Explosive art II… Cai Guo-Qiang: Sky Ladder
Nowness:
The Incendiary Chinese Artist Unveils His Spellbinding Practice of Painting with Fireworks
Pyrotechnic savant Cai Guo-Qiang unpacks the metaphysical questions at the heart of his explosive oeuvre for a new film series by fine art visual search engine Art.sy. Director Antony Crook traveled to Los Angeles with his wife, Art.sy Producer and Editor Marina Cashdan, to shadow the Chinese artist as he readied a site-specific installation for his new show at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. “He’s got this dynamic between an intense spirituality and a real childlike nature,” says Cashdan. “Explosions really do fascinate and excite him. There’s this tension between serenity and chaos—that’s what drives him.” Beyond the combustive opening spectacle “Mystery Circle,” which will feature a sea of mini rockets, 100 “UFO” spinners and its very own “alien” onlooker, the Sky Ladder exhibition’s highlights include the mammoth 108-foot-wide “Childhood Spaceship” drawing detailing the artist’s extraterrestrial fascinations. The show marks the West Coast solo debut for New York-based Guo-Qiang, who has shown at institutions including the Guggenheim and Tate Modern, served as curator for China’s 2005 Venice Biennale pavilion, and masterminded the special effects direction for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.
Explosive art I…
Joschi Herczeg and Daniele Kaehr - Explosions, 2010 - custom-built detonator connected to cameras and synchronized to photograph at the moment of explosion
(via bbook)
Song Dong, Waste Not @ Barbican Centre, London (until 12 June 2012)
I had a few minutes to kill before John Darnielle of the The Mountain Goats took centre stage at the Barbican, so I thought I’d wander next door and take a quick look at the pile of junk that was being exhibited there. I was not expecting to be moved so fucking much in those mere 10 mins… The installation piece holds no particular interest intself— it’s the backstory that gives Song Dong’s art piece all its power:
Barbican:
A Chinese artist of international renown, Song Dong is acclaimed for his conceptual and often very personal performances and installations. For this, his first major London exhibition, Song Dong has developed a new iteration of Waste Not, a work that he first presented in 2005 and which remains of the utmost significance to him.
Comprising over 10,000 household possessions and part of the family home, the installation is essentially a tribute to Song Dong’s mother, Zhao Xiangyun, who made this extraordinary collection over a period of five decades. The activity of saving and re-using objects of all kinds is in keeping with the Chinese adage wu jin qi yong – ‘waste not’ – a prerequisite for survival. From the start of Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution in 1966, being frugal was the only way for a family to survive. Zhao Xiangyuan kept everything, even pieces of used soap and empty toothpaste tubes.
Following Song Dong’s father’s death in 2002, the artist proposed that he and his mother make her life, as expressed through these simple everyday objects, into a work of art. His hope was that it would give his mother new purpose and also give real meaning to her collection. Tragically, Zhao Xiangyuan died in an accident in 2009, but each time Song Dong remakes the work, assisted by his sister, Song Hui, and his wife Yin Xiuzhen, the family is reunited once more. As such, Waste Not refers to a deeply rooted tradition of shared family endeavor, as well as being testament to a moving mother-son relationship. At Silk Street entrance [main entrance of the Barbican Complex in London, where the exhibition is hosted], a poignant neon sign, facing the cosmos, reads: ‘Dad, don’t worry, mum and all the family are fine’.
Ultimately, Waste Not is a portrait of a life that we can all relate to in some way. It speaks of the strong bonds between individual family members and the power of objects to tell stories and shape our lives.
To add to the above intro: Song Dong saw his mother fall into deep depression right after her husband’s death. That’s when her habit of not wasting anything got out of control. He and his sister would get into major clashes with their mother over her compulsion/pathology so one way to bring her back to life was to suggest making her collection into an art piece and in doing so, getting her involved in the art making process. It totally worked of course.
Gerilla Funny Girls
(The Advantage poster is part of the Art, Love and Politics in the 1980s exhibit @ MCA Chicago)
Martin Creed’s redesign of the Gallery restaurant @ Sketch
Sketch is a totally over-the-top design/art/restaurant space. its handful of restaurants and bar are all located in the same building, all insanely expensive and all visually highly ostentatious and entertaining.
I had dinner at the Gallery once, years ago (when it looked like THIS)— I don’t remember Gagnaire’s food but I do remember the fun art-ish décor, the pink lighting, the slightly sickening atmosphere and the space-age toilets (bright white, egg-shaped pods). The East Bar was pretty awesome to look at and to be seen in but too uncomfortable to want to stay for a drink (which kind of defeats the purpose).
I like what Creed seems to have done with the space so let’s give the Gallery another go, shall we?
[Neither here nor there: I totally dig the fact that Sketch founder, Mourad Mazouz, is Algerian]
Martin Creed x Pierre Gagnaire, for Sketch
The Sketch founder’s artist-inspired dishes reassembled into a bold still life series
Nowness:
Eindhoven-based design duo Raw Color toast the opening of Martin Creed’s grand overhaul of London’s Sketch restaurant with graphic still lifes dedicated to the restaurant’s new menu. The Turner Prize winning artist’s takeover saw him entirely revamp Sketch’s interiors, hanging his large-scale paintings along the walls and hand-picking each individual table, chair and piece of cutlery, as well as contributing in the kitchen. Sketch co-founder and Michelin-starred chef Pierre Gagnaire conceived two playfully named dishes dedicated to the conceptual artist––“Navet Martin Creed” and “Dundee Pinky”. Raw Color concocted their Irving Penn-esque visions from each dish’s disassembled ingredients, including black olive jelly, squid ink and parmesan cream. “The cooking side of the project was harder to translate into our own visual language,” says Christoph Brach, one half of Raw Color with Daniera ter Haar. “But looking at Creed and his approach to projects, how he organizes things, stacking from big to small, we knew we could take the ingredients and do something similar with them.” In typical Creed fashion the artist has even given the project a numbered title: Work No. 1347.
