http://www.lulu.com/content/1344050
This drawing is adapted from a memorial design my father did – etched and finished onto a memorial to a young boy who died in the 1960’s. I looked at this memorial every time I went into the cemetery in Bromsgrove. I was a bit dark even as a child.
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Claude Monet (born 14th November 1840)Monet was a French painter who helped found the Impressionist movement in the late 19th century. His works include renowned en plein air, or outdoor, paintings, which capture natural landscapes with accents of sunlight and vibrant colors. He is also known for painting the same subject repeatedly, at different times of day and in different seasons, to show how changing light affects form. Where did Monet paint his famous Water Lilies series? More… |
I suppose I am influenced by this man. It began when I was at Exeter College of Art – A lecturer went to Giverny, Eure, in Upper Normandy, this famous ‘backyard’ was where Monet planted a large garden, a garden he painted for majority of his later life. This garden was then derelict, overgrown, rotted and totally destroyed, the photographs of the place were a total contrast to the manicured, arranged images Monet had painted and which now adorn the walls of the world’s major galleries. In reality Monet failed as a painter of nature – he was a painter of controlled nature, organised, no better than the studio painters of a few decades before, who were scorned by the Impressionists…same shit different label. Why is one of his paintings hung in the same gallery as a Pollock in Tate Britain? Are they the same? Am I guilty?
Answers here please.
My two eldest boys and I were privileged to go to a private preview of The British Museum’s exhibition of the First Emperor of China (Ying Zheng). The so-called terracotta army is an insane collection of life-sized clay figures of soldiers, weight lifters, swans, acrobats, musicians and administrators, with whom the First Emperor decided to be buried with – in an attempt to achieve immortality. The idea was that his terracotta army would give him the power in the spirit world that he already enjoyed on earth. Originally painted these statues cost the lives of countless workers.
The objects that were with this army were in some ways more interesting – the money in shape of ploughs, knives and ant faces – the failed firing of tiles etc. melted into a distorted pile – the epitaphs inscribed in bits of clay dedicated to workers who had died whilst under forced labor. A great exhibition.
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Tate Britain explores the history of the Turner Prize with an exhibition of key works by the winning artists and the broader context of each year’s shortlist. This was a great opportunity to see some of these works in one space.
This exhibition shows some of the significant moments in the recent history of British art and the reception of the prize by the press, by artists, and by the public.
Find out more about The Turner Prize: A Retrospective exhibition 2 October 2007 – 6 January 2008.
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We then went to Tate Modern to see the Rothko’s. ‘I’m not an abstractionist. I’m not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.’ – Mark Rothko. To get to these paintings we had to walk over ‘The Crack’. Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth is the first work to intervene directly in the fabric of the Turbine Hall by creating a subterranean chasm that stretches the length of the Turbine Hall.
The Unilever Series: Doris Salcedo 9 October 2007 – 6 April 2008.
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Politics = the aesthetics of the system +
the aesthetics of failure = Politics
Cuba is the most exciting and inspirational place I have been to….and was one of the major factors in getting me painting again. The place is about survival and adaptability – before 1960, the US and Cuba shared strong economic ties, trading heavily in sugar and tobacco. When Fidel Castro rose to power and Cuba expropriated many American-owned land holdings, the US took action, enforcing countermeasures such as the 1960 prohibition of all exports to Cuba. In 1962, the US imposed a commercial, financial, and economic embargo on Cuba, which remains one of the most enduring trade blockades in modern history. More…
As a UK citizen it would be interesting to know the exact position my government take on this blockade – there are some interesting insights here..
The billboards around Cuba proclaim Revolution; the heroic gestures of Cuban heroes symbolize the power of Revolution. Cuba is still in a politicized state of revolution, a religion of the state, with Che substituting for the iconic imagery of Christ…. The imagery and feel of Cuba lead me to submit a proposal to Wolverhampton University in 2003 for my final piece of work there – it was never completed.
Basic Prediction
Horoscopes in newspapers are based on star signs and birth dates; these predict the day’s events. These predictions are based on the laws of probability and chance. You could read your daily horoscope and make the prediction into a self-fulfilling prophecy, you could go out and find that ‘Tall dark handsome man’ or go on ‘A long journey’. Alternatively you could read your horoscope late in the evening and interpret the day’s events and adapt them to the mystical words. â€Yes I did meet someone important todayâ€. The interesting thing about prediction is that you could meet a tall dark handsome man, go on a long journey and meet someone important and never read your horoscope. Does this mean the day’s events were not predicted? Similarly these rules can apply to art
For more than three quarters of a century, art has repeated itself, each repetition feebler, more inane than the last. Surely today, where the signs of a new world order are on the horizon, a radical position within modern art must be taken up again – and taken up more coherently and more seriously. It is not enough for art to hide in its practice when smart bombs, dirty bombs, anthrax, flooding, global warming and terrorism are threatening us with Armageddon. People are struggling for survival; the artist cannot reject or turn their back on them, cocooning him or herself in a cozy, creative duvet.
This is also a problem when explaining things that have happened. The environment that something was created in is impossible to recreate, if it happened outside our own time frame. We cannot relive a history that was not part of our own history. We can only rely on first or secondhand accounts – or create a myth about its origins.
Example of Adapting Prediction
Jack Burnham (and others) predicted network-based artwork(?) The expression ‘System Aesthetics’ exists. I would argue that this prediction is a convenient method of explaining the system-based artwork. In reality science and technology has moved on politically and physically since these visionaries of the 1950’s and 1960’s . The examples of ‘systems’ Burnham describes in Systems Esthetics (‘Artforum’ September, 1968) are not really computer systems they are other simpler systems. What he has provided us with is a language that conveniently explains our contemporary situation (MySpace, MSN etc.). He has not however provided us with the complete idiom.
