Ringside at the Circus!

Monday night was to be a night to remember! I have to admit that I'm a concert goer, and that usually means a seat in an auditorium or theatre where the action is played out on the stage a polite distance away from me! Not so at the Rescue Rooms in Nottingham on Monday 27th March! Accessed via alleyways and behind buildings, the Rescue Rooms are decidedly down beat! The sort of place that my son would frequent and my mother would have a fit if she knew! We'd met up with friends and we were delighted to find a place at the front, next to the barrier, spitting distance from the action, and wow were we in for a lot of that!
Ginger's band featured musicians drawn from a number of other bands and groups, including the cool, good-looking Swedish guitarist Conny Bloom (siiiigh!!!!!). Ginger and his band rocked for two hours much to everyones joy, which reflected back at them when they took a short break and the crowd kept singing continuously until they returned to take up the anthem!

I was incredulous to find myself confronted by the Psycho Cyborgs, body piercing each other only a few feet away, even more ironic that I should have turned them off in disgust the week before when they were featured on a Performance Art programme, muttering that you would never catch me any where near anything like that!!!!! Great night out, great fun, great music, just......great!!!
Ginger Myspace
Conny Myspace
Conny Bloom Jamesons Ad.

The Amazing Balls of Chris Bliss!

Thanks Bluefluff for the introduction! Isn't he spell-binding?!! :-)
Have a look here!

A small insight!

More fascinating art. Panda painted onto a single hair!

To infinity and beyond!!!

Just spent a great afternoon at the National Space Centre. In fact I'm just back from a Mission to Mars!!! Sounds impossible I know but in the Challenger Learning Centre anything is possible!! Challenger is part of the educational foundation set up as a memorial for the ill-fated Challenger shuttle mission of 1986, where one member of the crew, Christa McAuliffe a teacher was to deliver lessons from space. Of course that never happened but for the last twenty years the Challenger Learning Centres have attempted and succeeded to 'continue her mission' of enthusing and informing children, students and adults about science, physics and space. This one in Leicester is the only centre outside of North America.

My fellow crew members this afternoon were from a Birmingham high school and they enthusiastically flew to Mars and back whilst carrying out a whole range of experiments, investigations and monitoring duties all linked to their national curriculum study programmes in both 'mission control' and 'the Mars transporter'. One of the tasks was to build and launch a probe to one of the moons of mars, but this crew were so good they managed to build two! Something I never knew before was that Mars has two moons, both pretty small, called Phobos and Deimos, named after the beasts that pulled the chariot of Mars the Roman god of war. Interesting that Phobos means phobia or fear and Deimos panic or terror stricken! We had a few scary moments on our mission, when our smooth workings were rudely interrupted by flashing red lights and wailing sirens as we were told that we had just a few minutes of oxygen left! Fortunately the life-support team managed to solve this problem with seven seconds to spare!!! With our probes successfully launched we viewed superb video footage of the surfaces of the two moons with a close fly-by!!

Great fun!! Mars and back in an afternoon!!

Michelangelo still number one!

A new show of Michelangelo sketches is opening at the British Museum and has just set a record for pre-show ticket bookings. Michelangelo a super star in his life time seems to still hold that status today.

His contemporary Leonardo Da Vinci one of histories most original and creative artists is also in the news this week with this slice of life!

Talking of food, last month saw an art experience at Selfridges where the Chinese artist, Song Dong built a city out of biscuits and then invited the viewers to eat it!

Expression and Expressionism

I've just finished the chapter on Expressionism, and this explores some of the issues and debates relating to what has come to be termed 'Expressionist' art in the period from 1905 to the outbreak of the First World War. Three main groups of artists were identified: the Brucke ('Bridge) in Dresden, the Fauves ('Wild Beasts') in France and the Blauer Reiter ('Blue Rider') in Munich.