Leigh Bowery by Lucian Freud, 1990-1994
National Portrait Gallery, London:
Despite his size, Leigh Bowery was delicate and supple. Freud had always shunned working with professional models, but as a performer, Bowery was able to invent and sustain demanding poses. The two men developed a close relationship and for four years Bowery was his most consistent model. He said that sitting for Freud was like having a university education. Unknown to the artist, Bowery was gravely ill with AIDS.
[It’s via Bowery that Freud found his way to Big Sue]
Punishments by Julius von Bismarck
Today and Tomorrow:
Punishment is a new series of works by Julius von Bismarck. He traveled to Switzerland, South America and the United States to whip mother nature or certain landmarks, like the Atlantic ocean, a glacier or Christ the Redeemer (the statue of Jesus) in Rio de Janeiro.
You can watch a video of Bismarck whipping Jesus’s ass in Rio => HERE
“A message from Kusama:
Grand Orgy to Awaken the Dead at Moma
(Otherwise known as the Museum of Modern Art)
Featuring their usual display of nudes
At the museum you can take off your clothes in good company:
RENOIR
MAILLOL
GIACOMETTI
PICASSO
I positively guarantee that these characters will all be present and that all will be in the nude.*
*Sociological note: The nude has become socially acceptable among the more permanent residents of the garden of the museum. Phalli are also a la mode, particularly the harder varieties in granite, basalt and bronze.
This being the case, we will make this celebration traditional in keeping with the tome of the Museum of Modern Art.
“THOUGHTS ON THE MAUSOLEUM OF MODERN ART
By Kusama
What’s Modern here? I don’t see it.
Van Gogh, Cezanne, these are other ghosts, all are dead and dying.
While the dead show dead art, living artists die.
Fame and reputations are sold across the counter.
Here art, hard as diamond, prevails over love;
Diamonds for grand dames attending their funeral.
MOMA is political, a show place for vanity.
Politics has no place in love and in art.
No life stirs in empty rooms where DON’T TOUCH is the rule.
Exhibitions should be free and not a dollar fifty.
Art should be priced for all to own – at the supermarket.
Soft sculpture is alive, always preferrable to hard sculpture.
My love is like mixed media, mixing you and me.
Cast includes Lunar Eclipse, Crystal Violence, Lasar Beam, Dill Dough, Infra Red, Looney Tunes.”
Yayoi Kusama @ Tate Modern, London, 2&4 March 2012
She’s about 200 years old and has put out some rather fun and eclectic art over the past 300 years, ranging from phallus-incrusted boats, macaroni-incrusted furniture, avant-gardiste tits-exposing fashion, orgiac happenings, polka-dot binges and other various patterns repeated ad vitam æternam such as dots, mail stickers, cutouts of heads, etc. Paintings, videos, room installations, happenings, furniture, clothes, body art, poetry, fiction writing… she’s all over the place… Judging by her art alone, Kusama seems to be as fun as she is compulsive and obsessive. And totally insane of course (and I’m not saying that just because she voluntarily checked herself in a mental hospital and has been living there since the mid-to-late 70s).
Highlight: her infinity mirror room; the unquestionable climax of the show.
[pix blatantly taken by me: I was in a total fuck-you mode that day, and there’s no doubt in my mind that Kusama would have cheered me on.]
David and Eli and Pluto by Lucian
To clarify: David (Dawson) was Lucian (Freud)’s assistant of 20 years, Eli (of “Eli and David” and of “Portrait of the Hound”) is David’s whippet, and Pluto (of “Sunny Morning — Eight Legs”) was Lucian’s… “Portrait of the Hound” was Freud’s last and unfinished portrait.
Freud’s portraits of Big Sue @ National Portrait Gallery, London, 01 March 2012
“It’s flesh without muscle and it has developed a different kind of texture through being such a weight-bearing thing”
National Portrait Gallery:
Leigh Bowery introduced Freud to friends he thought might interest him of whom his clubbing friend, Sue Tilley, was one. For Freud, painting Tilley, known as “Big Sue”, was a continuation of his fascination with flesh, although he talked about not wanting to over indulge his ‘predilection towards people of unusual or strange proportions’.
Sue Tilley (or Big Sue, as she came to be known) lies languidly on the sofa in a bohemian artist’s studio, far removed from her day job as a civil servant working for the Department of Social Security. Freud was initially fascinated by her size, however as time passed her proportions became more ordinary to him. Freud’s portraits of Tilley are a celebration of flesh and as a feminine as Manet’s “Olympia” or “Rokeby Venus” by Velasquez, although far less idealised
The National Portrait Gallery is running an exhibition on Lucian Freud. Ten rooms filled with stunning portraits. Big Sue is plashed over all four walls of room VIII.
Guardian’s Eyewitness:
Yayoi Kusama, 82, arrives in London – leaving her native Japan for the first time in 12 years – to launch a retrospective at the Tate Modern called Love Arrives at the Earth Carrying with it a Tale of the Cosmos
Photographer: Sarah Lee for the Guardian
Petros Vrellis used openFrameworks to make Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” come to life by enabling the user to visualize the flow of the painting and interact with it by touch. The sound responds to the flow too.
