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

Wednesday 10 November 2010

FACT
Mike Stubbs talk in the LJMU was very interesting. He is very interesting personality and character.
He said that FACT is unique place because there are only few places like that are in the whole world!  
Only 5 places like that are in the world: in the Tokyo, in Austria, in Germany, in Melbourne (Australia) and in Liverpool – FACT.
It was (Mike’s presentation) a few weeks ago; but today, after visiting the FACT I understood why FACT Biennial exhibition called “Mother’s Touch”.
It is because of video installation, short video film in the foyer of FACT. It is the work of Japanese artist Meiro Koizumi  My Voice Would Reach You.
In a video documenting a performance of sorts, a male protagonist makes an idealised telephone call that falls on deaf ears. The man pours out his thoughts and emotions to his mother, amidst a backdrop of a busy Tokyo street, but on the other end of the line a call centre employee is revealed to be desperately trying to make sense of what she is hearing.
Reflecting on both the estrangement of life in the city and the folly of modern familial relationships, Koizumi contrasts humour with heartfelt emotion to create an absurd scenario that is compounded by the lead actor’s own experience of losing a mother. Here and in his other work, he uses video in a way that documents performances, conversations and constructed scenarios to explore the psychology of urban relationships and modern living.
I never paid attention to this video before. I quite dislike and don’t understand contemporary video art. But I keep trying to understand it and be confident about it.
I live and understand the movies. Not those “loud-blockbusters-action-iron-men-like”; I like movies which makes my feelings blow. What is different between movies and video art? Time of screening?
Whatever…
I like theme “Mother’s touch” anyway.

So I asked Mike: “Why his exhibition called “Mother’s Touch”? There are nothing about mother and child?
Nowadays it is so hard to be a mother. Good one. There is very horrible reality outside the doorstep and there are no answers for children questions”.
He responded: “Horrible?!!! No! Life is beautiful!!!”
And he became busy to sign books for students.








Kaarina Kaikkonen is one of the many international artists that has been commissioned as part of the 10th Liverpool Biennial Festival of Contemporary Art.  Kaarina’s beautiful sculptural work placed over FACT’s atrium.
Kaarina started out as a painter, but felt like drawing wasn’t challenging enough, and wanted to make her art more physical.  Her work crosses the boundaries between sculpture, installation and architecture.  She uses all kinds of recycled materials to create her work such as craft paper, potato sacks and second hand clothes.
Her work benefits from being easily approachable, as it tends to deal with issues that most people will encounter in their everyday lives such as social change, the effect of natural disasters on individuals and religious themes.  Kaarina is an internationally recognised artist and has held solo exhibitions in Brussels, New York and Malmo. 
Her most talked about work, Way, ensconced the steps leading up to the Helsinki Cathedral with men’s jackets in 2000.  Using men’s jackets has become somewhat of a trademark for Kaarina, as she often links back to her parents by using her own deceased father’s jackets within her work. 

information and picture are from oficial FACT website
http://www.fact.co.uk/news/blog/2010/08/25/liverpool-biennial-2010-kaarina-kaikkonen
FACT 

FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) has been leading the UK video, film and new media arts scene for 20 years with groundbreaking exhibitions, education and research projects. The organisation aims to pioneer new forms of artistic and social interaction with individuals and communities.

During its history, FACT has commissioned and presented over 250 digital media works with artists including Pipilotti Rist, Bill Viola, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Vito Acconci and Isaac Julien.

FACT is a member of LARC (Liverpool Arts Regeneration Consortium), a partnership of eight of the leading cultural organisations in Liverpool set up to help ensure that the cultural sector plays a significant role in the regeneration of the Liverpool City Region. The organisation is based in the heart of the RopeWalks area of the city and is central to the regeneration of the area.

Since 1992, FACT's Engagement Team (formerly Education & Collaborations) has been delivering a range of programmes aimed at addressing issues such as community cohesion, social exclusion, technological exclusion, citizenship and civic participation.

With programmes dedicated to schools and colleges, communities, young people, families, interest groups, health, housing and regeneration, the Engagement Team use creativity and innovate  projects to foster sustainable communities and to improve quality of living.

FACT’s Engagement programme endeavours to:

- Ensure the widest possible participation and engagement in FACT's core offer and building
- Continue to build world renowned and locally respected models of engagement
- Produce and present new works of artistic significance and social benefit
- Engage FACT's audience and stakeholders as producers empowering individuals and communities to engage
- Commission leading thinkers, artists and provocateurs to work with communities of interest
- Develop ethical commercial opportunities to sustain programmes and levels of engagement
FACT's work in the fields of artistic, social and scientific research
Over the years, FACT has launched partnerships with the University of Liverpool and Liverpool John Moores University to set up a series of collaborative PhD student-ships researching around higher education institutions, arts organisations and funders.
Films shown in the building are programmed by two organisations FACT and Picturehouse. Much of the FACT film programme relates to the exhibitions that are shown within the galleries and are chosen to enhance and extend the exhibition experience. FACT also programmes special screenings and one-off events so keep checking the website for updates.

Picturehouse at FACT is part of City Screen, the leading independent cinema operator and the fourth largest in the UK. The Picturehouse film programme includes mainstream blockbusters but independent, art-house and foreign-language films are also central to their profile. The cinema is programmed in response to the local Liverpool audience.

Increasingly, FACT's exhibitions incorporate research elements aimed at furthering the organisation's programme to extend beyond the arts.
FACT is a registered charity and the UK's national centre for the support and exhibition of new media arts in the UK. Thanks to your generosity and support, we have showcased the most prominent artists, extended our education and community programmes, and attracted millions of visitors since 1988.

