you have to be careful online
where you browse and what
the net shows you
it’s a reflection of how
the modern age really is
nowadays ugly things are
cool

without being pessimistic
whatever happened to television?
swearing chefs
+ cockroach-eating celebrities
i’m in the wrong era, arrived too soon
or more likely, late

the world is too beautiful
to sit behind a screen
i can assure you if you look
out into the street
and wait for one moment
you will see something
truly astounding
but only if you know how to look

I cannot believe it! 

England will (fingers crossed) have snow for Christmas!  I can only remember, how much I laughed last year in Germany when I heard a furniture store ad on the radio, betting buyers that if it snowed in the town on Christmas day, all their purchases would be repayment-free!

Of course, it being near Christmas, I hope my lack of blogging can be excused. 

My painting is nearer completion – the planned tree is now a dark silhouette against a beautiful deep red background, sunset on a deep summer sky.  However, it does seem a little incongruous with the snow falling outside – if only Britain had real mountains, I would definately be skiing!…  

It does all seem a little more like winter than it usually does here, even the early darkness seems darker and colder.  Perhaps my next painting will be all dark?   A vast canvas, painted first with dashes of luminescent colours – left to dry and then covered with the thinnest varnish of black or extremely dark blue… then rubbed or sanded down to reveal the colours beneath… 

I imagine it’ll be a little like the universe: – how arrogant! – a 2D vaccum of darkness intersected by pleasing brilliant coloured objects.  I always feel that the more depth a painting has, the better. 

However, I’m always open to inspiration – so if you feel genius has hit you like a ton of bricks: please comment!

I can’t wait for someone to write that “Matthew Day Jackson has an Urban Outfitters aesthetic” or “Urban Outfitters has a Matthew Day Jackson aesthetic.” Either one works for me.

Good to see you. It’s been a while.

Among other platitudes, it’s also been a time without much to say, and the ‘pensive contemplator’ lurking within me has just been dying for it’s day out. Well, today has been that blissful day.

Aside from doing practically nothing of worth for my ‘real’ life, I also took the time to reflect about the things that I had been depriving myself. And foremost among them were words.

You may be thinking: what idiot goes without words for a couple of months. Well, let me clarify. It’s not that I have a dearth of words, but rather a dearth of the meaningful and personal words. Our daily lives are so replete with useless fillers that one very seldom enjoys something that is concise but entertaining and thought provoking. Sure, the Wall Street Journal and New York Times report the news everyday, but that’s just it: it’s REPORTING. It’s not creating any meaning beyond that. There’s no attempt to make personal connections with the readers. And that, perhaps, may be the downfall of the traditional media.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying the media will be gone anytime soon from our lives. So long as we depend (some, subsist) on 24-hour news programming, there may be no other way (though Twitter searches are being looked at now as more rapid disseminators of the latest happenings). But because of the rapid changes in social networking, I think people are realizing that they no longer have to settle for being the ‘outsider’ viewing into the world, separated by the fourth wall (which filmmakers, from Hitchock to Haneke were hailed as geniuses for trying to tear down). Well, it is no longer a matter of innovation, but rather a strategic necessity for media to become more accessible. We as the audience can, and indeed, should demand of our entertainment experiences a participatory feeling.

In all this, I am reminded of my main objective for writing today: to describe the deliriously funny and delightfully personal reflections that I discovered today by author David Sedaris.

True, I had heard of him before (or at least seen his books on display at the local bookstore), but I always took one look at the cover of “When You Are Engulfed In Flames,” with the title page looking like little more than one of Damien Hirst’s ghastly art projects, and thought to myself: no.

But, as it happens, I was surfing the archives of the New Yorker today, and I came across a wickedly funny short essay of searching for dingoes in Taronga zoo, and thought to myself: hey, this is funny. And with that, I was hooked. I flipped from this, to one titled “Turbulence,” about an encounter sitting next to a demanding woman on a plane who insisted he switch seats with her husband. The image of a lozenge ricocheting off a flight tray table and onto this irate woman’s cut-offs was beyond funny. And yet, with a swift stroke of the pen, he could change the mood- somehow shift the blame for this impasse to himself being a hard-ass, unwilling to switch seats with a woman who might be terminally ill. I have never seen in writing someone so deftly change the mood from one of over-the-top blame to one of stark seriousness. Absolutely thrilling.

And at the same time, it reminded me of a TV series that I’ve come to love (and holds the honorof being the first TV series I actually went out and bought on DVD)– Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s ‘Extras.’

True, it talks about the superficial lives of the famous, and the lives of the fame-seekers which get disfigured along the way– that’s nothing new. But the way in which Gervais brings those introspective moments of a person who has the ability to sense when he’s actually getting screwed up along the way- that’s something unique. Usually, in the movies and on television, you encounter a character whose decline is precipitous and palpable to everyone around him but the subject him- or herself. But here is presented the sense that one doesn’t get carried away until it’s too late. In fact, there is that voice at the back of your head saying that you’ve done wrong by someone. And whether or not you choose to follow that voice: that’s what leads you down the path you’re going. By this time, I’ve descended into the utterly abstract philosophizing that I tend to get into,so to bring it back to topic, let me just recommend that you watch at least the Extras Christmas Special.

There is a sense, when we see shows like 30 Rock and The Office, that there are attempts to make reference to pop culture and current events. But that’s not what I’m talking about. What I say is that the shows are too literal, all-too-eager to reveal their ‘inner’ jokes that it makes us wonder whether we are really that dumb? True, we may not all be able to understand the personal jokes of the writers and directors, but at the same time, isn’t part of the allure of entertainment is the ability to capture meaning for oneself from what is depicted on the screen (or in Sedaris’ case, his writing). By treating us as the ‘dumb’ viewers who can only understand things in OUR OWN personal contexts, writers and filmmakers ignore the fact that there is an underlying story of humanism and inner struggle common to all mankind, and if told well and subtly, it can be quite touching.

And so I say to all who may be listening (but whom I know realistically to be few): be more selective in your entertainment choices. Demand something personal, that appeals to you and that touches you. It may be far from the story of your life, but the story it tells can nonetheless be poignant. And that feeling counts.

**Looking back at my statement above, I can only laugh, for while I am hailing ‘Extras’ as a delight, I still have my reservations about ‘The Office.’ I must confess here that I have not watch the British version of the show and my feedback is related to my experiences with the US version. I have nothing but a favorable impression of Gervais and Merchant to conjecture that the British version may have more of the subtlety and bittersweet element that I appreciate.

***You know, when I look back at why I even wrote this post, to reflect on Mr. Sedaris work, I am reminded of how terribly astray I have been led. From contemplation to exhortion. But let me just say now, in the footnotes, that his writing touched me not only for its starkness and brutal, personal honesty, but also for the close similarities of his speaking voice to Truman Capote’s.

Pop Art was not dead with Andy Warhol: today’s contemporary artists perpetuate his legacy. This could summarise the current Pop Life exhibition at the Tate Modern, mixing pieces from Warhol with other artists who, just like him, integrated business as an inherent part of their work.

