Historic Photography Uncovered

John Dillwyn Llewelyn

Speaking at the official launch of the new Historic Photography show at the National Museum Cardiff its Director General  David Anderson told his audience  to remember the moment. It was the start of a great and new emphasis on what he called the most important collection in the Museum, its photographs. Thanks to the Esme Fairbairn Trust an ongoing digitisation programme has started. Photographs originating  from all departments in the Museum covering Geology ,  Botany, Social History,  Fine Art and more  are being digitised and will form a publicly accessible database in the near future.David Anderson  told us to look out for much more around Photography than has ever been offered before.

For now go and see this first flowering, the most magical and varied collection of photographs and cameras and explanations of photographic processes. This exhibition traces the evolution of photography, as a scientific process, as a social record and a medium for artistic expression.

The photographic material on display dates from the mid-19th to mid-20th century .My favourites show  the beaches I love; Caswell Bay, Tenby, Three Cliffs looking just like they do today but dotted with little ladies in full blown Victorian and Edwardian garb, extraordinary.
The exhibition continues until 19th April

Artes Mundi

YouTube video: The Visitors | Ragnar Kjartansson @HangarBicocca  

Artes Mundi is an internationally focused arts organisation that identifies, recognises and supports contemporary visual artists who engage with the human condition, social reality and lived experience.

Don't miss the chance to see contemporary art on the subject of 'the human condition'. There are artworks to view in three venues: the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, FfotoGallery at Turner House in Penarth and at Cardiff's Chapter Arts Centre. 

I spent a wonderful hour watching,  listening, sitting, wandering around  Ragnar Kjartansson's  The Visitors (2013). If as I do you enjoy  live music, art and people this is an overwhelming and emotionally affecting work, it  left me feeling rather positive about the human condition . 
http://www.artesmundi.org/en/artists/ragnar-kjartansson



Other works are more difficult and deal in dark subjects, I am thinking particularly of Dutch artist Renzo Martens 'known for his satirical and disturbing video documentaries in which he travels to war-torn countries and places himself narcissistically at the centre of the action, demonstrating how Western spectators consume distant trauma. In 2012, Martens helped found the Institute for Human Activities and initiated its five-year Gentrification Program. By means of strategic inversion Martens comments on the ways in which Western media depict the non-Western world'.
http://www.artesmundi.org/artists/renzo-martens

A Conference will be held at Cardiff Metropolitan University. Straight from the Horse's Mouth, in partnership with Cardiff Metropolitan University School of Art and Design will be a series of talks and conversations offering a rare opportunity to hear the Artes Mundi 6 shortlisted artists speak about core themes and concerns that are central to their practice.

Cardiff Metropolitan University School of Art and Design, Llandaff
Wednesday 21 January 2pm - 6pm
Thursday 22 January 10am - 5pm
Tickets and more information here (conference followed by a social gathering at Chapter, Canton at 7pm).


Read about all the artists here

Artes Mundi employs a team of Live Guides as mediators who have met the shortlisted artists and have extensive knowledge of their work.If you would like to walk and talk with one of the Live Guides in the Museum in Cardiff  join a  tour.  Lasting 45-60 minute the friendly and informative tours are led by one of the  Live Guides and give an overview of the exhibition and its themes.
2pm daily at the Museum (book on arrival at the Information Desk)
For talks and tours at Ffotogallery and Chapter , check their websites for further details.

Behind the Scenes of the Museum: Artists in Collections

Installation for Woverhampton Art Gallery 2012    Photo credit D8

10am – 4.30pm, Wednesday 14 May, 2014
National Museum Wales
Reardon Smith Lecture Theatre, Cathays Park, Cardiff, CF10 3NP

If you are interested in the ways artists have interacted with Museum collections then this is the event for you.

The event will include:

·         James Putnam, curator and writer, discussing shifts in the way that artists are working with museum collections and their role in activating engagement.

·         Andrew Renton, Head of Applied Art at the National Museum of Wales, in conversation with artist Sarah Younan about their collaboration and what artists can bring to the interpretation of collections.

·         Jon Monaghan, artist and animator, leading a workshop on 3d printing as a tool for creating user-generated content.

·         Artist Helen Snell, talking about collaboration and what it's like to work in the 'institution' of a museum.

·         Emma Price, independent art consultant, offering practical advice on developing projects that utilise museum collections.

