Archive for tag: art

Abstract America

Thursday 10th December 2009 10:10 pm

This entry on the Saatchi Gallery will be mostly photographs, I have limited myself to eight (out of the 151 I took) but when I have free capacity on Flickr, or buy a pro account I will add more. I am going to attempt to keep comments short, I could write thousands of words on each as an art history student, but I won’t, this is not the place. These are some of my highlights from the Abstract America exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery.

As a gallery the Saatchi Gallery spaces are typical of contemporary art display but of very high quality, all of the display spaces are a good size, well lit and are therefore very adaptable to different exhibitions. As ‘white cube’ spaces go, the ones here are up there with the best. I especially like the inclusion of a mezzanine floor viewing balcony onto one of the ground floor spaces, currently containing a very large sculpture.

Spiral Staircase
Untitled (Spiral Staircase), Peter Coffin, 2007, Aluminium and steel, 670.6 x 670.6 x 213.4 cm

This dizzying, escheresque sculpture almost warps space around it, turning a functional everyday object into a twisted infinite circle. This work is displayed superbly, with visitors being able to see it from the ground level or from higher up on the mezzanine balcony and also get all entangled in it from underneath… if no one is looking…

Spiral Staircase Detail
Untitled (Spiral Staircase) [Detail], Peter Coffin, 2007, Aluminium and steel, 670.6 x 670.6 x 213.4 cm

I like to see Coffin’s Spiral Staircase as a metaphor for my entire life so far. Terribly fun, without purpose and not really designed to get anyone anywhere.

The Raft of Perseus
The Raft of Perseus, Kristin Baker, 2006, Acrylic on PVC, 255.3 x 40.4 cm (in two panels)

I really like the way that the raft seems solid and immovable despite being in a violent storm. It is reminiscent of Turner in some ways, being a seascape with a storm and the beautiful and innovative use of light.

The Pianist (after Robert J. Lang)
The Pianist (after Robert J. Lang), Matt Johnson, 2005, Blue tarp, paper, stainless steel, 147 x 340 x 198 cm

This mostly fascinates me in a technical way but this large scale tarpaulin origami has resulted in an extremely interesting piece beyond its method of construction, amusingly as if the pianist has been put into storage along with his instrument.

Good vs Evil
Good vs Evil, Elizabeth Neel, 2009, Oil on canvas, 201 x 168 cm

Elizabeth Neel’s paintings impressed me significantly, they appear to be chaotic but the closer one looks they appear to be more balanced and ordered. Sort of cartoonish in style but also graphically violent. Good vs Evil and her other painting in this exhibition, The Humpndump, which is almost repulsively sexual as opposed to the struggle and fight of Good vs Evil, achieve something rare. They make me like paintings with dogs in, as much as I love dogs they are usually depicted in art with a cloying sentimentality that makes me want to vomit up my own pelvis. (Do not get me started on the ‘Royal Academy’ era of British art, just don’t.)

Untitled (Can Sculpture)
Untitled (Can Sculpture), Paul Lee, 2007, Soda cans, bath towel, ink, magnifying glass, string, paint, xerox, light bulb 23 x 12 x 19 cm

Paul Lee’s can sculptures I find very individual and quirky and they bring up all kinds of references and inferences with the use of something as blatantly capitalist-consumerist as the soda can, combined with other repurposed everyday objects. It makes me wonder if some references to people representing themselves in a sort of consumerist portrait, composing an image of themselves with bought objects, brands and lables. This is probably me bringing my own ideas and projecting them onto the art, but that is as valid an interpretation as anything else in my opinion. I’m not even going to touch on the sexual meanings, I’d have to write an essay on it if I began to tackle them.

Kiss Trap Kismet
Kiss Trap Kismet, Sterling Ruby, 2008, PVC pipe, urethane, wood, expanding foam, aluminium, spray paint, 300 x 384 x 122 cm

Kiss Trap Kismet by Sterling Ruby is the most perfect depiction of ‘love gone wrong’ that I have ever seen. It manages to walk the line between repulsive gore and beautiful indulgence. In the detail photo below, featuring the, almost obscene, tongue a greater sense of the bright, shiny sticky, gloopiness of the effect created by Ruby can be seen.

Kiss Trap Kismet [Detail]
Kiss Trap Kismet [Detail], Sterling Ruby, 2008, PVC pipe, urethane, wood, expanding foam, aluminium, spray paint, 300 x 384 x 122 cm

It is love, kissing and sex as overindulgence, as equivalent to eating five boxes of expensive chocolates. Sickly but satisfied, queezy but happy, totally and thoroughly indulged to the point of revulsion.

There will probably be another entry about this exhibition posted tomorrow, about a single work in the exhibition. This will include a few photos as well as a rather badly recorded short video I recorded of it.