Commercial art tends to be criticised for not being ‘real’ enough, and many see the role of artists as outsiders of society. Warhol’s pop Marilyn has become so commodified as a symbol of kitsch that it stands in thousands of living rooms and Damien Hirst admittedly does not paint his dots himself. Yet, the former has become a cult icon worldwide, and the latter has managed the exploit of a record-breaking auction sale of over £111 millions in the midst of the 21st century’s economic crisis.

Described by Jeff Koons as ‘an overview of the different ways artists are engaged with the world today‘, the rich exhibition, curated by Alison Gingeras, takes inspiration in Warhol’s late – and very criticised work, mostly commissioned and sometimes discounted for ego-pseudo-celebrities. Films accompany the wallpaper-covered rooms and Gems paintings, representative of his obsession with wealth.

The exhibition then takes the visitor in the wake of Warhol’s work, with Jeff Koons’s candy porn sculptures, Takashi Murakami’s manga bling world, Keith Haring’s Pop Shop graffitis, Richard Prince’s celebrity culture obsessions and many more including Basquiat or Kippenberger.

And of course, the direct heirs of Warhol’s commercial art: the young British artists, with works including Tracey Emin’s debut show My Major Retrospective, and Damien Hirst’s cow in a gold plated aquarium, a cabinet of his full of diamonds, and his particularly entertaining 1992 performance of identical twins interacting with the audience under similar-looking dot paintings. Hirst defined the work itself:  ‘Whatever colours you use, if you do the same arrangement from a distance, it sort of looks the same yet they’re uniquely different’, adding that he particularly wanted real people for his piece because ‘Art is like holding a mirror up to life, so it’s always good if you confront people with something real’.

No more doubt: art is a business, why pretend else? And not only for Pop Art. Art markets, fairs, sponsors, the steep prices and deals of artworks, along with the trends of corporate art and increasing numbers of collectors, make it more and more acceptable. But is that an issue?

This exceptional exhibition retraces and gathers works from major modern and contemporary artists that have never been together before. A MUST see. Tate Modern. Until 17 January 2010. £12.50. More information here.

Pictures: Jeff Koons’ Inflatable Rabbit and a Damien Hirst’ dot painting.

ART PATRONS BANK COLLECTORS 

How has the 500-year-old tradition of art patronage by banks changed, particularly after the events of 2008? Why do banks collect art? Will they continue to collect after the Financial Crisis and if they do will their reasons for collecting change? Razia Iqbal asks art advisors and staff of banks including Deutsche Bank and the Royal Bank of Scotland in a Wise Buddha production made for BBC Radio 4. 

Anish Kapoor, Turning the World Upside Down III, Deutsche Bank Collection

Art has been bought by banks for all kinds of reasons over the centuries. In the Middle Ages art patronage helped banking families wash away the sin of usury and gain social status.  In more recent times art was bought to decorate boardrooms and for investment. Pre-recession banks came full circle and art collections were actively used for image management again. The events of 2008 have now created a double pull for banks with art collections: should they sell which would help their image of prudent fiscal management or should they keep and share their collections with the public who now own many of them.  Iqbal’s programme hints at intriguing echos: there may no longer be a need to atone for Christian guilt but corporate guilt is perhaps another matter. The podcast is no longer accessible but here are some snippets. 

Bank collectors buying wider range of media 

Alex Heath, Managing Director of Independent Art Consultants which sources art for Barclays Bank amongst others says that the type of works which banks are interested in buying have changed in the recent past. “It is now less about straight painting and prints” and more about bringing “variety into the workplace”‘ with other media. 

Art now part of marketing mix 

In the past many banks bought works for decorating public spaces and board room he explains and over time the pieces accumulated into collections. More recently though he says that art is used consciously as part of the marketing mix. He describes how, in his work with clients, the marketing department or agency is his first port of call where he will ask “‘What do you want to say about the bank?” and from there he will generate art ideas which will complement the marketing message. 

Deutsche Bank recognised by peers 

Asked if he thinks that banks are cautious in their purchasing decisions, favouring traditional over contemporary works, he explains that there are banks which are taking leading positions as collectors of contemporary art and particularly singles out Deutsche Bank as “‘doing very well” at this. 

Art for staff, art to stimulate intellectual curiosity 

Alistair Hicks adviser to Deutsche Bank, which has a collection of over 56,00o pieces, shows Iqbal some of the works in the Deutsche Bank lobby, corridors and board rooms and explains the bank does not buy for investment.  Deutsche Bank’s primary purpose in buying art which began in the 1970s as an initiative called “Art in the Workplace” is to stimulate the intellect of its staff. “A good banker has to be curious about what is going on in the world and artists play a leading role in expressing current ideas”. 

In the lobby an early spot painting by Damien Hirst is reflected in an Anish Kapoor sculpture called “‘Turning the World Upside Down”‘. Iqbal is invited by Hicks to come around and inside the “almost spiritual” sculpture to experience its echo effect. Artwork is so intimately integrated into the environment of the office that boardroom are named after artists and Kapoor’s sculpture, affectionately known as ’The Silver Ball’, has been adopted as a meeting point “We are in the Freud room. Meet you at the Silver Ball in 5″.

Art atones for sin 

Banks have traditionally been patrons of the arts with the first significant example occurring in Italy in the 1300’s when a banker commissioned a chapel containing religious artworks to atone for the sins of the family who had gained their wealth as bankers at a time when money-lending with interest was regarded as sinful by Chrisitians. 

Art for social status 

Iqbal explains that the Medicis in the fifteenth century, developed the concept of patronage considerably but used art not to atone for the family’s sins but rather to elevate its status. Artworks funded by gains from the prosperous Medici bank became a means to help the family gain public prominence, access and power and eventually noble status. 

What will banks do with art collections after the Financial Crisis? 

In an interview with the management of the Royal Bank of Scotland which since the Financial Crisis 2008, is now almost entirely public-owned, Iqbal learns about their strategy for the Barclays art collection going forward.  

Acknowledging that the trust of the public has been lost and taxpayer money needs to be refunded, the art collection strategy of RBS comprises three parts: art of historical importance will be retained, loaned out and made accessible to the public, some art will be retained for decorative purposes and the strategy towards the remaining part of the collection is to become “net sellers”. 

Though the reasons why banks buy art may change over time, Iqbal points out that banks’ tradition of collecting art stretches back over 500 years so probably won’t change any time soon. Do you agree? Leave your thoughts below. 

Related posts: 

• Deutsche Bank signs 5 year lead sponsorship deal with Hong Kong art fair - Dec 09
• The Power 100: Curators up and artists down in ArtReview’s annual list – Dec 09
• Art loans can offer liquidity to your collection – Nov 09
• Which museums are collecting Chinese contemporary art? New database just released – Nov 09
• Louis Vuitton, the fine art of branding – Passion for Creation review – July 09

OUR TOP TEN AFFORDABLE GIFT IDEAS FOR ART LOVERS THIS XMAS 

KCE

What! No bovine brain matter!?