This event is free to attend but places are limited so booking is essential

Book now at eventbrite > 

For more information contact Alicia Miller, Axisweb Associate in Wales: alicia@axisweb.org

Reel to Real

'Reel to Real' is a sound curating project, funded by the Esmée Fairbairn Collections Fund, designed to catalogue, digitise and  make available online, in gallery spaces and beyond, the Pitt Rivers Museum's unique archival field recordings. The content of the recordings ranges from spirits singing in the rainforests of the Central African Republic to children's songs and games in playgrounds throughout Europe.

The project website includes information about and playlists from all of the Museum's original ethnographic recordings, video and interview resources, ethnomusicology seminars, their SoundCloud account and much more. 

Reel to Real Project Website here.

Visualiser combining Bayaka sound waves and images

The related  SoundCloud account can be found here, and customised playlists and sets can be found here.

How we view Civil Rights, the images, the meanings and the roles of photography

Human Rights Human Wrongs 5.45pm 5 March 2014 at the National Museum Cardiff in the Reardon Smith lecture theatre

Bob Fitch, Martin L. King (Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.),

Birmingham, Alabama, United States of America,

December 1965.

Reproduction from the Black Star Collection,

Ryerson University. Courtesy of the Ryerson Image Centre.

Using the 1948 Universal Declaration of human rights as a point of departure, Mark Sealy, MBE, RPS Hood Medal, Director Autograph ABP and Founding CEO of Rivington Place London, examines whether images of political struggle, suffering, and of victims of violence work for or against humanitarian objectives, especially when considering questions of race, representation, ethical responsibility and the cultural position of the photographer.

The talk will reflect on the imagery that has informed perceptions of civil rights, ranging from historic events such as the Selma to Montgomery March and Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream” speech, to the independence movements in many African countries as well as more recent examples of injustice within wider global conflicts. Here the historical and contemporary roles of photography to validate and question the case for civil and human rights will be examined from different perspectives.

The event is FREE but booking is essential as places are limited.

This lecture forms part of a series accompanying a project by  National Museum Wales to work on its rich and diverse historic photographic collections

To reserve your place,  email: Historic.Photography@museumwales.ac.uk

with your name and contact telephone number.

New link for images on Databases A-Z : Flickr Commons

Our Electronic Library at Cardiff Met contains over 100 databases and also includes links to quality websites. Go to the Electronic Library and click Databases A-Z (Cardiff Met users only).

Image taken from page 582 of 'The United States of America. A study of the American Commonwealth, its natural resources, people, industries, manufactures, commerce, and its work in literature, science, education and self-government. [By various authors.] 

A new link on Databases A-Z will lead you to Flickr Commons.  The key goal of The Commons is to share hidden treasures from the world's public photography archives. Recently The British Library has added over a million images onto Flickr Commons for anyone to use, remix and repurpose. These images were taken from the pages of 17th, 18th and 19th century books digitised by Microsoft . The images cover a wide range  of subjects: There are maps, geological diagrams,  illustrations some beautiful or very colourful, comical satire, illuminated and decorative letters, landscapes, wall-paintings and  more.
Something to explore over the Christmas break...

The Night Watch

A sensitive reading of The Night Watch by Guardian writer Jonathan Jones has Rembrandt depicting democracy in action , the assortment of different types of people as night falls assembled to protect their community. Rembrandt's painting is once more on show after 10 years of renovation of the Rijksmuseum hindered access to their marvellous collection.
The Rijksmuseum used imagination and digital technology and the Internet to keep their works as visible as possible whilst the museum was closed. I blogged about one of the ways they used back in November (6th). It comes as no surprise to me therefore to see that, to advertise the reopening, the Museum staged a rather wondrous re-enactment of the Night Watch in a shopping centre.

And here are Jonathan's lovely words about Rembrandt's Night Watch, words that help keep alive for us the idea that art is important ...

"In the 21st century, as democracy and community are beset by menaces from climate change to the violent economics of austerity, The Night Watch ought to be cherished as political art. It portrays not only what the Dutch, but all democracies ought to hold dear – the courage of flawed human beings to come together while acknowledging one another's individuality and difference. It is an icon of tolerance, diversity and the magic golden light that makes a society work. While these ordinary people stand guard, we feel a bit safer in our collective defiance of the dark".

A cheery start

Here at Cardiff Met we offer an MA in Death and Visual Culture and for staff and students of that course and all others interested in the subject here is a link to the wonderful Wellcome Institute Collection covering  their current exhibition 'Death: A self-portrait' which runs until 24 February 2013. Events associated with the exhibition including discussion days and a day of films about death are listed here

'(The) exhibition showcases some 300 works from a unique collection devoted to the iconography of death and our complex and contradictory attitudes towards it...  including art works, historical artefacts, scientific specimens and ephemera from across the world. '

On show are rare prints by Rembrandt, Dürer and Goya , anatomical drawings, war art and antique metamorphic postcards; human remains , Renaissance vanitas paintings and twentieth century installations celebrating Mexico’s Day of the Dead, ancient Incan skulls and a chandelier made of 3000 plaster-cast bones by British artist Jodie Carey.

