Our Level 4 students are all exploring ways of making art from the concept of 'The City' this term. I have recommended the wonderful daily blog 'Spitalfields Life to them as an inspirational treasure chest of what a City can be when you look at it through its people. Posts have been categorised and can be searched by sections including Night Life, Criminal Life, Past Life, Plant, Animal and Literary Lives to name just some. Today's blog is particularly magical. Read here about a musician and artist exploring the paintings of Giorgione by re-creating them in authentic materials in a beautiful studio in the middle of an abandoned tramshed in Clapton, London.
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".
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.
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!
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
Girl Reading by Katie Ward comprises seven linked stories set over a period of over 700 years, from 1333 to 2060. Each is an imagined story behind a painting, photo or sculpture. The subject is always a girl, or young woman reading. The pictures are not shown in the book so I have given you the links below.
The stories are also concerned with the changing position of women and the choices they have had during those hundreds of years
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 pageshows 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,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.
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.
The Getty Research Institute is dedicated to furthering
knowledge and advancing understanding of the visual arts. They now have a Facebook page. Why not 'Like' them? There are all sorts of snippets there already.
Here’s two of them!
Coveted
by Venetian noblewomen and creative inspiration for Parisian lingerie-makers,
these 16th-century needlework pattern books are among the rarest of early
modern printed books to survive intact.
The new
2013-2014 Scholars Program research theme, “Connecting Seas: Cultural andArtistic Exchange,” explores how bodies of water, far from being barriers, have
served as a rich and complex interchange in the visual arts. Previous Scholar Projects are linked on
this page
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.
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.
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.
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.
The National Museum Cardiff in partnership with the Art Fund is offering a series of three evening lectures with acclaimed international academics at the Reardon Smith Lecture Theatre.
The first talk called Wales at Venice will be on Wednesday, 25 April 2012, 18:30–19:30 Speakers: David Alston, Merlin James, Laura Ford and Tim Davies The Venice Biennale was established in 1895 and remains one of the most important and prestigious events in the international, contemporary art world. Since 2003 Wales has been independently represented as a devolved nation. For those artists who are chosen to exhibit it is a key international platform. This lecture explores Wales’s representation in Venice and also hears from three artists who have been selected to exhibit for Wales. £4 with National Art Pass (full price £5)
Future lectures areJohn Piper (to accompany the current exhibition) on Wednesday, 9 May 2012, 18:30–20:30. The speaker will be Professor Frances Spalding, CB. The third lecture will be The Influence of Josiah Wedgwood on Wednesday, 23 May 2012, 18:30–19:30 when the speaker will be Gaye Blake Roberts.
Watch workshop assistants creating a new Damien Hirst with a live feed ......Studio view one gives you a ground view and Studio view two camera is an aerial view. They are presently making a rather wonderful new piece of variously sized stainless steel scalpel blades fixed onto a circular black canvas which today a young man is colouring in. Just one part of a very rich website that includes news, galleries of the most famous works, audio and video and a shop where you could buy a £5 spot keyring or splash out a bit more (£11,000) on a signed charm bracelet-the charms are casts of 35 pills. Damien Hirst is the subject of a major retrospective at Tate Modern, London running from 4th April-9th September. Adrian Searle art critic of the Guardian wrote that 'this exhibition charts a great descent in Hirst's art, one that mirrors the ascent of his bankability and the creation of ever more decadent and overblown artefacts.' The Sunday Times gave it four stars. Visit the exhibition to find out for yourself . If you can't make it to London then let Noel Fielding take you on a private tour of the exhibition
The sandcasting video, is from Process Arts, managed by Chris Follows at University of the Arts London (UAL) c.follows@arts.ac.uk
Process Artsfocuses on "making" in art and design . This site shows insights into the acts of making and encourages users to share knowledge and experience online. You can go there to explore traditional and contemporary creative technical processes , and see work and the processes involved in its making online through video, text, image and sound .
Interesting courses including bibliographies, online texts and images etc are available from the MIT site where the Anthropology course linked above was taken from. Courses include many other subject areas of interest such as media studies, history, literature, music and theatre arts, women's and gender studies. MIT is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology whose mission is "to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century".