So, a lovely-looking wall painting has won the Turner Prize. I know the world is now saturated with news stories about this (plus a frankly illiterate piece in the Sun, my five-year-old could do better, call that painting, you can get that down Lewises for £25 a roll), and it was a week ago, but let’s see if we can’t keep this thing moving, eh. There are a couple of aspects of this that impinge directly on the Baroque universe (such as it is – shrinking or expanding, I can’t quite tell which)…

Jonathan Jones, fresh from writing about Leonardo and Michelangelo, says we’re in a (nother) new renaissance. Already! Is the last one already over? It was only two years ago. I reasoned to myself that he may be a bit hyped up… like the children used to get after a birthday party, & I’d be feverishly trying to get the Smarties out of the party bag before they found them.

However, either of his subjects would indeed have recognised the process by which James Wright made his winning piece:

– drawing a cartoon on paper and then transferring it to the wall in what he called “an incredibly medieval way” by pouncing – piercing the cartoon with holes and rubbing chalk through it to create “the ghost of a work” on the wall. The image was then painted with size (adhesive) and covered with gold leaf.

The wall painting took a month to make, and I do want to see it before the exhibition ends. More on that later.

The same day as this was all happening (and I should mention the wonderful accolade for poetry itself, which was that the new Poet Laureate, Carol Ann, announced the winner of the Turner Prize), Damien Hirst was spotted skulking through the streets at 1.30am taking pictures of some sculptures in a gallery window. I’m not sure why this wold be seen to be a bad thing, as artists do have to get their ideas somehow, and after all where better than in art – but thank you The Standard for this description:

The onlooker said: “He pulled up outside the gallery and was looking around.

“Suddenly he put on a silly hat and ran up to the gallery window and took a quick photo of the sculptures on display using his BlackBerry. It was all over in 30 seconds.”

Well, as Hirst, says, art is “about looking.”

I don’t think a painter like Rembrandt is a genius. It’s about freedom and guts. It’s about looking. It can be learned. That’s the great thing about art. Anybody can do it if you just believe. With practice, you can make great paintings.

But if it is a question of time – if he simply hasn’t been “practising for long enough” – maybe we will have to wait for that New Renaissance after all…
There is more, so much more, but I must liek the will o’ the wisp be away…

Simon Finch is undoubtedly a maverick of the rare and antiquarian book world. Having started out as a book trader at university, his reputation has spread like wildfire, allowing him to break the  manacles of convention and launch his own book store bearing the slogan “Aspreys is now trading opposite Simon Finch: Rare Books.” But despite the critical acclaim that comes with clocking a books such as the 13th century Psalter (a volume containing the psalms) there has always been one collection that was a lot more personal. Propped on the pavement waiting for a mechanic to come service his newly broken down Vespa, Finch took some time to talk to USELESS about sex, death and publishing.

So what’s taken so long for eroticism to come out of the closet?

Well, [the collection] started because I used to sell books to Blackwell’s. This one guy had an amazing library, but he also had mounds of pornography- really rare stuff as well as modern.There was a clandestine nature about it that interested me. Many of the great writers wrote erotica anonymously with false imprints. So I took the whole lot and began learning about the clandestine collecting market.

So it was the research that took you so long?

Not the research. It was merely my ambitions to do it on a much bigger scale, with an exhibition incorporating art linking sex and death. So in the meantime I bought a lot of books and when someone badgered me for a copy I couldn’t resist. And when I started to see the illustrations of Belle Mere and read The Dances of Death by Holbein, it completely blew my mind. I’d never read anything so out there so sexually, in my life [laughs].

Going round other rare book stores and soon as sex or death were mentioned they
said…
… Simon Finch [laughs]!

Is there peer pressure from the other bookstores?

I think people think I’m a little bit mad as a bookseller, but they have great respect for the way I’ve presented books and been willing to take risks. Getting Hugh Grant to open my Notting Hill Gate bookstore was one of the times I knew it had paid off. As a thank you I gave him a first edition of White Stains by Anthony Crowley, the occultist who coined the
term 666. Not long after he was arrested with his pants down for getting a blowjob off a prostitute.

Do you ever wake up from a Ted Bundy-esque nightmare?

Well, funnily enough the guy who did a lot of the cataloguing for me, said he did after about a month of working on it [laughs]. Any powerful material of that sort purveys one’s unconscious.

You start seeking the links everywhere…

There’s a certain aspect of that. What really spurred me on was when AIDS became a clear sex and death link. I remember very well when AIDS first came, when I was in my sexual prime, and I was terrified. I thought even a triple wrapped condom wouldn’t be enough to protect me. It was a really frightening time which brought out a lot of peoples’ bigotry- and, of course, others’ courage. Then you start getting these artists like Damien Hirst. I mean, the embalmed shark was called The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. A fantastic title- and very much on the edge of sex and death. I don’t know any statistics, but most people think about sex and death more than any other subject. It’s such a pervasive subject. It’s not antithetical. It’s very linked psychologically.

This issue is about partly about global warming and body warmth, among other things.I was wondering if you saw the West as addicted to eroticism now as they are to oil?

It’s a very old adage that sex sells and I think pornography is addictive. People are addicted to the process of collecting. The British Library, apart from the Vatican, has got the biggest institutionally held collection of erotica.

Sorry?

The Vatican has got an enormous amount of clandestine books, which means anything smutty that has ever been published. On the other hand, Pat Kearney- who, along with Peter Mendes helped me enormously- had only just catalogued the erotic collection at the British Library. There’s always been a tradition in France and in Holland that is slightly more liberal. Even sending this catalogue out to America, I got some people telling me please don’t send me
anything like that again [laughs].

With the Internet, are we going to see the end of erotica in print?

I don’t think so. There will always be book collections involved in erotica and sensuality. There are always going to be fantastic erotic artists. Personally speaking, I think that the nature of pornography on the net is graphically obvious. It’s ugly and it doesn’t shed any light on human sexuality. The rare books in the collection stand out because of their clandestine nature while the more modern photography we’re moving into reflects the philosophy of the 20th century.

www.simonfinch.com

Originally published in USELESS magazine #8  – http://www.uselessmagazine.com/

School of Saatchi on Tuesday nights on BBC 2 has become my new favourite programme. It’s X-Factor for modern art; you can catch up with it here on watch again.

Matthew Collings – who has presented the televised Turner Prize in the past, and done a good job of it, I think, taking a sceptical yet on the-side-of-it sort of line – is both a judge, and principal presenter of, this show. This week the ‘contestants’ were went out into the seaside world of Hastings where they were required to create installations. Collings, in commenting on the difficulties the ‘contestants’ would face in substituting ‘the emptiness that was in the space before the artists came along, said the following:

‘The nonsense that goes on in the heads of those poor students whose minds have been corrupted by decades of garbage in Art Schools is going to be manifested there out in the street for the public to see.’