The website also offers links including one to  'Stories from the Day hospice' a blog by Chrissie Giles who throughout the summer of 2012, spent time at the day hospice at Princess Alice Hospice, Esher, running a creative writing group. In a series of posts she reflects on her experiences there and showcases some of the writing produced by group members.

  You can also view three extraordinary skulls (two Mexican, one Japanese) from every angle as they revolve on screen.

A book 'Death a Picture Album' accompanies the exhibition.

Your Paintings and your librarian!

The BBC hosts a website that documents all paintings in public ownership-those paintings that lurk in council offices, libraries, and slide libraries as well as the ones we get to see in the major art galleries and museums! The portrait above that a recent Fine Art graduate painted of me is just one of the 212,000 piantings now online and viewable by location, artist name or title.
Here are the FAQ's that answer questions such as who is behind the project, why no watercolours and also crucially  how many are on public display (20%)-a low figure which goes to show how valuable a service this website is...
Next time we have a Welsh Librarians' conference at the wonderful Gregynog Hall I am going in search of this fine specimen!                                         

 
















 

and this beauty painted by the same artist   

 

 

Artes Mundi (again)

I have recently attended some very interesting side events for the Artes Mundi Exhibition. A small square leaflet lists these opportunities , there is a web page  listing what's on  and also the facebook page advertises Artes Mundi events. Following these information sources I was able to attend the National Museum this week when the police horses corralled the crowds gathered in the Museum foyer using crowd control techniques, I heard beautiful music in the space occupied by Sheela Gowda's empty tin drums for tar used by Indian roadworkers, I felt sorrow-full in the room with the memorials to the dead of Teresa Margolles as a Welsh Performance artist Kathryn Ashill  counted in Welsh-was she counting the dead? When she stopped counting she whispered into our ears the words Memento Mori-'you too will die'.
 I have also attended an artists parents evening where I was celebrated for my creation (an artist daughter) and talked with other parents of artists and Darius Miksys about art, science , child rearing and mermaids and I watched a play by Miriam Backstrom where 'a director' annoyed 'an actor ' beyond endurance in her efforts to make him be a character she could then reject. I watched two films by Phil Collins and heard him in converstaion about his work afterwards with his old friend Jason Bowman.

I am also signed up for the rest of my life to stand up for any immigrants I see treated badly and not to walk on by. I have a poster and a badge to prove it created by the artist Tania Brughuera.
This years Artes Mundi has afforded me the richest art experiences I have had for a very long time. The art in the exhibition is fascinating, affecting, and says important things. The side events have been stimulating and original. I recommend you go along and investigate yourselves. If you do go to the National Museum to see the work then try go round on one of the  live guide tours. The live guides have all met the artists  and know the work well and will engage with you in talking about what you see and what you think about it.Tours take place daily at 2pm.
Artes Mundi continues until January 13th 2013

Decorating with Old Masters

Dutch art director Christian Borstlap created this film for the new Rijksmuseum project Rijksstudio. The film includes 211 artworks from the museum's online collection.

Video: Part of a Bigger Plan
Music: 'Dreaming' by Allo, Darlin

The Rijksmuseum uses Rijksstudio to make more than 125,000 objects from the collection digitally accessible, free of charge. You can zoom in, share them, and ‘like’ them. You can also create collections of your own, using your favourite images and details. Not only that, but the Rijksmuseum is also inviting you to use these images to create beautiful products. At this resolution, a single detail is still sharp enough to decorate a car.

 

This page shows some examples of other people’s creations and offers links to websites that supply various forms of printing on demand. Using them you could order wallpaper , decorate a scooter, have a vinyl foil for your phone, all of them featuring works of art from the Rijksmuseum

Artes Mundi

Miriam Backstrom The Opposite of Me is

Artes Mundi, Wales’s biggest contemporary visual art show is back for its 5th exhibition in its new home, the National Museum of Art, on the top floor of National Museum Cardiff. For the first time Artes Mundi  is in partnership with organisations such as Cardiff-based multidisciplinary arts centre Chapter, who will provide an additional venue for some of the works.

