Culture Grid and Porphyry

This is porphyry. Stephen Cox sculpts in this stuff because he likes a challenge-its very hard (literally). In 1988, he was commissioned to carve sculpture for the new Cairo Opera House, Egypt, and was allowed to quarry Imperial porphyry at Mons Porphyrytes in the Eastern Desert, which had not been used since the end of Roman Empire.  Below is 'Chrysalis' a work from 1991, the  image is  from the Tate website . The artist describes this work as having to do with transition and reincarnation. It suggests a recumbant Egyptian funerary figure in the process of changing and mutating

Marble Roman emporers used to be dressed in porphyry togas because it is the colour of Roman Imperial Purple.

The first image of  porphyry in this blog entry  is not from an art image database  but from a geological one which I found by searching The Culture Grid. If you are after images from Ethnography, Geology and other non art and design objects then have a look at the Culture Grid.

Culture Grid opens up a wealth of information from museums, galleries, libraries and archives: giving greater access to UK culture, arts and heritage. It contains approximately  3 million items from hundreds of collections on all topics.

University College London (UCL) and University of Reading have just added 6,500 images of objects from their museum collections to Culture Grid. The images can be freely viewed, downloaded and used under a Creative Commons licence.The objects include rare Ancient Egyptian artefacts brought to life in twenty-first-century 3D; digital images of zoological specimens in glass jars, strange and beautiful anatomical prints, sixteenth-century portraits, and intriguing nineteenth-century scientific gadgets.

 Preserved infant lemur Grant Museum of Zoology UCL. Image from the Culture Grid

 

 

Exploring London/in the Field in Cardiff

 

                         London is one of the greenest cities in the world from Exploring 20th Century London

 

Our Level 4 undergraduates are currently 'in the Field' exploring various places around Cardiff, researching them in groups made up of students from all our different art and design disciplines. They will soon return and engage in creating physical outcomes to their investigations back in their practice studios. I think they may be interested to see how many different aspects there are to a city and how these present visually on this rather fab website.

 Exploring 20th Century London

Phase I of the Exploring 20th century London project is a partnership project between four museums in London:

• Museum of London (MoL)
• London Transport Museum (LTM)
• Jewish Museum, London
• Museum of Croydon

The project’s aim is to make the collections held by these museums more accessible, but to do so in a way that links the objects in the collections with the broader history of London. All objects and images featured on the site speak of the real events and experiences of twentieth-century London.
The content covers different types of objects: from Routemaster buses to architectural designs; from 1970s platform shoes to oral history recordings; from paintings and artworks to family photographs. It also includes a mass of supporting information.
more information about this project here

Martha Rosler's Library

Martha Rosler Library
1 August – 9 November 2008
Stills Edinburgh, 23 Cockburn Street, Edinburgh

The book collection of the American artist Martha Rosler is perhaps the perfect embodiment of her radical vision - and an archive of the marginalised American left. It has travelled the world -here's its  journey.

 

 

 

 

e-flux, New York, 2005-2006, Frankfurter Kunstverien, 2006, Museum for Contermporary Art, Antwerp, 2006, unitednationsplaza, Berlin, 2007, Institut national d'histoire d'art, Paris, 2007-2008, Stills, Edinburgh, 2008, Gallery at the University of Massachussets, Amherst, 2009 eflux describe how the library came to be mobile

Martha Rosler's Library holds books on economy, political theory, war, colonialism, poetry, feminism, science fiction, art history, of children’s books, dictionaries, maps and travel literature as well as photo albums, posters, postcards and newspaper clippings . On exhibition they could be studied at will.
Martha states in thsi video that

"the practice of an artist is based on ideas and criticism and thinking and philosophy and science"

three cheers for that
                                      

 

 

Now back at rest the library is in the process of being catalogued and can be searched here. There are over 7600 books in the Martha Rosler Library; they can be viewed  by their title, author, or at their original location on Martha Rosler's shelves. A keyword search for Feminism finds 555 titles.

 Rosler’s website here describes her work thus '(She) works in video, phototography, text, installation, and performance. Her work deals with the separation of the public and private sphere, exploring issues from everyday life and the media to architecture and the built environment'.
She has published 17 books of photography, art, and writing, in several languages. Her essay book Decoys and Disruptions, was published by MIT Press in 2004. Publication of her three-part series, “Culture Class; Art, Creativity, Urbanism,” based on the Third biennial Hermes lecture that she gave in Den Bosch, the Netherlands, in 2010, was recently completed in the e-flux Journal, followed by “From Gentrification to Occupation: The Artistic Mode of Revolution.”

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.

Let's dance

It's the festive season where we may well find ourselves at  parties dancing.

To get dance-move ideas you could always watch Ai Wei Wei do the Gangnam style.

But to see something more old-style go here where you can also listen to the entertaining NPR radio program that talks about Muybridge and his life and work.

Stephen Herbert has collected many more of these animations made from Muybridge's photographs and  very much more (perhaps everything!!) on Muybridge and his work here

 

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   

 

 

secrets in books

old bookmarks left in secondhand volumes

Wayne Gooderham buys secondhand books as they are cheaper than new ones. They also give him an added pleasure. For many years he has been collecting the inscriptions he finds within these bargain books.  In fact he got so keen to collect more inscriptions that he now uses a network of friendly booksellers who alert him to particularly good ones when they come into their hands.Wayne  blogs with images of the inscriptions here

an Example

To Robert, on his crucial 30th birthday -

hoping for a safe and speedy emergence from adolescence

1/9/1955

Frank & Jackie

One of his network of bookseller helpers from Skoob Books  suggested to Wayne that he might be interested to see the collection of interesting things found left inside their second hand books. In their out of town warehouse Wayne was given permission to photograph some of Skoob Books' marvellously named 'Wall of Found' and you can read about them and see examples in another Guardian article by Wayne here