I don’t know about that. I went to Norwich Art School (NSAD – Norwich School of Art and Design) in one of these past decades (94-97). If I recollect the experience correctly, though you could really do whatever you wanted – which would be the point (if there’s no freedom of expression, there’s no art school) – whatever you wanted included the opportunity to develop craft skills in the life room, the print room, the computer room and so on. Even in those years the works of Damien Hirst, Gavin Turk, Rachel Whiteread et al were on the syllabus – there were monographs, slides and videos in the library and there were on short loan, too: we were already studying our contemporaries, who, in some cases, doubled up as our heroes and inspirations. It was a free-spirited time. There were some students, perhaps, who were going to make the unhappy discovery that they weren’t artists, but as far as I was concerned there was no garbage in the experience at all. Perhaps it was different elsewhere.

It’s certainly different at Norwich Art School (NUCA – Norwich University College of the Arts) now. The anti-poetry of the new name (chosen by committee to exhibit the fact that the school is now allowed to accredit its own degrees) tells you all you need to know about how, in the past decade, such garbage as there is has come down from the top. The place has been dryly sanitised by the steady drip drip drip of a stagnant, ‘transparent’ New Labour form-filing Health and Safety ‘Human Resources’-led brand of uptight dronery. Now that all the bean counting has been done, and all the old ‘artist teachers’ have been squeezed out, the Mandelsonian task is complete. All that remains is a turgid structure of suffocation and the dread hand of beaurocracy. If I enrolled there today I don’t think I’d last six months before the weight of rules and the stifling atmosphere of authority killed me. Now that is garbage.

Emma Biggs/Matthew Collings : Primitive Methodist, 2008

I haven’t updated as recently as I would have liked. There is so much going on here at the end of the quarter, but I feel that there are several points that I want to quickly share. I confess, there is very little overt connective tissue between these various ideas, but the common denominator is that they are occupying my attention right now, and as I hope is clear through the overall journey of this blog, that which occupies my attention inevitably finds its way into influencing “the work” (i.e. my creative practice, the dances I make, the papers I write etc.)

So there’s Lady Gaga. There’s her new album Fame Monster that is blowing up my world.

And there’s its connection to ballet. On November 14th, Lady Gaga premiered her new song “Speechless” at MOCA’s 30th Anniversary Gala in Francesco Vezzoli’s “Ballets Russes Italian Style (The Shortest Musical You Will Never See Again).” She played a piano customized by Damien Hirst, wore a hat designed by Frank Gehry, was accompanied by dancers from the Bolshoi Ballet, who were attired in costumes designed by Miuccia Prada. That alone should be enough said. But you can read more about it here. And see a clip of it below. And an image.

So for my last week of teaching ballet this quarter (to beginner non-majors), I set all of my barre combinations to Lady Gaga, predominantly the new album, as an homage to this contemporary intersection of high Russian ballet and contemporary pop culture, it in itself an homage to the Ballets Russes and the work of Serge Diaghilev. After having taught Vaganova Technique all quarter, it felt appropriate.

I had an amazing opportunity to take a class with Jill Johnson, former dancer with William Forsythe and the Frankfurt Ballet (among a list of other credentials). I relished the opportunity to revisit a way of moving that became familiar last winter working with Nik Haffner and Forsythe’s “Improvisational Technologies.” Today Jill emphasized the relationship between these ideas and classical ballet technique, epaulement as rotations in the body, and working rigorously in abstracting these various rotations and counter-rotations. It was not the same way of moving that I explore last year, but there was significant overlap, and moments of realizing how that experience last year changed the way that I move “naturally.” You can see me exploring some of those ideas in a piece I performed in October here.

I am also working on authoring a new paper, the working of title of which is “Body of Knowledge/Knowledge of the Body: An Analysis of the Presence of Embodiment in Synchronous Objects for One Flat Thing, reproduced.” I am working to construct a working theoretical definition of what is meant by “embodiment” from synthesizing writings by Mark Johnson, George Lakoff, Judith Butler, Amelia Jones, Heidegger, and Henry Sayre, among others, and then looking for the presence of embodiment in Synchronous Objects. I have found that there is a fairly widespread uncomfortability amongst dancers engaging with this dance-based research project. I think it has something to do with a sense that the knowledge that we know as our moving bodies has been extracted, transformed into date, and re-presented in forms/objects other than the moving body. My interest in the implication of embodiment throughout the project, in the site of origin (the dance), the collection and translation of the choreographic systems into data, the transformation of the data into alternative re-presentations, and ultimately (and perhaps most viscerally) in the viewer of the project himself or herself. While the paper is still in the works, I feel that there are implications of embodiment throughout the project; this is most acute in the viewing of the project. The project is an object to be viewed, to be understood by a viewer. It is a request for the re-embodiment of the knowledge being re-presented. I am attempting to describe that not only does the site itself necessitate the (embodied) presence of the viewer, but that the way in which the objects themselves are understood are through conceptualizations of time, space, density, movement, etc. that emerge from an embodied experience of the world in which we live. This is supported primarily by Johnson and Lakoff’s writings in Philosophy in the Flesh and The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding. I’ll keep you posted on the paper. In the mean time, I hope you go and explore the site.

In the reading I’ve done in preparation for writing this paper, a gem of a resource was a book I came across by Henry M. Sayre entitled The Object of Performance: the American Avant-Garde since 1970. Sayre writes about the shift of importance in the visual art world from the art object to the performative act, and in doing so the shift of “presence” from the artist/object to the viewer of the object. He writes beautifully about the photograph emerging as a respected medium, a signifier of both presence (the viewer of the photograph, and even the photograph as an object itself) and absence (that which the photograph depicts). He also wrote about the action painting (re: Pollock, Krasner, others) as a significant shift, in which the paintings that were bought by museums and collectors were not the action painting itself. It was a thing concerned with the immediacy of the action; the painting acted as a trace, a document of the action, and yet an object itself. Like the photograph. Like Synchronous Objects. It has sparked some fascinating notions as I have engaged with visual art after this reading. Last weekend I saw a series of works by Dale Chihuly, mostly large glass sculptures. It was fascinating and exciting to engage this work as “movement traces,” the documentation of the actions of the glass artists (which, in Chihuly’s work, art already mostly interpretations of Chihuly’s “action painting” designs for the pieces), and even farther as potential “movement scores.” Visual art as movement score. Reading visual art as movement scores as a method for engagement. There is something there.

Speaking of art object as documentation of action, I just ordered a “Tit Print” by Annie Sprinkle. She posted on her facebook today that she just made another batch of them, and had them on sale today. They consist of large ink or paint prints using her breasts as her instrument. I think they’re lovely, a kind of Yves Klein way of revealing the body. And the fact that I am going to San Francisco later this month to interview Annie and Beth and see their upcoming show “Sexecology: Making Love with Earth, Sky and Sea” at Femina Potens Gallery.