Exhibition: 6 October 2012 – 13 January 2013
The shortlisted artists were selected from over 750 nominations covering every continent in the world except Antarctica. Their art  has one overriding theme in common; their work explores social themes, telling stories of lived experience and gives a platform for commentary on the world today.

Miriam Bäckström (Sweden)

 Bäckström’s ongoing interests explore how history is told, and processes of creating and recreating memory using photography, text, theatre and video.

Tania Bruguera (Cuba)

Since the late 1990’s Tania Bruguera’s artistic practice has often reflected back on the social, cultural and economic experience of being Cuban.

Phil Collins (England) Informed by the visual traditions of cinema and television, Phil Collins’ diverse practice is based on close engagement with place and community.

Sheela Gowda (India) For Sheela Gowda the social and cultural reality of India has formed the basis of her practice.

TeresaMargolles (Mexico) Teresa Margolles’ work focuses on the collective turmoil of the Northern Mexican social experience where drug-related organized crime has resulted in widespread violence and murder.

Darius Mikšys (Lithuania) For Mikšys, installations provide the opportunity to experiment, conceptualise, and re-imagine processes of making, displaying and engaging with art.

ApolonijaŠušteršič (Slovenia) Artist and architect Apolonija Šušteršič has focused on the social aspects of living environments manifested in art as well as architectural contexts since the 1990’s.

Events are scheduled throughout the duration of the exhibition. http://artesmundi.org/en/news/whats-on-artes-mundi/#

On 29 November an international panel of judges will award one of the artists the £40,000 Artes Mundi Prize, the UK’s largest art prize

Conserving an Icon: Traces of Time in The Beanery by Kienholz

After in-depth examination, one of the most popular works in the Stedelijk Museum collection, The Beanery (1965) by Edward Kienholz, will be fully restored for the first time by the museum staff working in its new facilities.

As the installation comprises a variety of materials – for instance, the artist coated the entire installation in a synthetic liquid resin – this will be a complex operation. In anticipation of the grand reopening on September 23, the Stedelijk is preparing and restoring a number of its best-loved artworks.

A short video about this project is available on ARTUBE videos about Art and Design the online video channel for art and design contributed to by the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, M HKA in Antwerp, Gemeentemuseum The Hague, De Pont in Tilburg and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. The videos will generally be produced by these museums themselves,  and include  interviews with  artists , designers, and makers. Fiction and experimentation are also included, for example in the Boijmans TV series and in a number of unusual animation and remix films.

travel to World Wonders from home

Would you like to take a journey on the Rhaetian Railway through the Swiss Alps? Or perhaps you’d prefer to explore the mosaics of Pompeii in Italy. Or gaze upon the nine-story Roman aqueduct in Segovia, Spain. Or track down the Aboriginal rock art at Kakadu National Park in Australia.

Google Street View has left the road and photographed some of the world’s most impressive monuments and parks. Launched at the end of May in Madrid, the World Wonders Project is the latest creation from the Paris-based Google Cultural Institute, a wing of the company that aims to spread culture and history to users around the globe.
To scan inside the Nijo Castle in Kyoto and traverse the grounds of Stonehenge, Google had to ditch its typical car-mounted scanners. Instead it created image-capture equipment suitable for adapted tricycles and vertical trolleys that can be pushed around to capture indoor sites. These trikes globe-trotted for a whole year, sailing down the Amazon River and sitting atop the Glacier Express train in Switzerland.

To document 132 heritage sites worldwide, the Google team has partnered with content providers such as UNESCO, the World Monuments Fund, and Getty Images The site is  geared towards educational uses , as both students and teachers can download free lesson plans and presentations.

Google World Wonders Project is here


A related video explains the background

Another Google Cultural Institute project launched early last year was The Art Project a collaboration with 17 museums and covering  about 1,000 works of art. In April 2012 , the updated version contained 32,000 artworks from 155 museums. The institute has also digitized Nelson Mandela’s archives, the Dead Sea scrolls, and documents and photos from the Yad Vashem Centre for Holocaust research.

Thousands of high quality freely available images from a Baltimore Museum

The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland is internationally renowned for its collection of art . It offers an overview of world art from pre-dynastic Egypt to 20th-century Europe, and counts among its many treasures Greek sculpture and Roman sarcophagi; medieval ivories and Old Master paintings; Art Deco jewelry and 19th-century European and American masterpieces.

In 2011, the Walters launched a redesigned works of art website with 10,000 online artwork images freely licensed under a Creative Commons license.

 Apart from their image rich website,  works of art from this museum have been donated as  19,000 + freely-licensed images  to WikimediaCommons. This is one of the largest and most comprehensive such releases made by any museum.

