‘De la chasse, Cato l’africain’, Mixed media 1990, 230 x 200 x 140 cm by suisse artist Jean Tinguely in the summer show at Guy Pieters Gallery in Saint-Paul de Vence, France, 2009. See more at > Museum Tinguely and Guy Pieters Gallery

Werkschau des frankophilen Künstlers Fero Freymark im Rathaus Güglingen

„Durchblick“, „Haus des Bildhauers“ und „Große Fuge J.S. Bach“, drei Kleinskulpturen von Fero Freymark paradieren nebeneinander auf Sockeln und empfangen den Besucher im Foyer des Güglinger Rathauses. Verkantet, subtil ineinander verschachtelt, kubische Räume, voll Vitalität und ursprünglicher Schaffenslust, wurden diese drei  Bronzen vor einem Jahr in Paris beim Salon des Artistes Francais ausgezeichnet.

Eine „Riesenanerkennung“ so Freymark, „zumal für einen  Nicht-Franzosen“. In der Ausstellung „Bilder und Skulpturen von Fero Freymark“ repräsentieren sie einen der Werkkomplexe des Künstlers.

Formal streng, naturverbunden klar – über 30 Exponate, zu denen auch  Fundstückskulpturen gehören, wie  Rost patinierte Stücke von  Schiffshäuten, die an die Kindheit des 70-Jährigen erinnern oder der „Werkzeugtanz“ eine Reminiszenz an Jean Tinguely. Ob in Bronze gegossen oder in Stein gehauen, ob Gemälde oder Zeichnung, ob Großformat oder schnelle, kleine Tagebuch- und Reiseskizzen des ganz jungen Künstlers, die  Schau ist ein faszinierender Rückblick auf eine 50-jährige Schaffensperiode.

In Köln geboren, wächst Freymark kriegsbedingt in Westpommern bei den Großeltern auf. Geprägt von den Erfahrungen auf einer „Bauhütte“ beim Neubau des Gelsenkirchner Theaters, fährt er zweigleisig. Tagsüber studiert er Architektur und gehorcht  damit der Familientradition. Abends folgt er seiner Neigung in Bildhauerkursen. Als  Geselle wandert er durch Europa, verdingt sich als Maurer in England, als Schreiner in Portugal und in einer Bronzegießerei in Deutschland.

Verschachtelt und verzahnt wie  Skulpturen und Farbflächen, wie bildnerische und plastische Fertigkeiten, so harmonisch fügen sich Zufall und bewußte Entscheidung  ins Lebensganze von Fero Freymark, der sich von der Provence und ihren sinnlichen Qualitäten angezogen fühlt. Nicht allein die Landschaft, auch Seelenverwandte wie Paul Cezanne und Vincent van Gogh trifft Freymark hier, liebt wie jener die Abenteuer des Tartarin de Tarascon. Beschäftigt sich mit Literaten wie Albert Camus  oder Jean Giono, der Mann, der Bäume pflanzte.  Galeristen sehen in Freymark einen „Literaten mit Schweißgerät“.

Vielseitigkeit und umfänglich ist das Lebenswerk, in dem in der Güglinger Werkschau ein Fixpunkt herausragt: „La grande pierre de St. Guenolé“ (2009). Der Große Stein an exponierter Stelle  zwischen die zweiteiligen Gemälde „Landschaft Gelb“ und „Werkstück Rot“ platziert, steht pars pro toto für die 30 Jahre anhaltende Auseinandersetzung mit der Urmaterie.

Wie der, vor einer Felswand meditierende Buddha, arbeitet Freymark am liebsten im Steinbruch. Die Stille monumentaler Brocken,  gesprengte Erdschichten, massive Blöcke gebrochen, gekerbt und verwittert – eine unerschöpfliche Inspirationsquelle  für den Poeten und Bildhauer, der in  großen Zeichnungen aus tausenden von filigranen Kugelschreiber-Strichen riesige, rhythmische Gesteinsformationen festhält. Ocker, Rot und Brauntöne, selbst die leuchtenden Farben seiner Gemälde entspringen Natursteinen.

Info: Bilder und Skulpturen von Fero Freymark sind bis 18. Dezember im Rathaus in Güglingen zu sehen.

Mesmeric is my word for today.

Bedwyr Williams, Nimrod, 2009 Photography by Helen Palmer

This bloody wordpress app for ipods keeps losing everything I write. I spent all morning making notes on it and they just disappeared.