One of Annie's Tit Prints

Finally, a little rant: I am exhausted about hearing about making art or dance “accessible.” I take issue with this word. Because it rarely refers to making art experiences available to the population. It most often implies that the art be constructed in such a way that the viewer can “get something out of it.” It is not about making the art itself accessible as it is about making a specific experience (or kind of experience) of the work accessible. I think it has emerged from the collective anxiety of audience and artist worrying that they have somehow misunderstood the art experience. And my issue is this: “accessible” implies that there is something to be “accessed,” something encoded that must be (able to be) decoded. It assumes that art is essentially communicable, that its purpose or intention is that the viewer understand or “access” the experience that the artist has of her or his own work. And I think that is simply not the purpose of art. My theory is also that we live in such a visually complex, communication driven culture that we spend our lives trying to “figure out” what we’re supposed to understand from images, advertising, commercials, etc. etc. etc., that we come to the art experience with that same pressure. It is my opinion that the art experience is perhaps the opportunity for reprieve from this way of engaging and understanding. The purpose is not to access the encoded meaning, but instead to engage with that with which you are presented and make it meaningful for yourself. Construct meaning rather than access meaning, using your experience of the dance or sculpture or literature or music, etc., as the materials by which you construct your meaning. In this sense, I am opposed to making art “accessible.” I am in favor of making art available. But I would like to do away with this language/concept that there is anything to “access” in art. It is there. You experience it. You make that experience meaningful for yourself using the materials before your as the materials of your meaning.

There. That’s my little rant for today.

Back to reading/writing about Synchronous Objects.

So I had an art show at CSUSM where I displayed two works of art one is a painting and a video in one here it is…


and the other is a ready made by Rebecca Sunshine. I will post the picture when i come across it

Simon Hattenstone has written an article entitled “Damien Hirst: ‘Anyone can be Rembrandt’” (not a catchy title, that) in the Art & Design section of the Guardian (online) which includes a marvelous Hirstian sound-bite interview that offers up a rather good laugh at Hirst, Hattenstone, art and money, not to mention painting.  There’s nothing shockingly new, nor newly shocking, said, but still, we believe that you’ll enjoy another quick look at how ridiculous things can be.  Perhaps you’ll take heart, as we did, in the announcement that “Anyone can be Rembrandt”.  We’ve already dimmed the lights and are looking for some meaningful shadow, some lovely highlights,….

No Love Lost, Blue Paintings, by Damien Hirst, is showing at the Wallace Collection, Manchester Square, London W1 through 24 January 2010. Nothing Matters is at the White Cube, London N1 through 30 January 2010

nothingisinvisible@live.fr

So I’ve made it this far. Who knew when I started out in september 2008 that I could keep up with a visual blogging diary for so so long. Thank you to all who have visited the blog over the year and a bit, and to all those who will visit in the future.

This piece is an invite to Hirst’s opening with his older characters. They say how delightfully unpleasant, but it mirrors what the critics said about them once upon a time. This piece probably doesn’t have much to do with value, but I suppose in a way it does.

“We need more simon skull toys” is the quote written here in this disneyland/artland scenario where two employees have noticed the damien hirst themed items are selling quicker than the others.

This is a take on the piece before as I couldn’t be bothered with making the cartoon in cel format. It portrays pluto as duchamp’s fountain this time as pluto is seen as not one of the frontrunners in the commercial success.

These pieces are thoughful representations of simon skull, a mickey mouse/damien hirst hybrid. The second is painted bad because Hirst is seen as a terrible painter.

White Cube Mason’s Yard and Hoxton Square, London

Damien Hirst’s triptych, Insomnia 2008. Copyright Damien Hirst/ The White Cube

What can a portrait do to its subject, beyond the usual act of depiction? The question is unexpectedly raised in Damien Hirst’s new two-site show. Among the many paintings of carrion crows, skulls, knives, empty pill bottles, corpses and other mortal intimations is a series of portraits in chalk white and inky blue. Each represents Angus Fairhurst, Hirst’s close friend and contemporary.

Fairhurst was 41 when he hanged himself at the close of his final show. Everyone spoke of his death with extraordinary sorrow. To those who only knew his droll and philosophical artworks, it became apparent that he was much loved as a person too. Hirst has painted not one but half-a-dozen portraits: keeping him present, keeping him going.

These canvases share their hues not just with Francis Bacon’s early portraits but more obviously with blue period Picasso; which might make you think of Picasso’s memorials to his great friend, the painter Casagemas, who turned a gun on himself. But Picasso paints the apotheosis of Casagemas, his soul rising to heaven on an El Greco uprush of exorcism and prayer. What Hirst is doing is by no means so clear.

The Fairhurst portraits are perfectly recognisable and densely worked. You have the sense of an appearance coming and going – remembered, half-remembered – and of a character buried somewhere in the paint; clumsy, yet with something approaching force of personality.

Read more at: Reheated Bacon

ELEVEN Lucid Diamonds in The Rough Voluptuous Sky.

Tell Persephone, for a good time don’t call my Iphone, silence in the cave and underground realms is woo’ing me with diamonds now. And if you are a Party or Person calling…this better be GOOD.

The cave of deep dark cold, the long night, the winter solstice is coming. For direction, desire and comfort…the voluptuous night sky. For knowing…the deep quiet inside.  For events…transforming only please.

Diamonds in the Rough from inky black coal are Stars in my Sky and here are 11 of them ranging from “under-privileged kids” to Pop Stars such as Damien Hirst and Karl Lagerfeld.  Go below, go under and go into and get into it to find treasures where most don’t look.  

ONE. THE MEEK SHALL INHERIT THE EARTH. NEWARK, NEW JERSEY.

Picture this. I had a cold. It was an unseasonably cold night in October. I had commitments. To Kids. To Art. To an Evening out in NYC for Causes + Fundraising, I had to accept my fuzzy brain and altered perception of Body, enter the magical forest glens of Midtown Tourists and West of Eighth Avenue Hinterlands and Rock on.  

And so…to Rockefeller Center, our first stop for a cocktail party to benefit the Links School in Newark, held in a verdant cave of palms against the night sky of deep dark blue and cool steel.

My partner Michelle Barge and I met up at the invite of Ellen Cohen of Lazard Freres and her beloved cause, The Link School, which serves low income urban students from Newark with exceptional and rigorous education.  The result is students who excel with an 80% college enrollment. This year resulted in an astounding 2 million dollars in scholarship funding.

I was born in Newark and care passionately about this city rising from the ashes of racism and poverty to be a center of the Arts and Industry.  Thank you Mayor Cory Booker (and our friend Desiree Peterkin Bell) Ashton Kutcher, Forest Whitaker and Conan O’Brien…public faces waking up America to the potential versus the hopelessness in our inner cities.  I proudly step away from my red Camaro in my Uggs and push back my feathered bangs and salute you. I am actually a proud Jersey girl. (I mean, Newark girl…ouch!…not ALL of NJ!)

TWO. “HIGHBROW” AND LOWBROW…ALWAYS THE TWAIN SHALL MEET.

The next stop that night, WAY on the other side of town, almost in the River to an unmarked warehouse loft, the site for the Pointe Suite Art Ball Studio 450 Penthouse. A place where no one in their right mind should sojourn. Whizzing cars entering the Lincoln Tunnel make it feel as though one was in New Jersey already, a frightening prospect for NY’ers. “This better be good, “ I thought.  Annika Conner, artist and social butterfly and my friend, artist Nick Papadakis were raising funds to create a book of new artists and for the trek, I wanted excitement. 