The images and their associated information join the collection of more than 12 million freely usable media files, which make up the image repository for Wikipedia.

The image donation is part of the Walters Museum’s larger initiative to provide free public access to its collection, both online and offline, beginning with the removal of admission fees in 2006.

Save the Wedgwood Museum

The Wedgwood Museum has been listed by UNESCO as one of world's top 20 cultural assets. In the Unesco register, the museum's archive now sits alongside objects such as the Bill of Rights, which is the closest document that Britain has to a written constitution as well as a copy of King Charles I's death warrant.

But the Museum is due to be broken up and sold off to pay £134m pension deficit after a high court judgment in December. As well as thousands of ceramics produced by Josiah Wedgwood, the museum, which opened in 2008, boasts an archive of more than 100,000 documents and manuscripts, and masterpieces by Stubbs, Romney and Reynolds. Such is the collection's historic significance that questions will be asked in parliament this month.

The high court ruled that the collection was an asset of Waterford Wedgwood Potteries, which went bust in 2009, and could therefore be sold to pay off their creditors, the largest of which is the Pension Protection Fund.

Members of the Wedgwood family wrote a letter to the Telegraph this weekend they write:

"....We will now have to raise money to buy the very pieces of history that our family, together with employees and museum supporters worldwide, donated with the intention that they would be on display for the nation…"

Last month John Caudwell, the billionaire founder of Phones4U, the mobile phone retailer, said he would act as a lender of last resort to the museum.
He warned the act would not be “pure philanthropy” and would have “strings”.

The case is being reviewed by Dominic Grieve, the Attorney General, who is expected to decide before the end of the month whether to seek leave to appeal in the case. Tristram Hunt, the television historian and a MP for Stoke, the home of the museum, is meeting with Mr Grieve this week to discuss the case.
Campaign to save the Museum is here

The Kyoto Costume Institute

The Kyoto Costume Institute has created a database of the items in its Collection called the KCI Digital Archives and this link  presents a taste of the content with image and text for approx. 200 objects from their collection, arranged in chronological order. The design of the timeline of costume from the 18th century to the present and the quality of the images are both superb. I've seen a lot of websites and a lot of image databases-this one is small but perfectly formed.

And if you can get to Kyoto and the Costume Institute there you would be able to view the complete digital archives  in the KCI Study Room under a fee-paying, reservation-only basis. Providing support for the work of designers and researchers, text and visuals are available for all 12,000 items (costume, underwear, accessories, etc.) in the collection.

The website also provides access to interesting full text journal articles written by curators at the Kyoto Costume Institute

Catch Gerhard Richter online or before the show finishes

Tate Online offers a range of videos about artists in the 'Tateshots' series. On the occasion of his major retrospective at Tate Modern a lovely video featuring Gerhard Richter talking to Nick Serota (Director of the Tate) has been  linked from the exhibition's webpage  here.

"Spanning nearly five decades, and coinciding with the artist’s 80th birthday, Gerhard Richter: Panorama is a major retrospective exhibition that groups together significant moments of his remarkable career.Since the 1960s, Gerhard Richter has immersed himself in a rich and varied exploration of painting. Gerhard Richter: Panorama highlights the full extent of the artist's work, which has encompassed a diverse range of techniques and ideas. It includes realist paintings based on photographs, colourful gestural abstractions such as the squeegee paintings, portraits, subtle landscapes and history paintings."  from Tate pages for 'Panorama'
Gerhard Richter: Panorama at Tate Modern 6 October 2011  –  8 January 2012

More Tateshots from the Tate Channel can be viewed from here

The Arts Desk

Anish Kapoor’s Leviathan, a commission for the Monumenta series at the Paris Grand Palais

Here's a great newletter to keep you up with a wide range of items on what's new and good in the media and the arts . Here you will find theatre and film reviews, features on matters of interest such as  'Is Classical music relevant?'or a list of this year's Festivals , and CD, DVD and book reviews and interviews with people from the arts and a comprehensive listing of whats on in cinemas, theatres, galleries and concert halls. Sign up and get a weekly round up of all this in your inbox. As well as seeing  the very latest in the arts you can also view the archives of the newsletter. To subscribe look for the box on the right hand side of this page halfway down

autre mers (other seas)

French-born, London-based artist Francoise Dupre makes work that celebrates women's creativity, re-contextualising knitting and stitching activities traditionally associated with domestic space. A new exhibition at the Womens Library in London brings together a series of her installations that use many craft forms to create ephemeral, playful, extraordinary sculptural patterns and objects.