Richard Wright wins the Turner Prize
December 9, 2009 at 10:46 am | In Artist, Contemporary Art, Exhibition, Painting | Leave a CommentTags: Painting, Richard Wright, Turner Prize, Tate London, Mural, Gold Leaf Painting
British painter Richard Wright has been awarded the Turner Prize. On display currently through January 3 at the Tate London.
A description of the work from the Guardian UK:
An enormous and spectacular gold-leaf design that occupies most of the far wall of the gallery’s second room. Lucy Skaer’s exhibit must lose quite a bit of footfall, in fact, because as soon as you glimpse Wright’s painting through the door, it is difficult to resist walking through to have a closer look. When you do, the swirling details start to resolve: a roiling cloud, an angel’s wing, a pulsating weather-forecast sun. Everything is painted – even over a plug socket in the gallery wall – with a kind of spidery intricacy, like a giant map from The Lord of the Rings book. And the whole design is ridged with lines of symmetry, as if the map had been refolded, with a picnic stain inside.
Watch a video on Wright here as well as reading more on the execution of the gold leaf wall painting on view. More from the Gaurdian:
Despite the toil involved, when the show closes at Tate Britain on 3 January, the work will be painted over in white emulsion and lost for ever.
The temporary nature of the piece is deliberate: none of Wright’s wall paintings is intended to survive the immediate circumstances of its commission. “I am interested in the fragility of the moment of engagement – in heightening that moment,” he said. To see a work knowing that it will not last, he said, “emphasises that moment of its existence”.
Asked how he felt to experience the destruction of his work, he said: “Sometimes I feel a sense of loss; sometimes of relief.”
Vrno
December 9, 2009 at 10:22 am | In Artist, Contemporary Art, Drawing, Painting | Leave a CommentTags: Artist, Drawing, sketchbook, Vrno
Art criticism and Damien Hirst
November 11, 2009 at 3:42 pm | In Art Criticism, Artist, Contemporary Art | 1 CommentTags: Art Criticism, Damien HIrst, Jonathan Jones, UK Guardian
In a recent review of Damien Hirst’s new paintings on view at the Wallace Collection in London, critic Jonathan Jones declares
“No one doubts that Damien Hirst’s paintings are terrible. But they’re more than that – they reveal everything that’s wrong with contemporary art.”
What always leaves me puzzled about criticism towards Hirst’s work is not that he seems to cause such a knee jerk reaction in critics (just check out other reactions on the Guardian UK blog) but that no one really seems to wants to talk about the big ideas in his work. Yes, Hirst’s new paintings are in direct conversation with the works of british painter Francis Bacon as are many of his past installations. This should mean they automatically have a lot more going on in them content-wise than just the formal aspects, which is all this critic seems to be concerned with. This does art a disservice if you only deal with formalist aspects in the work, which not-so-consequently has been officially less important than content since Jackson Pollock. So what is he dealing with? Why are they terrible? How does ‘terrible’ painting speak to the content? Even if you don’t like it, as a critic, you must have something to add to the conversation.
Conservative critics generally maintain on some level that post-modernism was a pox on the grand tradition of art-making. Not liking something based on aesthetic appearances is one thing. But, as this critic does, to leave it at the surface with no articulation towards content in relation to the form, seems lazy. I take issue with the tone of the critic and emphatically stating what the paintings mean, or what Hirst intended, especially without positioning his opinions in a theoretical context or quoting the artist. Just because you can recognize the historical thread in a work and name drop periods of art doesn’t mean you know what an artist is thinking or what his intentions may be. This approach doesn’t help anyone come to understand what could be going on in the work. How can a painting that doesn’t measure up technically in the eyes of the critic help the viewer understand anything about the traditions of western painting, the work of Bacon or both artist’s dealings with the human condition as a subject matter?
The thing that is really wrong with contemporary art, speaking as an artist, are the critics and the institutions that are built up around the serious questions artists can ask through their art making. Jones’ four paragraphs are nothing but a search engine grab and reflect his own inability (desire?) to find any middle ground. Polemic critics don’t help anyone understand the potential for art as a beneficial endeavor and they make it harder for an artist to scratch out their existence. And they certainly don’t help bridge the gap between artist and viewer.
-Courtney Stubbert, Dir. of Development BTAF
New Paintings by Damien Hirst
October 14, 2009 at 2:08 pm | In Artist, Contemporary Art, Exhibition | Leave a CommentTags: Contemporary Art, Damien HIrst, New Paintings, The Blue Paintings
News coverage of contemporary art is never very good. I’ve yet to hear a journalist actually speak about Damien Hirst’s work in any real detail. The most they can bother to do is talk about how controversial he is and his shark in the tank piece. I suppose the themes Hirst deals with don’t really make a good news story, and criticism is not really their job. The irony is the news media covers death and the fragility of human life all the time (“if it bleeds it leads”), but only from an objective distance. They don’t need to get philosophical about life and death, but do they have to make us cringe with their feigned seriousness?