Posted by Chris Pixie under Bloggery, Photos

Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

No Comments  

Pancras, Patron Saint of Trains

Sunday 6th December 2009 9:22 pm

Following on from my previous entry, I disembarked from my train and prepared for some photography. I decided I could spare about half an hour and took a series of very disappointing photographs of the architecture. The light in there is a bit weird and my camera is only a compact digital, the flash is just not enough for long shots in unevenly lit buildings. I think I’d need a DSLR to get some photos worthy of the architecture at St. Pancras.

I am aware that the police in London have been unfairly targeting photographers recently, I’ve seen numerous reports of anyone taking photos being accused of being a terrorist and told to stop. So, I went out for my photography session in St. Pancras (which is an international railway station for those unaware, it has customs, security and such things for the trains from Paris and Brussels and other European destinations as well as to Nottingham) ready for a fight.

The only photographs worth showing are those of the statues, commissioned for the renovations and only a few years old currently.

I love the pose that Martin Jennings chose for this portrait sculpture of Sir John Betjeman, a poet that many British people have a great deal of affection for, and who was an enthusiastic admirer of St. Pancras station.

It was at this point the thing I had been mentally preparing myself for happened, I went to shoot from a different angle and out of the corner of my eye I noticed a policeman looking at me. “Aha, here we go…”, I thought to myself as I deliberately continued, pretending to have not seen him.

I caught another glimpse of him out of the corner of my eye, approaching and taking something out of his pocket. I started running through my arguments in my head, and prepared to defend my camera with my life. There is no way I was going let anything I had taken be deleted or be stopped from doing an entirely reasonable thing, taking photographs of a beautifully renovated public building and the art that was commissioned for it.

The policeman spoke, I paraphrase because of my shoddy memory, “Hi, let me show you something, if you come around this side”, he gestured, “it is a really good angle with the clock above, especially at night. Here, look at this photo I took last night.”, he showed me the iPhone he had taken out of his pocket. I agreed that it looked really good and thanked him and he went back to his job of being a policeman in a building.

This put me in a fantastic mood for the entire day, I am usually disturbingly optimistic, much to the amusement of my friends. “No, give Gordon Brown a chance. He might be really good at being Prime Minister. Everything might change, things could get better!”, I once suggested in the weeks before he became Prime Minister. Later that day I also wondered out loud to Patrick whether the Hammersmith Apollo might sell better beer now that it is sponsored by HMV rather than Carling. What happened is that they just overcharge for a plastic glass of Carlsberg instead of Carling. I honestly entertained the notion that they might have a range of nice beers and ales now.

So, when I am being pessimistic and expecting the worst I absolutely love being proved wrong.

Paul Day’s Meeting Place is a spectacular and imposing work, more of a portrait of all the people over the decades who have used the station, especially lovers who met under the clock, it being a meeting place from the days before everyone was contactable no matter where they are. Mobile phones have reduced the meaning of this work but it is perhaps because of this that it should be there, as a celebration of generations of people greeting or waving off a loved one.

Meeting Place stands as a tribute to the people who have begun and ended journeys there.

I also took some photographs of parts of the frieze, which extends around the base of Meeting Place, for no other reason than particularly liking a lot of it. This woman with a book, especially.

I would love to write about Meeting Place for my Open University course this year, I think it would be very interesting to plan and write my independent assignment on, but there is one rather important reason that this is unlikely to happen, my course is called Art of the Twentieth Century and this statue is from 2007.

After a while I decided I had better go and check in to my hotel and head down to Leicester Square to meet Patrick for coffee and sushi before the gig.

Posted by Chris Pixie under Bloggery, Photos

Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

No Comments  

Nottingham Contemporary

Thursday 26th November 2009 9:32 pm

I finally made it to the new gallery, Nottingham Contemporary this evening, twelve days after it opened. I rushed through a bit and looked at all four rooms in about an hour. I wanted to have a look at everything and it closes at 7pm.

Very impressed with the exhibitions, over the last year or two I’ve watched this building being constructed I wasn’t expecting it to have such great exhibitions. I’m getting excited about all the possibilities of contemporary art they could exhibit. There are names whizzing through my head. The current two are David Hockney – 1960-1968 and Frances Stark.

Stark’s collages and use of written and printed quotations in patterns combined with the minimalism of the backgrounds are very striking. I am going to go back and take a few photos when I have acquired a camera but they will not do the work justice, collage comes across particularly badly in photographs. I’ll probably mostly photograph the telephone costumes. I am extremely impressed, I haven’t seen her work before but it presses all the right buttons in my brain. I tend to go to extremes in the things I love in art and one of them is minimalist design, using the least possible lines, textures and forms to convey the message. I also love very textured and complex art for entirely different reasons and some of her work egdes towards this as well, in parts. The the following collage…

There Will Also Be Things That I Dont Like
There Will Also Be Things That I Don’t Like, Frances Stark, 2007.