The picture is Franz Marc's The Tower of the Blue Horses 1913 (Course Book 2 page 50)

A pivotal essay is by Henri Matisse, Notes of a Painter (Art in Theory 1B6 pages 69 - 75) in which he states:

'Expression, for me does not reside in passions glowing in a human face or manifested by violent movement. The entire arrangement of my picture is expressive: the place occupied by the figures, the empty spaces around them, the proportions, everything has its 'share'. Composition is the art of arranging in a decorative manner the diverse elements at the painter's command to express his feelings'.

Just a few links relating to Expressionism and the three main groups of artists.

Expressionism - Wikipedia
Expressionism - The Tate Glossary
Expressionism - Artcyclopedia
Expressionism - Artfile

Three groups discussed
Die Brucke - The Bridge - founded in Dresden in June 1905
The Fauves - French for Wild Beasts.
More on The Fauves
The Blauer Reiter
Franz Marc and The Blue Rider

The Sound of Rigo Jancsi!

Great!! The boys have uploaded a song to listen to called 'Agrophobia'.:-)
If you can't hear there try here!!

South Bank Sunday.

Today I stood in front of Eve and sought the 'absolute emotion' that Barnett Newman hoped to share!

The Tate Modern is re-hanging its collection, and moving away from its original display format linked to the Academy genres of Landscape/Matter/ Environment, StillLife/Object/RealLife, History/Memory/Society, and Nude/Action/Body, and looks like it's moving towards chronology and isms. Only two of the new galleries are open as I write, and completion of the remaining exhibit areas is scheduled for May.

On arrival our first encounter was with Embankment the display of white boxes by Rachel Whiteread in the massive Turbine Hall. This installation seems to invoke feelings of size and fun as children ran and played between the structures, and lots of camera bearing couples looked to discover new views of each other between and around the towering boxes, creating their own art images!

The first of the re-named galleries that we visited was Material Gestures, and it was there that we were immediately confronted with Barnett Newman's Adam and Eve side by side and much larger that I had envisaged. Opposite the paintings but beautifully complementing the expressive ideas of Newman, was Anish Kapoor's Ishi's Light. I captured my thoughts and information in these few hasty notes taken at the time!! Kapoor's sculpture was like walking into a concave pod, it was very disorientating as you were lost in it, it seemed to go on forever, like stepping into an eternal space, and you physically felt it, but was it a physical experience of an emotion? This piece seems to explain Newman's objectives for Eve and Adam which were hung opposite the 'sculpture'. I'd written that, then saw these notes on the wall: 'extends Newman's metaphor into real space. Like Newman, Kapoor's work generates an immense experience which elicits powerful physical and psychological responses'.

We also enjoyed viewing works by Rothko, Pollock, Miro, Matisse, Monet, Dubuffet and was interested to learn that the expression 'mobiles' was used by Marcel Duchamp in explaining the moveable hanging sculptures of Alexander Calder.

Before leaving Material Gestures, a great find was Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's Bathers at Moritzburg 1909/10 reworked 1926) a work from the Course Book 2 Art of the Avant-Gardes. He was a member of the Brucke group in Dresden.

The other gallery which is open for viewing is entitled Poetry and Dream, which has a heavy focus on Surrealism. From the wall : Surrealism and Beyond. For the poets and artists of the Surrealist movement, dreams stood for all aspects of the world repressed by rationalism and convention.

The most exciting discovery here was Duchamp's Box-in-a-Valise (1941). Very interesting notes accompanied this item. 'Marcel Duchamp was a significant influence on Dada and Surrealism. He was renown for his irony and intellectualism as well as his distanced deadpan treatment of eroticism. He was careful to limit his creative output, warning that artists should not repeat themselves. However, he also issued multiple versions of his work'. 'Duchamp saw Box-in-a-Valise as a "portable museum" containing miniature versions and reproductions of many of his earlier works. Its title refers to the fact that many of these have been signed by Duchamp's female alter-ego Rrose Sélavy. The box unfolds like an intricate puzzle, revealing the thematic links between works created over more than three decades. The number of objects in the box was sixty-nine, an erotically suggestive number'.