The wintery and tree girl paintings at the top of this post are by Nick.  I showed his work many years ago when I ran the MUD party at Baktun in the Meatpacking when it still was an actual Meatpacking place and parties there were shining because of the contrast.  We are talking The Cooler, Baktun and Florent. It was magic.  Looming buildings, dark streets and unmarked doors when you arrived at about 12 am along with that pervasive smell of meat. At 4 am, tumbling out into 14th street to the roar of tractor trailers, white clad meat men and slivers of glimpses at the swinging cow carcasses in the coolers. Imagine us at 4 am, silhouetted figures against truck headlights, Manolo and liquor challenged, with our diagonal, cobble stoned treks home past steaming street vents with drum and bass still pumping in our blood as meat workers arrived for a day’s work. This was visceral Art without price tags, entitlement and the crowds.  

If an art event is going to sparkle diamonds in NYC it better have some feel like this…no matter how highbrow the rollers.

Once inside the warehouse, I searched the crowd vainly for something to turn me on. Annika and her father’s regalia unfortunately were the highlight I enjoyed, mostly because they reminded me of artist Richard Saja’s embroidered toile (above)… without the irony though.  

Here are Annick’s paintings.

I love the saturated colors.  As a contrast, here is a painting of me done by  Florian Heinke from a photo taken at APT, another old favorite place in the Meatpacking.

I have read that Annick loves dancing, and although there was none at her party, we seem to share this.

Nick’s work is now sold at Sotheby’s.   I was nostalgic and touched to hear how he has moved from nightclub party exhibitions to the world’s stage.  I guess dancing does indeed lead to other things.

Our photographer, Kaitlyn Barlow and I wished the artists to be featured in the book were more prominent at this event, even the slide show was tucked away in a corner. Beside a hilarious drunken girl with dress and shoes falling off, who was running around sketching everyone, you had to search for the art or to feel immersed in creativity. Without an immersive experience of art, music, film, atmosphere,the whole party was not as exciting as it could be, as most charity balls tend to be. Kudos to Annick and Nick, I admire your art and efforts, but this party made me want to hustle my heels home…vaguely unsatisfied.  

Sometimes, the lucidity comes in knowing when to get to the leaving.

(See further in the post for a truly stellar “Art” party, Preforma’s Opening Party.)

THREE. HOW TO CIRCLE FROM HYPER NATION TO HIBER NATION.

Sanskrit language tutorial. OM begets HOME. OM begets WOMB. OM begets ROOM. A room with no view is an instant high. Home is where the heels kick off into the sculptural pile of clothes shed and skin and gratefulness spin a cocoon via a linen down comforter.

How planned it would be to cuddle first in this tufted leather over metal cocoon for the Night’s Requiem before the bed?  

Blackman Cruz is the pointed collection of stellar furniture to behold Life and Drama in. Blackman Cruz stores are in LA or SF.  This Tufted Pod Chair requires $20,500. in exchange for plenty of Good Dreams.

FOUR. VISIT YOUR DARK LADY. 

Remedios Varos is the artist for pod chairs.

FIVE. FIND PERSONALITY BEGINS WHERE COMPARISON ENDS.

…and then there is I Pod hair.  Dusty Springfield, The Woodabe and me.

After reading recently again the biography of David Geffen I tuned the Pandora to Laura Nyro radio and was transported by other pop icons of the 60’s and 70’s such as Dusty Springfield and even Carole King and became a bit obsessed by their guru-like words and untouchable, mysterious goddess status and personalities. When I saw this photo of Dusty above, it really hit me and I suddenly wondered what she was thinking and feeling in that puffy beehive during this photo shoot.  The only way I could really know was to try to assume her un-natural pose and quixotic smile so I started playing around in Photobooth.  

The result is a series of images, stepping stones towards a vision of mash-up, old formal portraits which I have been desiring to do for a very long time but in such a way to be completely timeless, genderless and culturally undefined.

The root of that desire is my obsession with any transformative ritual.  The Fulani tribesmen of the Woodabe from Africa shown here with their exaggerated expressions and full-on preening line-ups like showgirls is so opposite our culture’s man-dance of solitary ego parading. I always wondered how they felt too. So I went there too.

Perhaps contrasted with Dusty’s cool, stiff and almost transsexual vibe, the window between these two worlds beckoned me in and the plan is to bring more people and personalities with me.  We have just begun the mining process for these diamonds.

(You can see what gets churned up from pod-chair dreaming and cold nights between parties.)

SIX. PRACTICE DARK ARTS.

From the entrance, with its giant big blue inflatable lightbulb with evil eyes and scars signaling brilliant ideas ahead, to the intricate charted details of Martian and ghoul anatomy, Burton’s vision is our modern antidote to everything Dark and Fearful.  With one eyeball set on Western culture, following Edward Gorey’s mock Victorian and the other eyeball on Eastern culture’s best 1960’s monster and Argonaut movies and futuristic anime, the man has created a compound eye based on a childhood touchpoint of enjoying being “misfit” vs. “normal” and seeing the world from inside his head.

I desired the corpse bride’s popping eyeballs to see over the crowds oogling precious drawings of my favorites, Stain Boy, Mr. Oogie Boogie, with his independently moving bulges in his cushy body and Large Marge.  Burton’s renderings of ourselves and the people we know with their innards flailing about in a way that we realize we truly perceive them. An early film he made of himself sleeping and dreaming in his bed with upside down nerd glasses says it all.

Thank you to my friend Rajendra Roy, The Celeste Bartos Chief Curator of Film, one of the organizers of the exhibition. My favorite memory of Raj is his glow-in-the-Dark, very Burtonesque and hilarious mad ghost dancing on the beach in a sheet at our Halloween bonfire during the Hamptons Film Festival.  Big hugs to Monique Baron, my friend just moving from Corporate to Creative, for suggesting we go to the exhibit.

The Tim Burton exhibition is at New York’s Museum of Modern Art until late April.

SEVEN. A BRILLIANT SKULL ONLY NEEDS SISYPHUS’ PAINTBRUSH.

Damien, we hardly know ye.

 “No Love Lost, Blue Paintings,” the Damien Hirst painting exhibition, opened this month in London at the Wallace Collection to disparaging criticism. I actually love the paintings and it made for a Hirst womb coupled with my visit to Other Criteria, Damien Hirst’s underground gallery at the Gagosian uptown store, which opened in September in New York City, with the perfect companion, Shelley Lewis, an elegant, humorous and smart Brit with a Bohemian spirit.

A brilliant white cave with wallpaper of pills, butterflies and flowers proffered up the tidy output of the Artist for Conceptual Consumption.  Close ups of the solid multi-colored dots surrounded by field of gold glitter revealed a precision and perfection around simplicity that is as meditative as a Rothko or a mandala.

The paintings feel like a pared down schematic of the momentary void from which Hirst’s lit symbolic tools, such as his skull, flowers, thought lines, dots and shark jaws, converge for a moment.  Less solid and a childlike effort begging for the technique and critique to be dropped, I truly admire these for their rawness and almost naivite.

The Guru is painting for fun.

EIGHT. MEN IN BLACK. 

Karl Lagerfeld is the one who said, “Personality begins where comparison ends.”