The clean lines and black/white contrast suddenly explodes in silver and gold textures and light adding yet another contrast both in colour and texture. I’ll probably write a bit more about her work with some photos, when I have a camera. I’m in the process of choosing one at the moment.

Naturally, I’d heard of and seen works by David Hockney but I don’t recall seeing his early work, which is the focus of this exhibition. No photography is allowed in these galleries due to copyright issues, so I won’t be taking photographs of any of it when I go back armed with a Sony Cybershot.

I was especially taken with his early Californian work, painted from his experiences and sights on his first trip there in the 1960s. They seem to capture the idea of California, well one idea and aspect of California, brilliantly. The paintings are all deep sky and swimming pool blues, clean lines and spaces, a sense of air, warmth, sun, summer, water and clean surfaces. It makes me think of the way Tim Burton portrays American middle class suburbia in his movies, such as Edward Scissorhands, and also the supermarket in Mark Romanek’s One Hour Photo, that purity and exaggeration that is both true and grotesquely exaggerated all at the same time. The grass is too green, the fences too even and clean, and in the case of Hockey’s Californian paintings the sky is too blue. It is almost a caricature of reality, but it also is a distilled reality and is, critically, still truthful.

A Bigger Splash
A Bigger Splash, David Hockney, 1967.

I love the way he has really played to the strengths of acrylic paints in this work, sometimes the right medium is crucial. In oils or watercolours his California paintings would really not carry the sense of place and environment that works like A Bigger Splash convey.

I get the feeling that Hockney wasn’t using this method of depiction as a critique and was genuinely celebrating this alien, open, clean and brilliant blue and green landscape he found himself in after having grown up in 1940/50s Bradford.

I’m going to go back and spend some proper time in each room, not just fifteen-ish minutes each and look, photograph, make notes, love and admire all the wonderful things that are just at the other end of the street I live on.

Posted by Chris Pixie under Bloggery

Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , .

No Comments  

Readjustment

Thursday 1st October 2009 6:44 pm

Things have been hectic recently. I’ve been working full-time and studying part-time all year. I started in January with an OU course and I just handed in my final piece of work just over a week ago. Suddenly I have free time!

I wrote 4,500 words about Carlo Crivelli’s Annunciation with Saint Emidius for those who are interested. If you’ve been to the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery in London you may have seen it, and other work by Crivelli. My mark won’t be very good, I didn’t have the time to do enough research and spend as much time as I would have liked.

It has also been a hectic year at work, I started back in January in a new role and this has continued to expand and change to the point where I’m now considered part of the ‘management’ and have to do things like attend meetings in the board room and occasionally go for meetings with clients and potential clients if it relates to my particular areas of responsibility.

This week at work I’ve mostly been building my server. I took my old work PC, installed Ubuntu Linux Sever 9.04 on it and set it up to host an internal web based database system. I have called it ‘Fintan’ after the Salmon of Knowledge. There was also a little catching up on other things to do because I had Thursday and Friday of last week off.

After I had posted my essay off to the Open University I went for a few days in London, because I badly needed a break and to recharge a bit. I had an excellent time doing various things, including…

Kinky Friedman gig in Camden. This was extremely enjoyable and made me less upset that Schelmish had to cancel their gig. There was also a guest singer called John Joe Mayo, who was superb but I can’t find anything about him online. I was hoping to buy some CDs.

Dalek & Delta exhibition at the Elms Lesters Painting Rooms (now finished) near Tottenham Court Road. It is a fantastic gallery and the building is worth seeing on its own. I liked Dalek (James Marshall)’s work more than I had in pictures online, I think it works best on a larger scale though and I am still unsure about the smaller paintings but I do find them fascinating. Delta (Boris Tellegen)’s work was fantastic and I enjoyed that significantly, his style is much more my thing when it comes to contemporary art. The textures and colours are just great. I shall post a few photos of the building when my friend Gem put them online. I didn’t take any myself, I don’t currently have a camera.

This coming weekend I actually get to relax and do nothing, by Monday I should be in some kind of fit state to face the world and not appear to be held together entirely by coffee and sheer bloody mindedness.

Definitely looking forward to the weekend. One more day to go!

Posted by Chris Pixie under Bloggery

Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

2 Comments  

Heroin Chic

Tuesday 30th June 2009 9:18 pm

Beautiful

I have been trying to think of words to describe this and mostly failing, I suppose at best it is taking something awful and highlighting it by having it pose as something else entirely and at worst it is something for the awful people of the internet to masturbate to that isn’t actually illegal*.

Personally I just find it fascinating in a macabre way but even I find this just about the least erotic thing I have ever seen in my life.

Full collection here, if you are a terrible person you can order prints.

*Well, I assume they aren’t. Maybe the police will kick my door in and I’ll find out this was an incorrect statement.

Posted by Chris Pixie under Bloggery

Tagged with: , , , , , .

2 Comments  
« Previous Entries