FUNDERS

FACT is proud to receive the generous funding and support of: Liverpool City Council, Arts Council England, Arena Housing Group, Biffaward, British Council, Cultural Leadership Programme, Department of Culture Media and Sport, FACT Fifty, First Light Movies, Liverpool Primary Care Trust, Northwest Vision and Media, Paul Hamlyn, Pro Helvetia, The Foyle Foundation, The Mersey Partnership, Youth Opportunity Fund, UK Film Council, Wellcome Trust.
SPONSORSHIP

FACT benefits from sponsorship by national and international forward-thinking companies. We can offer you high profile branding through our cutting-edge exhibitions, festivals, and our FACT TV platform.

CORPORATE MEMBERSHIP

FACT is about to launch a Corporate Membership Scheme. Members will benefit from our first class hire venues, private view invitations for staff and guests, special events and occasions.

TRUSTS & FOUNDATIONS

FACT has managed an extensive education and community programme across Liverpool and the North West. We have received financial support from: The Foyle Foundation, The Wellcome Trust, Biffaward


FACT Programme is the artistic core of the organisation, commissioning and exhibiting projects by artists in film, video and new and emerging media forms and working with a wide variety of partner organisations.

FACT Programme delivers four seasonal exhibitions a year in the FACT gallery spaces, which are linked by a common theme. In 2009 this has been UNsustainable, in response to Liverpool City Council's Year of the Environment. In 2010 Innovation and Wellbeing will be examined under the theme of Progress.

The exhibitions we have commissioned or curated have a life after they have been shown in the building, touring nationally and internationally.

 Liverpool Biennial is the largest contemporary arts festival in the UK. Every two years, the city becomes a giant canvas with international artworks displayed across galleries (like FACT) and (often unexpected) public spaces. Liverpool Biennial celebrates its 10th birthday this year with more artists than ever before. The theme for the festival is Touched which is all about art that moves us - in mind, body and soul.

At FACT, the Biennial 2010 exhibition has theme into the idea of "a mother's touch". The artists in the exhibition are interested in ideas of separation and loss. They explore the relationship between mother and child, when more and more of people live dispersed in other cities and overseas, do they learn new ways to be touched and touch?

I have chosen piece of art "Hanging On to Each Other", by Kaarina Kaikkonen from Finland.
Finnish artist Kaarina Kaikkonen creates site-specific installations in both interior and exterior spaces using items of used clothing or shoes collected from local donors. The garments carry personal memories of the owner, and with them, she makes large-scale architectural forms or sculptures. While the materials she uses represent a common experience of domestic life, they also often allude to the artists’ own parents - her deceased father’s jackets as well as her mother’s shoes.
In a new project, she collects second hand clothing from individuals of all ages around the Liverpool area, and installs them in FACT’s public Atrium. The work reflects on the maternal act of doing the laundry, which can be understood as a basic symbol of healing, care, and unconditional love.Kaarina said about her work: “It is shape of a ship; it is made of clothing donated by the Liverpool people. Ship form is a kind of a connected to the history of the city, my idea is: people could feel them self’s to be a part of my work, to see them self somehow find something new from them self, how it is to be a human beings, what is this life all about, something like that.
I have always a feeling that I am not a good person; I am not good human being, so I try to be better by making art. I had students working as my assistants, and all the people in the FACT and everywhere has been helping me and Liverpool people are so much creative and energetic! It is wonderful, wonderful city!”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_gUz9YdCBY&feature=channel


information about FACT are from oficial FACT website:
http://www.fact.co.uk
 

Saturday 6 November 2010

The term 'Art Deco' is taken from the name of the 1925 Paris exhibition titled Exposition Internationale des Arts D&eacutecoratifs et Industriels Modernes. The most popular and respected French artists of the day showcased their work at this exhibition.
Jewellery makers, graphic artists, painters, architects, fashion designers and all other manner of craftsmen and women displayed their pieces at the exhibition. All of the works had a commonality - they were not only functional, but also very beautiful and decorative.
The exhibition in Paris was meant to be a display of nouveau design from around the world, but U.S. Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover declared Americans off limits from entering, as he felt no contemporary architecture was "new" enough.  Instead, Hoover sent experts to learn and adapt the exhibition's designs to American architectural expression.  The ensemble included members of the American Institute of Architecture, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and The New York Times.  Their reports along with the attendance of many American architects to the exposition address the swell of decorative treatments in American design between 1925 and 1941.
Art Deco was not labelled as a separate category from Modernism until a 1966 retrospective on the 1925 exposition.  Patricia Bayer describes Art Deco as “an architecture of ornament, geometry, energy, retrospection, optimism, colour, texture, light and at times even symbolism."
Art Deco Style is the definition of eclecticism. Drawing inspiration from a wide variety of sources, Art Deco Style has its own unique look that is difficult to define. Its range of characteristics makes it an extremely versatile style, and an enjoyable one to work with, since Art Deco is easily integrated into a wide variety of personal styles. This makes Art Deco admired by many and a favourite among collectors.
The structure of Art Deco style is based on mathematical geometric shapes. It was considered to be an eclectic form of elegant and stylish modernism, being influenced by a variety of sources. The ability to travel and excavations during this time influenced artists and designers, integrating several elements from countries not their own. Among them were the so-called "primitive" arts of Africa, as well as historical styles such as Greco-Roman Classicism, and the art of Babylon, Assyria, Ancient Egypt and Aztec Mexico.
Much of this could be attributed to the popular interest in archaeology in the 1920s.
The tomb of Tutankhamun discovered in 1922 by Howard Carter and received worldwide press coverage.
Art Deco also drew on Machine Age and streamline technologies such as modern aviation, electric lighting, the radio, the ocean liner and the skyscraper for inspiration.