Compare and Contrast are THE jumping off points, for new ideas, humor, conveying a seductive advertising message and even to the stark black and white uniform Western culture adopts to award and celebrate.

Both were shining last week for the Ad Council’s annual black tie event at the Waldorf Astoria. I was struck how the sea of men in the rigor and elegance of black tie dress always levels the comparison factor for males (much like the Fulani line-up) and allows the personality of the men shine on top of a white arrow in a black field through their faces, hands, shoes and characters. 

Similarly, The Ad Council uses contrast and the improbable to convey messages from the American Heart Association’s “hands can do incredible things” for Hands-only CPR to brilliant pieces on Gay rights. Where would we be without these creative minds devoting time, energy and money to creatively pushing the needle of compassion and engagement for the masses?

Huffington Post has many of this year’s commercials here.

And Kudos to Karl for re-inventing the language of black and white uniforms via Chanel and his own wardrobe as a frame for personality read from the articulation of details.  The signs and symbols sensed like animals.

NINE. PERFORMA. NOW THIS IS AN ART EVENT.

Attuned to digital experience and expectations, almost in a sexual way, public events must equally touch the primal and the disorienting to engage us.  We are now the impulsed creators of our immediate experience in front of our Ipods and computers…so to replicate this seduction face to face, nothing about our surroundings must be less than peak experience.

Imagine exploring vast spaces with freshly uprooted apple trees saying “Pick me”, a sea of glasses inviting you to “Drink me”, a table of 2000 pounds of pork ribs rained upon by honey ooze dripping from the ceiling saying “This is messy”and Jeff Koons chocolate bunnies with hammers saying “Break me off”… with all of it based on the book of Genesis?  Now you are talking an event worth braving the cold for!

Performa, the bienniel roster of performance artists from around the world opened recently in New York City with an Opening Night Dinner Benefit at X Initiative, designed by Jennifer Rubell, the daughter of art collectors and niece of Studio 54 impresario Steve Rubell.

This event raised the bar…thankfully. (still getting honey outa my dress)

TEN. SOUND IN THE DARK BEGINS THE WORLD.

Pomp and circumstance reigns at the Park Avenue Armory from its historic army days to “PA” a performance by resident Marina Rosenfeld, one of the closing events of Performa 09.

While waiting to be let into the Armory’s drill hall where the performance was to be, I and others explored the dark rooms filled with taxidermy, including owls, a bobcat, a moose and others, among intricate black wrought iron chandeliers and military portraits.  The rooms are begging for a fashion shoot (especially given the Armory’s rep as hosting the “Silk Stocking Regiment”)  The heavy, ornate rooms were surprisingly designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany along with Stanford White (whose story of young mistresses and murder is intriguing New York history).  The rooms are intricate example of the American aesthetic movement’s use of exotic materials in lush combinations, a cult of beauty and sensuousness that is considered to have been pronounced dead upon the trial of Oscar Wilde in 1895.

The Veteran’s room’s chocolate brown wood carved ceiling with silver inlaid arabesques made me gasp. In the library, the silver work on urns, commemorative plates and ephemera mixed ornate animal forms and horns with heraldry is salivating and desires an indie model’s hand on them. Gold stenciled, Indian block-print inspired flowers on blue wallpaper and ceiling made me think of Hirst’s flower wallpaper, can you imagine that being commissioned today for an army headquarters?

The incongruity continued as we poured into the cavernous dark of the drill hall punctuated only with a few spots of light on PA speakers or a cellist and the monstrous scaffold ceiling. Machinery and recording bits lay all around. Following first a female voice’s personal love cooing coming out of the big PA speakers turning around and around in a vast searchlight way made me feel Nazi-Germanish. Tick tock tick tock, the crowd became attuned to the utterances of The Machine.  Another spot is lit where a cello player plays with electronic feedback and the crowd drifts there.  Lights or sudden switches took people to one tableau or another or just sitting in the middle of nowhere to soak it all in.  Once the soundscape became more and more of the same thing, it made me wonder about the tone of pure love emanating from within and without, like the sound of OM or the universe existing whether we tune in or not…and how we are subject to sound’s pull and push.

The crowd’s long applause at the end was most thrilling, due to it’s shared staccato and crowdsourced birth.  Another surprising and life-shifting night in New York City.

The following image, Bejing’s National Stadium by architects Herzog and de Mueron, just came into my life because of a potential client’s new space in their upcoming project in Miami.  It is the perfect modern aesthetic fusing sensuousness and contemplation and strangely conveys the same feeling of being in Marina Rosenfeld’s drill room pulsating with light and sound.

ELEVEN. STARCHILD…This better be GOOD.

I’ve been doing yoga since I was 16, a teenage starchild, flipping into headstands against my bedroom door where hung this Lisbon nightclub poster with groovy Hebrew writing advertising a nightclub called “Tiffany’s”.  Today, while doing a headstand, (which is great for spilling out the stars in your head), I saw the poster on my wall where it now hangs today and thought about the images we have as lodestars in our lives. 

This enigmatic black-pod-hatted man will always intrigue me on to keep believing in that black field of all possibility so I remember to cultivate the stars in myself and others to pop the moment.

Here are Jamiroquai’s lyrics to Starchild, an old song, but one that feels right for the time and coming cold. It is kind of Christian mythical but a good reminder that we all are actually the Starchild and we are capable of fully inhabiting and making good the black wholes filled with stars that we are…

I’ve never seen the sky so angry

Starchild

You’ve got to do something about these

Mind crimes

The shuffling feet and sad expressions

They don’t go, they don’t go

I thought you came down from heaven

To save souls

These angry men are into making

Bad seeds

The only thing we had they’re taking

Now love needs

Needs a little, needs a little

Five thousand million people

To spread joy, spread a little joy

 I thought you came down from heaven to save us

I thought you came but you just don’t take us

Chorus:

Somewhere in the world tonight

There’s a fire blazing bright

Keeping warm the superman

Sent to us to save the land

Somewhere in the world today

A hungry one will kneel to pray

Wishing all the while to see

Starchild

I’ve seen the preachers on the TV

In white suits

With precious stones they’re studded into

Their boots

Can you take the money, can you take their money?

I don’t know who to believe

Is it them or you?

