra’s video projection, a schoolgirl sits on the floor as part of a museum education class, drawing Picasso’s painting The Weeping Woman. As viewers, we do not see the painting; we see only the girl lost in concentration, drawing what she observes. Filmed using a single, static camera angle, the image resembles a photographic portrait. Like Dijkstra’s earlier photographic and video work, Ruth Drawing Picasso concerns itself with the photographic subject, encouraging us to observe closely the pose and gestures of the young girl. For Taking Place, this work will appear in rotation with Dijkstra’s video I See a Woman Crying (The Weeping Woman), both of which were created as part of the spring 2010 exhibition The Fifth Floor: Ideas Taking Space in Tate Liverpool and based on school classes visiting the collection.

Museum of contemporary art Stedelijk - is amasing place to visit! It is big and new. There are no permanent collection of art and a lot of gallery spaces are empty, but empty spaces are very big and fresh painted and I found some impression to find in the labirints of gallery some of it. The windows are covered and every space had own misterious charm and colour.
Exhibition is interesting.


I like Barbara Kruger's installation. It is quite psychedelic environment she had created from only two colours - black and white and only from different size of letters. Exhibition's room is so big and it is overload of black-and-white letters and quotes of famous people, I felt myself smal and confused and the same feelings I felt when I spend a lot of my time to read news online. Information superhighway owerloaded my brain and usually it was negative and shocking information...I feel I need to stop and turn computer off but I had continue to red those stupid information.

Barbara Kruger, Newark NJ (US), 1945
Lives and works in Los Angeles CA and New York NY (US)

Past / Present / Future, 2010
Digital printing on vinyl
Courtesy of the artist

Barbara Kruger’s work with pictures and words addresses mass culture’s representations of power, identity and sexuality. As she has stated, “I work with pictures and words because they have the ability to determine who we are, what we want to be, and what we become.” The range of Kruger’s works is broad—from photographic prints on paper and vinyl to videos, room-size installations, public commissions, printed matter, and a variety of merchandise. Using the language of direct address and words like “you,” “me,” “we,” and “they,” her works reach out into the social space of the spectator.

In this installation—designed especially for the building’s largest gallery, known as the Hall of Honor—Kruger’s wraps the floor and walls with printed texts that “speak” directly and loudly to the spectator in a chorus of voices. Her provocative, emotionally charged statements about how people regard and treat each other disrupt the decorum of a traditional museum space. Bringing the world into her work and her work into the world, she confronts stereotypes and clichés, shattering them with a rigorous critique, a generous empathy and a sharp wit.

Tuesday 16 November 2010

Feelings

My today’s research involves looking at the role of participants and pieces of art in art galleries and art gallery space, using the gallery as an immersive space for experiencing and interpreting artworks and my feelings when I inside the gallery space environment. Using the Walker Art Gallery’s and TATE’s sculpture collections and exhibition as inspiration, I tried to compare sculptures and space around it, my feelings and emotions inside the exhibition space.

I like classic sculptures more than contemporary sculptures.
When I visited sculptures room in the ground floor of Walker Gallery, I always do my walk through sculptures room and every time I saw something new and wonderful. It is strange, the same collection and the same sculptures but it is different all the time. Maybe it is depend from my mood? I don’t know. Probably…
I really adore those old sculptors! They spend so many times and emotions, talent and efforts to produce those brilliant pieces of art. Timeless and amazing!
My feelings in sculpture’s room remind me my feelings in the church or ancient cemetery. Maybe it because all those models and people died long time ago and long time ago was died whole epoch and culture of producing such brilliant pieces of art.
When I visited Walker’s sculptures I have a great desire to sit beside it and thinking about life, future and poetry and drawing it. I mesmerised by old sculptures room spiritual atmosphere.
Today I have chance to compare my feelings. I went to the TATE sculptures rooms to explore this concept about feelings of space. There is absolutely different environment. I like pink wall and whole exhibition. Behind every contemporary sculpture in the first place is name and period of time-epoch when every sculptor-personality was produced his art work. There are not so important how efforts and talent the sculptor put to the work. In the TATE sculpture’s room not so important each piece of art but whole collection and exhibition’s room atmosphere. The atmosphere is absolutely different if compare to the Walker’s sculptures. It is cheerful and optimistic, for me, in my opinion, today. Of course some sculpture left to me feelings that sculptor are cheating my aesthetic taste. Everybody can produce the same and without any art education and talent…but in the first place in the contemporary art is – the name. I dislike Damien Hirst’s “Shark” or Tracy Emin’s “Bed” but who cares? It is the names.   Who I am to judge it?



 Poetry from A. S. J. Tessimond:
The British
We are a people living in shells and moving
Crablike; reticent, awkward, deeply suspicious;
Watching the world from a corner of half-closed eyelids,
Afraid lest someone show that he hates or loves us,
Afraid lest someone weep in the railway train.

We are coiled and clenched like a foetus clad in armour.
We hold our hearts for fear they fly like eagles.
We grasp our tongues for fear they cry like trumpets.
We listen to our own footsteps. We look both ways
Before we cross the silent empty road.

We are a people easily made uneasy,
Especially wary of praise, of passion, of scarlet
Cloaks, of gesturing hands, of the smiling stranger
In the alien hat who talks to all or the other
In the unfamiliar coat who talks to none.

We are afraid of too-cold thought or too-hot
Blood, of the opening of long-shut shafts or cupboards,
Of light in caves, of X-rays, probes, unclothing
Of emotion, intolerable revelation
Of lust in the light, of love in the palm of the hand.

 We are afraid of, one day on a sunny morning,
  Meeting ourselves or another without the usual
  Outer sheath, the comfortable conversation,
  And saying all, all, all we did not mean to,
  All, all, all we did not know we meant.

(A. S. J. Tessimond)

Thursday 11 November 2010

Poppy Day and art history


I am under impression by todays morning lecture.
Well, it was not professional lecture, absolutely boring and without any sense and structure.  It was named Chamunda. I am not quite sure, maybe it was name of first slide of her PowerPoint presentation?
However, it should be finished by 11 oclock and all decent people of the country should be hold two-minutes' silence  in honour to all the servicemen and women who fought and still fighting in wars for their country.
But at 11oclock she has not finished a lecture and our Professor very politically correct and polite gentleman did not interrupt her speech and we do not keep the two minutes of silence.
Disgrace