Hirst is polarizing. The common result in an quick twitter search resulted in snarky comments along the lines of “Oh look, Damien Hirst didn’t know he knew how to paint.” (Typically he has had a staff of assistants see his projects through to the end) But the fact that this is somehow seen as antithetical to art merely points to the fact that people know very little about the history of art in general. Artists have always had studio assistants. Besides, we live in the post art-as-idea age anyway. Painting has little to do with making art when your perception of it is largely conceptual. For Hirst, this is certainly the case.
FYI, for all you twitter users out there, you can follow Hirst at @hirstdamien. Yesterday (Oct. 13th, 2009) he claimed in a twitter post to have “kidnapped” Paris Hilton for ransom by downloading her image and burning to a disk. Perhaps this sounds silly, but what else is she but an image. He has claimed to kidnap someone that everyone has equal access to. So is it the claim that is silly or our perception of Paris Hilton’s existence? Or is it that Ms. Hilton’s perception of herself is the problem?
You can vote on whether or not you like his art at his blog.
Also read testimonials about him at his website. Here is a sample:
“Love the art and your concept. Can’t wait to get mine. I’ve been toying with the idea of being able to sell art on ITunes for .99 a pop. I think it is the future.”
Jeff, USA
Below is the second of a five part interview with Hirst. In it he talks about his relationship with British painter Francis Bacon.
Artist Song Dong at MOMA
August 26, 2009 at 8:00 am | In Contemporary Art, Exhibition, Installation, Museums | 1 CommentTags: MOMA Exhibition, Song Dong
photo by c-monster.net
photo by c-monster.net
C-Monster has some great pics of the current MOMA exhibition of Song Dong’s current installation titled “Waste Not”. A very powerful collection of the contents of the artist’s mother’s house. Check out the rest of the images here. The show is up through September 7th.
via CM
Confessions – Nico Muhly & Teitur
August 25, 2009 at 9:32 am | In Artist, Contemporary Art, Experimental Music, Imagery, Music, Video, film | Leave a CommentTags: Confessions, Nico Muhly, Online Collaboration, Teitur
Composer Nico Muhly and singer Teitur began a project last year of composing music to YouTube clips people had sent in to their project website. The only rule for submission was that it had to be of a personal or confessional nature. You can subscribe to their releases as they come available on their YouTube Channel. You can also read a recent article from NME on Teitur and some of the project.
via Olafur Arnalds
Artist Marco Pires
August 24, 2009 at 2:35 pm | In Artist, Contemporary Art, Drawing | Leave a CommentTags: Artist Marco Pires, Cartography, Collage, Moleskin, White Lies
Portuguese artist Marco Pires has some really great work in his portfolio. From his statement:
The concept of “white lies” was first associated to the study of cartography by Mark Monmonier, a geographer who adopts a critical stance regarding the evolution of maps, being somewhat sceptical of the manipulation exerted by some of these models of reality. According to Monmonier, a map constructs a representation that is based on deliberate distortions, doing away with exactitude and truth in an effort to better depict the essential.
According to this notion, the map undertakes a spatial abstraction, developing a language that allows it to communicate and analyse data. From that basis emerge those elements called cartograms, which combine the topographic survey of a particular area with information concerning the distribution, frequency or intensity of certain phenomena. “A cartogram is a purposely-distorted thematic map that emphasizes the distribution of a variable by changing the area (or lengths) of objects on the map”, according to James A. Dougenik (1985).
My homonymous series develops itself in accordance with the cartograms’ form of construction. In an attempt to recontextualise documents such as ancient contour maps, which are themselves outdated information, I fragmented their spatial structures through a series of discontinuities, deletions and subtractions. This intervention conceals certain areas and consequently reveals others, especially those containing the document’s captions, whose original referents are replaced by the formless, discontinuous monochrome mass which now covers each map.
The black sketchbooks series consists of small pages taken from moleskine notebooks, on which fragments of maps are printed and then worked on with various materials, from writing implements to oil stains, re-drawing each document in a game of tensions and erasures, an exercise of displaced intentions which separated themselves from reality. Project, hesitation, error, direction and drift all combine into an autonomous language that competes with the topology on the maps from which it emerges, pointing towards a referential and spatial repositioning. The pages are then photographed and large-format prints are made.
via HBT
Artist Paul Henry Ramirez
August 13, 2009 at 9:34 am | In Artist, Contemporary Art | Leave a CommentTags: Artist, Paul Henry Ramirez
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