I thought you came down from heaven to save us

I thought you came but you just don’t take us

[Chorus]

Starchild

Got to see him now

When you gonna come, when you gonna come

You’ve got to save us from what we’ve begun

From what we’ve begun

So long coming down

Starchild

Chorus

Somewhere in the world tonight

In the world tonight

Somewhere in the world tonight

In the world tonight

You know that somewhere in the world tonight

There’s a superman

There’s a superman and he’s coming down to see you, baby

There’s a superman coming

There’s a superman coming

Or “Pop Trash” as its described by this Independent review. This is a deeply superficial show, full of glitz and gloss, blingy as Moscow, neon-besmattered as the buildings of central Tokyo, noisy as a hypermarket. The review means this as a bad thing, but I’m not so sure. Yes, it’s shallow, but its entertainingly shallow and raises interesting questions about commercialisation in art, and in one case of a sex video, an artists selling of her body “for the purpose” of art (or is it just shameful hype?) Also its pretty entertaining- my favourite parts were the Damien Hirst room (in all its dotty ridiculousness), complete with Golden Carf Submerged in Water, the Naked Lady Corridor (not the room “Adults only”, but the corridor where startled middle class ladies rushed their young children past medium-core arty images of women in various states of undress), and the final room- a gloriously Murakami-ed up extravaganza (not Haruki, this one) that allowed me and my friend to bask in Japan nostalgia with the Kirsten Dunst video filmed in Akiharabara on display. Anyway enough talk, here’s some pics:

Andy Warhol- too much for me, and certainly wasn’t the best part

The Brooke Sheilds controversy generated publicity, but the replacement picture was a minor part of the exhibition

Lots of sex

Golden Cow in Water, or “False Idol” (2008) by Damien Hirst- now that’s more like it

Dead Horse. Untitled (2009) by Maurizio Cattelan

Takashi Murakami

Kirsten Dunst – BABE!

Odeio aquele deslumbramento típico de brasileiro que acha que tudo que vem de fora sensacional. Nós temos artistas, galerias e museus incríveis! Esta semana entrevistei aqui em Londres Hans Olbrist, o curador da Serpentine Gallery. Ele foi eleito pela New York Review como a pessoa mais importante das artes e ele confirmou isso. É encantado pelo trabalho da carioca Lygia Pape (1927-2004), a escultura, gravadora e cineasta, contemporânea de de Hélio Oiticica (1937-1980) e Lygia Clark (1920-1988). Olbrist conhece com detalhe o trabalho de curadoria de Walter Zanini, nas Bienais de São Paulo. Para mim, o que diferencia, e as vezes distancia, o Brasil de lugares como Reino Unido, pelo menos em termos de arte, é história e educação.

A japonesa Suki Cha faz videoarte e parece ser uma das favoritas

Nesta semana, a BBC 2 lançou um reality show chamado “School of Saatchi”. Esqueça o “Big Brother” e seus pares, trata-se de uma competição de arte televisionada, que intercala fascículos de aula de história, e supervisionada por Charles Saatchi (escrevi um perfil dele na Serafina que está hoje nas bancas). Ele é o galerista e colecionador de arte responsável por descobrir gente como Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin e Jeff Koons. Reuniu todos eles na exibição Sensation (1997) e assim fundou o grupo chamada de Young British Arstist, os YBA’s.

Dentre as milhares de inscrições, sobraram 12 participantes. Esses puderam apresentar seus trabalhos para uma banca formada pela artista Tracey Emin, o colecionador de arte (conhecido como o Saatchi do Norte), Frank Cohen, a curadora do Barbican Centre Kate Bush e, o crítico mais conceituado de arte contemporânea do Reino Unido, Mattew Collings.

Um a um, os candidatos tinham dois minutos para apresentar seus trabalhos e ao terminar eram questionados: “Por que você acha que isso é arte?”. Um dos pretendentes a pupilo de Saatchi amassou duas folhas de papel, dois e-mails impressos, colocou uma ao lado da outra e disse: “Isso representa a nossa comunicação hoje”. Foi desclassificado e saiu aos berros: “Vou encontrar alguém para fazer a minha cama!” Ele estava se referindo a instalação de Tracey, “My Bed”, que a revelou para a Saatchi e a colocou na lista curta do Tunner Prize, o principal prêmio de arte do país. Tá, a arte era meia-boca mesmo, mas o protesto foi ótimo.

Seis candidatos foram selecionados. Entre eles um paquistanês, que faz vídeo instalações questionando sua identidade cultural, uma japonesa que também trabalha com vídeo e quatro ingleses. Entre eles uma menina que fez os olhos de Tracey brilharem. Ela pendurou um apito num gancho e disse que havia ali conotação sexual. Nesse momento, entra um vídeo sobre Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), um dos precursores da arte conceitual e o pioneiro na idéia de “ready made”. “Ela não criou uma peça, ele selecionou um objeto, retirando a função dele e colocou no museu”, explica a curadora Kate Bush.

Ben Lowe nunca frequentou escola de arte e trabalha por encomenda (faz quadro para combinar com sofá), o que irrita profundamente Tracey Emin

Ainda no primeiro epsódio, houve uma prova realizada a pedido de Saatchi. Uma mulher na casa dos 40 e tantos anos entrou no estúdio de roupão. Tirou e deitou nua em uma espreguiçadeira. Outro vídeo entra para contar a história do desenho vivo na história da arte. Além de deixar claro o que o anfitrião do programa está buscando. Os resultados foram quase engraçados. Só dois dos seis selecionados mostraram habilidade em desenho. Apesar de todos terem encenado aquele gesto clássico de segurar a ponta do lápis, virando-o para a horizontal e vertical, tentando medir as partes do corpo da modelo para dar proporção ao desenho. Muito bom e bem divertido. Mais divertido ainda é ouvir a Tracey fazer suas análises, com um palavreado que remete automaticamente à Aracy de Almeida (“Nunca ouvi tanta merda na minha vida…” ou “Por que você não coloca esse treco no Youtube?”), enquanto a curadora Kate usa o mais inglês mais “posh e polite” da TV britânica.

Saatchi não deu o ar da graça. Apareceu apenas numa imagem formada por uma fumaça (tudo bem, o padrão BBC é altíssimo, mas essa foi punk). Dizem que ele só aparecerá no quarto e último capítulo. Nos três seguintes, os candidatos terão que cumprir tarefas, dessa vez irão criar obras diante das câmeras. O vencedor participará da exposição Newspeak: British Art Now, que será realizada em 2010 em uma das galerias do Museu Hermitage, em São Peterburgo, na Rússia. Além de ganhar um estúdio bancado por três anos por Charles Saatchi e se tornar o próximo Damien Hirst ou Tracey Emin da arte contemporânea britânica.

Yes I was at the new painting exhibition opening by Damien Hirst. It was oh so exciting!!

and I got some snaps of some local celebs looking at the work too.

Wow they’re very VERY blurry photos, must have been well drunk. At the opening he also had a representation of his old work pharmacy:

Damien Hirst has yet another painting exhibit; this time at London’s White Cube galleries following the exhibition at the Wallace Collection. His latest paintings keep with the Francis Bacon inspired imagery, but that’s where the extent of Hirst’s inspiration ends. Bacon’s paintings had an over the top theatricality to them, but Hirst manages to go so far over the top, he comes up from the bottom. I’d like to see these in person to get the full experience, but I’m going to have to agree with Adrian Searle: “ambitious though his paintings are, they appear to be trying to look like successful art, rather than actually being so.”

We went to see Damien Hirst’s exhibition last night. I know, I know, I was in the area.
Anyway, as expected it was one of the worst exhibitions I’ve ever seen. Not only is Mr Hirst an utterly talentless painter, but even breathing Bacon’s name in the same sentence is a bit if a travesty.

Beautifully just, is the Stuckists leaping to Hirst’s defence. Some of the worst artists in London (history?) are, after years of lampooning the man, now his vehement defenders.