Visited Ceri Hand Gallery this morning to see Bedwyr Williams exhibition Nimrod. That is very special, like entering an alternative universe. Bedwyr’s work has a rye dark humour, which I really like. Here he has created an airport, which reminded me of Valley on Anglesey, small, with few buildings and fog engulfing the flatness. The departure building was complete with advertisements and music. The wonderful space at Ceri Hand Gallery is slowly transformed with dry ice and the repetitive music all adds to the dreamlike quality as the skateboard and walking stick planes hover motionless above us.

I particularly liked the book work, Methodist to my Madness. A framed copy of the bible in Welsh which has been posted over with a conversation piece about artist duos and other things. This is part of his performance work. Bedwyr Williams shows himself to be an intelligent and challenging visual artist whose work encourages engagement.

This idea of madness followed through at the Tate exhibition of Michael Landy and Jean Tinguely. Joyous Machines is on until 10th January.

This is the best exhibition I have seen at Tate Liverpool for ages. The simplicity and beauty of Tinguelys wire sculptures was astounding. I was so excited by the slowness of some of the meta works…I wrote loads about this and it’s all gone, arghh! Anyway, the pace and simplicity of the works from the 1950s seems to me to be the antithesis of what was going on around it. Streamlined cars and vacuum cleaners, space age sputniks, jet planes etc. This work stops you in your tracks and makes you consider and contemplate our place here. Landy destroyed all his possessions in 2001 and this relates to Tinguely’s Homage to New York, a machine that created and destroyed itself in March 1960.

I felt a mixture of elation, sadness, freedom and disgust at the Breakdown piece. Is this what we are? are we made up of our possessions? are we a sum of parts? can we be reduced down to dust ultimately? When we die do we leave behind us a legacy of waste? to rid yourself of every possession will give you a freedom, and reconnect you to what we are.

Today I went to the Tate, Liverpool and saw Michael Landy’s co-curated exhibition Joyous Machines: Michael Landy and Jean Tinguely. Landy pays homage to his predecessor, presenting some of Tinguely’s earliest works which simultaneously explore notions of movement, space and time through sketches, paintings and intricately crafted sculpture. Tinguely’s sculptures incorporate junk metal and other found  or unwanted objects. These disparate pieces are forged together; rehashed into new and (by all intents and purposes), ‘useless’ objects. The collection of works are thought provoking and to me; suggestive of the advent of industrialisation; the increasing role of mechanical machinery; the development of the mass consumerist market, and the subsequent influx of technology and new media, versus the decrease in manual skills, labour and craft. These pieces seem to reflect on the link between capitalist society; our fixation with mass consumption and our eventual [and often, premature], disregard for commodities.

For more information, have a look at this brilliant, Liverpool based blog:

http://www.artinliverpool.com/blog/2009/06/tate-joyous-machines-michael-landy-and-jean-tinguely/

Hablando de objetos para ser destruidos, aquí transfiero el primer manifiesto de “arte auto-destruible” (1959) escrito por Gustav Metzger:

Auto-destructive art is primarily a form of public art for industrial societies.

Self-destructive painting, sculpture and construction is a total unity of idea, site, form, colour, method, and timing of the disintegrative process.

Auto-destructive art can be created with natural forces, traditional art techniques and technological techniques.

The amplified sound of the auto-destructive process can be an element of the total conception.

The artist may collaborate with scientists, engineers.

Self-destructive art can be machine produced and factory assembled.

Auto-destructive paintings, sculptures and constructions have a life time varying from a few moments to twenty years. When the disintegrative process is complete the work is to be removed from the site and scrapped.

Metzger escribió también un segundo (1960) y tercer manifiesto (1961).

Igualmente, fue en los años 60 cuando Jean Tinguely enseñó en el patio del MOMA su escultura performática Hommage a New York, la cual se autodestruía mientras producía música y pintaba.

EXHIBITION – artist: Jean Tinguely, location: Tate Liverpool Liverpool, date: 02.10.09 – 10.01.10 / current exhibitions at: Tate Liverpool Liverpool 2009. Artistinformation and biography-text from: Jean Tinguely Tate Liverpool Liverpool CATEGORY: art, modern art, projects: TEXTPORTRAITS Jean Tinguely by Ralph Ueltzhoeffer and Laura May. More information about Jean Tinguely Exhibition Tate Liverpool Liverpool, United Kingdom.