The Mystic Lamb of 1432 by Hubert and Jan van Eyck, known as the Ghent Altarpiece, recently underwent emergency conservation within the Villa Chapel in St. Bavo Cathedral in Ghent.
Every inch of the altarpiece was scrutinized and professionally photographed at extremely high resolution in both normal and infrared light.
The photographs were then digitally “stitched” together to create highly detailed images which allow for study of the painting at unprecedented microscopic levels. The website itself contains 100 billion pixels. These high-definition digital images are now available on an interactive digital website, “Closer to Van Eyck: Rediscovering the Ghent Altarpiece”
The website features overall photographs of the polyptych in its opened and closed positions, and from there users can zoom closer into the details of individual panels of the altarpiece, down to a microscopic level. Scrolling and zooming features are guided by a thumbnail image to indicate the location and size of the detail on the altarpiece. Users are also able to open two windows simultaneously to compare any two images from the site.
This project, funded by the Getty Foundation ran from April 2010 through June 2011 and consisted of three main segments: an urgent conservation treatment, an assessment of the current condition of the altarpiece, and a campaign of technical documentation. Its goal was to establish whether a full restoration treatment of Van Eyck’s famous polyptych was necessary in the near future, which indeed turned out to be the case.
Jeremy Deller opens at the Hayward today with a show entitled Jeremy Deller: Joy in People.The exhibition incorporates almost all of his major works to date including installations, photographs, videos, posters, banners, performance works and sound pieces and is curated by Ralph Rugoff, Director, Hayward Gallery. Jeremy Dellerwon the Turner prize in 2004 without having taken even O-level art at his London public school. He emerged after the Young British Artists, who began exhibiting together in 1988, many of them wrapped up in the rising art market and collected by figures such as Charles Saatchi. Sometimes his work – a re-enactment of the Battle of Orgreave in 1984, one of the fiercest clashes of the miners' strike, or organising the ladies of the Women's Institute to show flower arrangements at the Tate – did not look like art at all.
His mum said "I tried to explain his work to the Queen when Jeremy took me to a reception at Buckingham Palace. I don't think she quite understood, but she was too polite to say." Rugoff declares of Deller that he , "brought up questions of value" in his work. “ He has rarely made work that can be bought or sold straightforwardly. He has, said Rugoff, "heralded a new chapter when artists work as catalysts, producers, curators and collaborators … and with his interest in folk art and the creativity of everyday life he has brought attention to what other people have done". There are some great events planned to accompany the exhibition including a David Shrigley and Jeremy Deller DJ Night on Friday 4 May 2012. Jeremy Deller’s interest in the social character of pop music is far ranging. The enthusiasms, rituals and passionate loyalty of fans have all provided the artist with inspiration. Our Hobby is Depeche Mode reflects on how people intimately embrace pop culture and embed it in the fabric of their everyday lives.The exhibition runs until 13th May
ARTIST Damien Hirst who has been valued at £215 million has unveiled plans to build more than 500 landmark eco-homes in Ilfracombe, which he hopes will regenerate the town and provide a national blueprint for environmental housing. The plans involve utilising land at Winsham Farm, which has been owned by Hirst for the past ten years, as well as nearby Channel Farm and Bowden Farm. Mr Rundell said the houses would be modern in design and could incorporate state of the art environmental features such as photovoltaic panels, concealed wind turbines in the roofs and increased insulation. "If we are committed to doing this as Damien wants it, it will happen. Damien is a man who gets things done."
Damien Hirst's latest exhibition, The Complete Spot Paintings, will be held at all 11 Gagosian Galleries across the world. Here's a selection of the works, which the Guardian has provided in a slideshow here
Richard Prince sometimes takes photos and changes them. The original is usually easily recognizable. This activity tends to break Copyright (if the creator of the original has not been dead for 70 years) and infringe the Moral Right that dictates an artist has the moral right to be recognized as the author of their work (Prince never acknowledges his sources) . In fact in a recent court case versus the photographer of the Rastafarian above Prince declared himself positively un-interested in any original that he takes and changes. His defence was that he needs other people’s works as raw material to "critique, dismantle, [and] transform..."
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
