Posts Tagged ‘Art

12
Feb
12

Kusama at Tate Modern – Wonderland despite the faded white turds

Infinity Mirrored Room I spent a few hours at the Yayoi Kusama exhibition at Tate Modern this afternoon. The area just south of Tate modern seems to be an area in transition. In some ways it is very old London yet there are massive apartments blocks going up. Not many people about so presumably none of them are sold yet.

Inside Tate Modern it was the usual story of queuing for the ticket then queueing for the exhibition to be let in at a given time then trying to get past the people who think they have to queue for every exhibit. I recall prior to Tate Modern, if one wanted to see some modern art, one was forced to visit The Tate (now Tate Britain) and endure a lot of dusty old fashioned art first. To be honest all art can be good and bad and I can well remember being extremely impressed when I discovered a futurist sculpture created in 1913 named ‘Unique Forms Of Continuity In Space’ by Umberto Boccioni.

These days the art establishment like to claim that they are brining art to the masses but I think they may merely have succumbed to the obsession with profit which seems to have driven the start of the 21st century. I’m not sure that having Anne Robinson ask “Name a modern art museum in London” on The Weakest Link counts as art appreciation and justifies the congestion. …however, I digress……

Yayoi Kusama is a Japanese artist who lives in a mental institution so it says here. The first exhibits I found fairly mundane and was soon presented with what appeared to be painting from the Bollocks school of art. i.e. Since anything can be art, therefore any old bollocks I create must also be art. Monochrome canvasses with squiggles and texturing. I began to feel a little cynical. Chairs and shoes filled with what appeared to be large white turds. Thank you Ms. Kusama, we’ll be in touch.

Boat

Boat

However, things livened up a bit and the dark room with the white boat full of turds was quite striking. Later the punters were paying great attention to a video with a large sign stating that there were scenes of an “explicit nature”. So many people were paying so much attention that I never did get into that room.

I entered another dark room decorated somewhat like an ordinary living dining room with chairs and a table laid for dinner. The only light in the room came from Ultra Violet strip lights around the ceiling. What made the room impressive was thousands of dots of primary colour dabbed all the over the floors, walls, ceilings and objects. Sounds daft but I felt like I had entered an Alice in Wonderland novel. Following swift on the heals of this was another room full of coloured lights and mirrors which was also very impressive and by the time I was presented with her latest large vitally colourful paintings I had become a Kusama fan.

Obliteration Room

Obliteration Room

The Kusama exhibition runs to the 5th June 2012 and tickets are £10 with a request for a £1 donation to charity. Worth a visit.

Buy Art Photography by Nigel Chaloner

Buy Art Photography by Nigel Chaloner

27
Jan
12

travel photography – Objectifying the subject

The Long Way Home

The Long Way Home

Recently The Guardian ran an article reporting that India is to crackdown on what are termed “human safaris” where comparatively rich tourists visit the Jarawa tribe people of the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal.

The Jarawa people have long been isolated from the rest of the world and are now being affected by a major road built across their land by the Indian government. A video accompanied the report showing Indian tourists getting the tribes people to dance for food.

Of course we sympathise with the Jarawar and abhor the idea that tourists casually throw them food in order to capture a few second of video footage.

But are we so very different? As a keen photographer I keep an eye on Flickr and, today, I came across this picture which appealed to me. The picture shows a couple of Ugandan children walking down a dirt road carrying baggage on their heads. The girl also carries a large container probably for water. It’s a nice shot. The colours are subtly beautiful and the girl’s expression is interesting.

But take a step back here. How would we feel if tourists wandered around poor areas of America with expensive cameras, capturing images of people struggling with bags and then drove back to their hotels in the evening to eat and drink too much?

I am in no way condemning the photographer of this shot. I have taken similar pictures and have to defend photography as an art form and state that, while the streets of western countries are fantastic subjects for photography the scale is less and less human. The beauty of pictures such as The Long Way Home may be related to their simplicity and humanity.