New entries: actual 0

Joseph Beuys / Portrait (TEXTPORTRAIT).

textportraits by Ralph Ueltzhoeffer.

AKTUELLE AUSSTELLUNG: Tate Liverpool Liverpool; Künstler: Jean Tinguely; Betitelung: (Joyous Machines: Michael Landy – Jean Tinguely) – Zeitraum der Ausstellung: 02.10.09 – 10.01.10. Kunstausstellungen (England) aktuell: Tate Liverpool Liverpool (2009). Weitere Informationen über: Jean Tinguely: Biografie/Biography — | Galerieninformationen/Gallery: Jean Tinguely — Weitere geplante Ausstellungen: Tate Liverpool Liverpool von Jean Tinguely — Jean Tinguely Kunstportal: Wikipedia (http://de.wikipedia.org). Mehr aktuelle Informationen über Jean Tinguely Tate Liverpool Liverpool.

Beitragsforum Kunst & Kultur allgemein:

Textportrait: Joseph Beuys.

Textportraits – Ralph Ueltzhoeffer.

SÃO PAULO AGENDA
Exposição Uma Aventura Moderna – Coleção de Arte Renault
no MAC USP Ibirapuera

Yves Klein, IKB 64, såld för 9 500 000 kr.

I dagens dystra lågkonjunktur gjorde af Buréns privata konstsamling succé under klubban på Stokholms auktionsverk den 11:e mars, trots lågkonjunkturen! En bidragande orsak till höga priser kan mycket väl vara den låga svenska kronan i kombination med ett internationellt intresse för flera av auktionens verk.

Eva af Burén, som skapat samlingen, var gallerist och kom på så vis tidigt över konstverk av numer världskända konstnärer. I sin samling kunde hon stoltsera med namn som Marcel Duchamp, Lucio Fontana och Jean Tinguely, vars verk nu klubbades för miljonbelopp. Dyrast var Yves Kleins verk IKB 64 som såldes för9,5 milj kr.Se mer i SvD och DN. 

Marchel Duchamp, Feuille de vigne femelle, såld för 3,4 milj.

Jean Tinguely, Relief Point Rouge, 3,8 miljkr.

Bilder från Stockholms auktionsverk.

Auktionsverket håller just nu på att auktionera ut Eva af Buréns samling på 125 konstverk. Denna auktion skrev jag om för några dagar sedan. När ungefär 100 utrop är avklarade så är trenden klar. Verken går ganska genomgående över utrop, många till och med högt över. Någon lågkonjunktur och hot om uppsägningar märks inte av här. Yves Klein tavlan som jag visade tidigare gick för 9,5 mkr vilket var lika med utropet på 8-10 mkr. Nedan ett verk Relief Point Rouge från 1955 av Jean Tinguely, schweizisk konstnär. Slutpris blev 3,8 mkr mot förväntade 1,2-1,5 mkr. Ibland undrar jag om auktionsbranschen, liksom mäklarbranschen iallafall i Stockholm, tillämpar lockpriser ?!!!

The third issue of Matthew Offenbacher’s art ‘zine La Especial Norte has hit the streets!  This issue features essays, articles and interviews by Jeffry Mitchell, Debra Baxter, Joey Veltkamp, Susan Robb, Jean Tinguely and me.  On first reading, I am struck by the profound resonance of the themes and ideas uniting this issue.  Trust me, it’s not to be missed and it will go fast!  As always, the publication is FREE and copies may be found at various contemporary art venues including James Harris Gallery, Lawrimore Project, and SOIL.  Joey Veltkamp has written much more about this and previous issues of La Especial Norte on his blog, Best Of.

For this study, I’ve decided to make simple lists to summarise the ideas that are brought up in relation to these photographs of artists.  Obviously,I’m taking a slightly feminist view, so my thoughts often came back to gender roles,especially as ‘gender’ has been the over-arching theme of this week’s readings (notes/thoughts on those to follow).

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Click on the artist’s name to visit their site or their biography.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Ad Reinhardt with his family (1958 )

- authority

-masculinity

-traditional roles (father, husband, bread-winner)

-control

Jean Tinguely and Nicky de Saint-Phalle

New York City, 1962

-

-Gaze(who/what is the focus on? who are we supposed to be looking at?)