The distinction between the concentration on form and the isolationist stance of the modernists and the mixed media and 'expanded field' of the postmodernists, really came alive with video's, installations, collage, natural materials etc. We left elated and excited feeling that today we had seen Tate Modern with a new view thanks to AA318!!!

After a visit to Pizza Express we strolled along the South Bank crossing the Thames to visit Covent Garden and the Tea House before making our way back to the car via The Strand, Fleet Street, Ludgate Circus and St. Paul's. I love visiting London with 'him indoors' cos I know that I won't get lost!!! :-)

A New Can of Worms!

I have just submitted my first assignment for the current Open University course I am studying, Art of the Twentieth Century. This certainly has been a new can of worms, considering artworks, history and ideas which I had never encountered before. In a bid to reflect on some of the things that I have learnt I thought I would record a few blog notes, in an attempt to hang on simply to some of the complex ideas I have been introduced to without trying to make this another TMA!

The century is dominated by the ideas of modernism and postmodernism. Modernism was an idea brought to prominence by Clement Greenberg in his essay Modernist Painting and focuses on the idea of 'art for art's sake' and a concentration on art being pure and separate from politics and the culture of the world around it, a retinal experience only giving aesthetic pleasure. It gives great credence to art in a specific medium such as painting or sculpture. Postmodernism by contrast gives prominence and credibility to art in mixed media and in an 'expanded field' such as performance, photographs, video, installations, pop art etc. It also gives recognition to movements and works of art that were pushed to the side by modernism and brings them back into mainstream such as Duchamp's 'readymades' e.g.Bottlerack and Fountain, and Dada. The modernist ideas of Greenberg and Barr (the curator of MOMA) dominated the artistic world, but started to lose their hold with the emergence of the postmodernists during the 1960's.

The four case studies in the first block leading to this assignment were Marcel Duchamp's Bottlerack, Barnett Newman's Eve, Ana Mendieta's Silueta Series, and Yuendumu community’s Yarla. Each introduced a very different notion of art both physically and culturally, and presented challenges to my preconceived ideas of art. Duchamp's 'readymades' presenting the notion that the artist by choosing an item makes it a work of art creating a new thought for it. Newman through abstract painting and considering the eye of the spectator, attempting to create an experience of 'absolute emotion'. Mendieta through use of her own body and body shape conveying ideas of femininism, feminist repression and the transience of all things, using objects that are part of the natural world. Yarla, a temporary installation by the Yuendumu community, based on the traditional shapes, patterns and 'art' of indigenous Australians raising questions of ethnicity and the relationship between western and non-western views of art and how the western view is incompatible to the culture that creates this form of art.
So I've opened my new can of worms, hopefully I've managed to catch some before they all wriggle away!! Cos there's a new can to open this week!!!

Related links.
Marcel Duchamp 1887 - 1968 World Community
Making Sense of Duchamp Interactive Website
The New York Times - Taking Jokes by Duchamp to Another Level of Art
BBC News - Duchamp's urinal tops art survey

Wikipedia - Abstract Art
Barnett Newman - Tate Modern and OU Study Days Online

Tate Modern Sculpture and Performance in Ana Mendieta's Silueta Series
Online image results for Ana Mendieta

Carol Schneemann Lecture - Tate Modern

Yuendumu Community

Cat Herding!

Following the theme of my previous post this advert could possibly qualify for an oscar!
View here!

Power of Dreams!

Car adverts are one of the most irritating of those that appear on our televisions, and so often are pretentious and stupid!!! But this one for me is like a work of art! A gem amongst so much dross! Adverts are so much a part of our lives everyday, and I guess have become one of the main art forms. Most of them though are so unsatisfying that they actually would put you off the product especially when they are repeated time and time again with some form of humour that made you smile the first time, but not on the thirtieth! So, I think this one really stands out..............pity I don't want a Honda!!!