I guess there have always been disparities in wealth and power between the haves and have nots but these days cheap air travel seems to allow we who live in the rich world to objectify people from the “developing world” without a thought.

Vietnamese Girls

Vietnamese Girls

14
Oct
11

The Dreary Legacy of Marcel Duchamp

old ideas

old ideas

I just caught bits of The Culture Show on BBC 2. One bloke was interviewing another bloke as they sat on a large luxury motor yacht. It seems that one of them was working for the program and the other was an “artist”. The artist had a concept for an art work which was this luxury motor yacht with his name stamped on it and no other changes. The artist was a German named Christian Jankowski at this year’s Frieze Art Fair.

In fact the art work had not yet been created. First he intended to sell the concept to a punter and then the work would be created. The interviewer asked if he got any flack along the lines of anyone could do this and it’s not art. Yawn!

In 1917 Marcel Duchamp created a work of art entitled Fountain consisting of a urinal which had been signed by M. Duchamp. This, apparently, kicked off the discussion: Is it art? Who says what is art? If I am an artist then anything I created is art. The circular logic of such and argument etc etc.

M. Duchamp opened the door for nearly a century of boring and uninspired people to duck out of real creativity and spend their time climbing up their own arses.

It is true that the vast majority of the world’s population will not have heard of M. Duchamp and his exploits and it’s true that many popular newspapers will rant against such art. But for artist of today, to fall back on ideas that are nearly a century old as justification for their work woud be laughable if the media did not insist on treating the argument so seriously.

The type of artist who get off on this sort of piffle is the same sort of person who, were he a computer geek, would spend his time condescendingly boring all and sundry with details of the technical implantation of his latest box of chips.

Of course a luxury motor yacht is a work of art but it’s artistry is no more imbued by a supposed artist plonking his name on it than a Range Rover is by attaching the word Vogue or a Panasonic camera is by rebadging it as a Leica and marking it up £150.

These activities are not art they are mere marketing.

For a contemporary artist to make Duchamp’s ideas the centre piece for his work shows a pitiful lack of imagination and it is not surprising that many artists in this tradition appear so passionless and vague. In this evening’s Culture Show it became evident that many artists will never challenge an interpretation of their work. Apparently they want to leave the interpretation open. Here we run into yet another stock cliché of the contemporary art world: the idea that each person will have their own impression of an art work. Many artists have misinterpreted this as meaning that an artist should have no ideas or incites of his or her own. These seems to me to be the antithesis of an artist.

I listened to the first part of Mike Oldfield‘s Ommadawn this morning and it struck me that, without wanting to detract from Mr. Oldfield’s skill and achievements, his work was a product of it’s time. Technology had progressed to the point where musicians could afford recording studios in their own houses and this allowed Mr. Oldfield to create a work where he played all the instruments. When Tubular Bells was released in 1973 this was amazing yet today kids have more powerful studios in their bedrooms.

Technology enables art.

In the 80s the Western world became rich. Many of the newly rich had no knowledge of, and therefore no preconceptions and prejudices about, art.  Further, many were not really interested in art yet wanted the qudos that art provides. This left the way open for self appointed gate keepers such as Charles Saatchi to milk the rich while pursuing his passion for modern art.

Artists embraced this culture and began creating all sorts of stuff but I can’t help thinking that Damien Hirst‘s sharks were, really, no more that the product of new money looking for sensation. The money was there to pay for Hirst to turn his childhood hobby of fish taxidermy into a business. So he did.

None of this is to denigrate contemporary art. 90% of it may be shit but in the words of the late, and great, Theordore Sturgeon90% of everything is shit” and Mr. Saatchi has done the nation a huge service by presenting more than 10% of it at the fantastic Saatchi Gallery.

What I object to is lame and passionless artists, unable to think of new ideas and so falling back on the ideas of an artist who’s been dead for over forty years.

To be more explicit: Forget whether it’s art, is it any good?

20
Sep
11

Painting on an iPod Touch by Seikou Yamaoka

This is an amazing video of a guy named Seikou Yamaoka using just his fingers to “paint” on an iPod touch using a app named ArtStudio.