-

-Female form (of sculpture)

-

-Gender roles (He’ll smoke and work, she’ll sit there, bored but pretty)

Elaine de Kooning and Willem de Kooning

East Hampton, New York      1953

-Again, ideas of focus and importance, though here it made more obvious that Willem de Kooning is the focus of the photograph due to his prominence in the foreground.

-However, it is the woman this time caught smoking, which seems somewhat unusual, though it may be considered elegant in certain cases,and rendered masculine in others (“women on fire eating meat!”, as certain male friends of mine insist on saying rather rowdily every so often)

Helen Frankenthaler

West Islip, New York    1964

-

-here the scene shows Frankenthaler being taught by a man (presumably another artist)

-

-could be seen to hint at women’s lack of skill, but equally it is just a picture of her learning something new, or of a piece she worked on with another (it’s all too easy for us to read into things- we cannot tell whether the scene is staged or not, for example).

Barnett Newman

-Again,smoking (perhaps I’m a little more aware of this as someone living in the age of the ban (how would they cope?)), but this stereotype plays further- alone, male- were the decor different, it could almost be a bar.

-There is a sense of self assurance as the artists sits, back to the canvases, almost as if he were not phased by them (though he may yet be unaware of how important these pieces would become/were made to become (more on that in week 2))

___________________________________________________________________________________________

In general I feel these photos show a tendancy for women to be quite literally pictured as being a different kind of/of a lower class of artist in comparison to their male contemporaries. We see this through the subtle positioning of women in the image compared to the men (often behind, in the background), and the overall feelof the image- for example,whilst Newman seems clever, independent and confident due to his aloof position away from the camera- women in images are often not portrayed so powerfully.

TINGUELY MUSEUM

William Heath Robinson: The first roast turkey: an old legend that attributed the discovery of roast turkey to the monks in the 13th century

Consider, if you will, a nudist avatar. Don’t worry, for the moment, about what it has to do with Christmas – even if I was introduced to this mind-bending oxymoron in a casual discussion between two thirtysomething lawyers talking across me at a Christmas lunch. It has something to do with the idea being not merely a conception but a contraption.

One of my neighbours was describing a divorce case. It was initiated by a wife incensed by her husband’s idealised self stripping down to his imaginary perfection with other believers in the same –ism – nudism – on Second Life, the all-digital Never-Never Land. Nudism, we know, is supposed to be about divesting yourself of all the artifice and status encoding that create needless barriers between human beings; about accepting the brute facts of your physical endowment with pride and joy. A vision of swaying, jiggling and drooping en masse inflicted on me on a Greek island at the long-ago age of twenty-one is engraved on the part of my brain that stores minor traumas.

But if nudism is about accepting and celebrating reality, what does it mean to take it all off not you, but the being you’ve invented to give reality the slip?

This manoeuvre struck me as almost as convoluted and unfathomable as some of the contraptions of W. Heath Robinson – the cartooning inventor-fabulist whose flighty meditation on the origin of the classic seasonal food I have borrowed to say - H A P P Y – C H R I S T M A S - a bit early, to everyone checking in here.

I had for some days before the lunch been wandering into an online gallery of his work, trying to decide whether, for example, I liked Compressed Billiards for Maisonettes more than A Cloud Dispeller Designed by the First Lord Discovering a Heinkel Bomber Hiding in a Cloud. That was because some of us on this site had been comparing his work to the creations of Jean Tinguely, the Swiss artist who specialised in designing satirical mechanical sculptures — with, Hazlitt told us, practically no justification at all.

From the lawyerly tête-à-tête, I gathered that the couple in the nudist avatar divorce were, like my fellow guests, in their early thirties – the average age of Second Lifers. When we got to the pudding course, they were complaining that the long sentences and descriptions of Charles Dickens were complicated and annoying, which made me rather sad. I find it disheartening that a generation after my own seems to have no patience whatsoever with his style of mental knotting — but unlimited tolerance for mental acrobatics involving figures in the pedestrian artists’ illustrations that pass for avatars.

How could anyone prefer those pictures to – for instance — the scene in A Christmas Carol when Dickens begins to turn up the suspense for Scrooge’s first haunting with an unexpected reminder of his partner, Marley, who has been dead for six years. On his way home from work, the peerless grump enters ‘a gloomy suite of rooms, in a lowering pile of building up a yard,’ and, Dickens continues,

. . . let any man explain to me, if he can, how it happened
that Scrooge, having his key in the lock of the door,
saw in the knocker, without its undergoing any intermediate
process of change–not a knocker, but Marley’s face.