04
Jun
11

George Shaw at the South London Gallery

George Shaw

George Shaw

I’ve been looking out for an exhibition of the work of George Shaw for some time and finally found that an exhibition at the South London Gallery.

The exhibition is entitled The Sly And Unseen Day. Shaw paints pictures from his youth growing up on a housing estate in Coventry. He uses Humbrol paints which are more normally associated with the painting of airfix model kits which many young boys will remember from the 1970s.

His pictures are devoid of people and I find them strangely haunting and reminiscent of my own youth. I have heard it suggested that Shaw’s pallet is predetermined by the set colours of the paint. I doubt that he mixed the paint. Up close the effect is almost metallic and each brick in a brick wall seems individually to spring out of the canvas. His control of light is excellent and shows up in the shadows of trees cast on buildings and the reflections from large rain puddles.

The gallery is an impressive old building on Peckham Road, admittance is free but they request donations. I found it easy enough to park in a side road.

The South London Gallery

The South London Gallery

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Rose

Green Rose by Nigel Chaloner

03
Jan
11

Capturing Colour: Film, Invention and Wonder

I visited the Brighton Museum & Art Gallery in th Royal Pavilion Gardens today having been tipped off by the Brighton Flickr group that there was an exhibition named Capturing Colour: Film, Invention and Wonder.

Some may already know that the moving film began in Brighton, England and the exhibition traces it from original black and white, through a system using three black and white films stained in red, blue and green and combined to create colour images and then on to colour film and video.

There is a fantastic old movie camera on display as well as very informative video exhibits including one showing the paterns created by a Cromatrope. Also an excerpt of The Open Road, a 1926 colour film by Claude Friese-Greene.

The exhibition is upstairs at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery, 4/5 Pavilion Buildings, Brighton, BN1 1EE and run from 4th December 2010 to 20th March 2011. Admission is free.

29
Jun
10

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York

Torso of a High General

Torso of a High General

I wrote a blog article recently knocking the content at the Getty Centre in Los Angeles but praising the building.  I failed to mention that I had earlier visited The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Blimey Mrs. It’s a corker!

The Metropolitan has art from all over the world. I’d seen some of the types before but what I found completely stunning was the quality of the pieces. It seemed that if there was only one perfect example still in existence of a type of art from somewhere in the world then the Metropolitan would have it and all beautifully displayed and perfectly lit.

I was stuck by one piece in particular. This was a damaged statue with the title Torso of a High General from 4th Century Egypt. The piece is of a young man but the torso has sheered away revealing the raw sandstone. It occurred to me that, for people who had not seen carving of this quality before, it must have seemed miraculous. Sandstone in it’s raw state is uneven and quite obviously inanimate. Yet in the hands of a craftsman it takes on the appearance of a man. Even the damaged example had  all the strength and vibrancy of a living body even after 2000 years!

If there is one museum you visit in New York then it should be the Metro.

Marble Head of a Woman, 1st Century Rome

Marble Head of a Woman, 1st Century Rome

Marble Head of Athena, Rome, AD 138-92

Marble Head of Athena, Rome, AD 138-92

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Sea Bear Head, Haida, British Colombia, 19th Century

Sea Bear Head, Haida, British Colombia, 19th Century

Forehead Mask, British Colombia or Alaska, 1840

Forehead Mask, British Colombia or Alaska, 1840

Smiling Figure, Mexico, Remojadas, 7th-8th Century

Smiling Figure, Mexico, Remojadas, 7th-8th Century

Female Mask (Gabanda), Democratic Republic of Congo, Pende Peoples, 19th-20th Century

Female Mask (Gabanda), Democratic Republic of Congo, Pende Peoples, 19th-20th Century

01
May
10

77 Million Paintings by Brian Eno at Fabrica

The Brighton Festival has kicked off and the centre of Brighton was pretty busy today. Fabrica has an installation entitled 77 Million Paintings by Brian Eno.

77 Millions Paintings at Fabrica

77 Millions Paintings at Fabrica




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