Marley’s face. It was not in impenetrable shadow
as the other objects in the yard were, but had a
dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark
cellar. It was not angry or ferocious, but looked
at Scrooge as Marley used to look: with ghostly
spectacles turned up on its ghostly forehead. The
hair was curiously stirred, as if by breath or hot air;
and, though the eyes were wide open, they were perfectly
motionless. That, and its livid colour, made it
horrible; but its horror seemed to be in spite of the
face and beyond its control, rather than a part of
its own expression.

Only being tickled made me giggle as much as listening to this passage, at some age before independent reading – and it has much the same effect on me now.

Do younger people – no matter how bright they are – find sentences of many clauses indigestible because no one read them to them properly, when they were children? I mean, pronounce them rivetingly, varying tone and pace so that understanding the way they worked became instinctive?

Or does the gap between their ability to enjoy Dickensian and digital fantasy have something to do with an inescapable requirement that a solipsism quotient be met? As readers, we let authors annexe our imaginations. It’s different in our compulsive contemporary electronic playgrounds, which cater to self-love by letting us insert pseudo-selves – artefacts of our own imaginations – into stories we help to shape. The imagery is shallow and two-dimensional by comparison with what minds following the multi-faceted directions of, say, a Dickens, can conjure and generate. But in imaginative entertainment, we’ve apparently entered the age of No Complexity Without Vanity.

A shrug seems the only possible response: autres temps, autres moeurs.

Another year is ending, and there’s no holding back progress.

I found the most wonderful story today and just had to share it (even if it´s kind of long).

Franz Gsellmann, an austrian farmer was born in 1910, as a child he wanted to be an electrician but his father didn´t allow him to start an apprenticeship so he became a farmer. But for all his life he remained fascinated by moving objects, the mechanical interaction of modern machines. He dreamed of building a machine but lacked a characteristic element for the construction of his machine. Until he saw the Atomium of the 1958 Brussels world fair in his local newspaper. The farmer boarded the train and went to brussels. The journey to three days but was worth it: Gsellmann had found the heart of his machine. He went home and started working.

For the next 23 years he worked on his wondrous machine and never during all his life told what purpose or meaning his machine was supposed to have. He went to Graz, Vienna and many fleamarkets all over on a bike to find objects and small treasures for his machine, among them a small dutch windmill, an eagle made from china, 5 crosses, seven generators and 200 lightbulbs. No one was allowed into the room where he build his machine, not even his wife.

In the attic, photographed by Franz Killmeyer

But in the night of 1968 as all lights went off in his tiny village, the people there knew: Gsellmann did it. In that night he turned on his machine. 12 switches were needed. Then green, red and blue wheels started to turn, hundreds of tiny lamps started blinking , it was creaking and humming and squealing. The whole thing is 6 meters long, 3 meters high and 2 meters wide. In its middle a tiny Atomium is rotating and a glass Holy-Mary statue is shining with tiny lightbulbs surrounding it like a rose wreath.

And nobody knows what it is.

“When a human is gifted, it´s like an inner drive. It´s like in spring when a rosebush starts growing tiny buds, and in may,june the roses are there. like this it drives me year after year.” Franz Gsellmann, builder of the worlds-maschine.

Over time his magical machine began to drew visitors. Legend has it that even the artist Jean Tinguely, who builds kinetic sculptures and has his art displayed at the MoMa and the Tate, traveled to the farm to see the machine.

Gsellmann kept perfecting his machine until his death. The family claims that one day after he went to his wife to tell her his machine was finished, he simply went to bed and died.

It´s such a beautiful (and kind of sad) story and my translation doesn´t really does it justice. I really hope that Mr. Gsellmann was satisfied with his machine and that it turned out how he wanted it too. And that he is watching from heaven now, seeing people take enjoyment in his machine and that they are in awe of his accomplishment and dedication.

Here is a beautiful article about Gsellmann and his miracle machine (in german).

And the website of the museum at his house where the machine still stands (in german).

There is also a book about him on amazon (in german): Der Weltenmaschinenroman.

Escultor Suíço (1915-1991) utilizou nas suas esculturas em movimento objectos desperdiçados, numa sátira à máquina. É também um elogio ao movimento. http://www.tinguely.ch/