In and out of life
Colour is a firey lover. I move continually between its presence and its absence, like a poem by Dante.
Paintings that are mysterious, delicate paper collages, explosive site specific installations to get attention a historical places.
http://www.andreamastrovito.com/
Sundance
Californian artist Jennifer Steinkamp, creates virtual trees as if they were in an earthly paradise…photographs/installations/video/multimedia art. Her works don’t have a story to tell, there is no beginning, no middle or end. Yet, through the images in movement, she can evoke stories. Just like a photograph and a painting can tell a story.
orbit
Jennifer’s (nice name!) trees, flowers, lights, urban landscapes are always moving because she likes the unsettled state of tension that the movement of air can give to us. Her trees are “possessed” by movement and that makes them almost alive.
By looking at her works, one experiences their own humanity. And maybe even is more attuned to how perceptions are strictly connected to emotions. Have a look….
http://jsteinkamp.com/index.htm
Sundance: :http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfjzJQvAP5Q&feature=related
Complex Shit
Paul McCarthy, the L.A. based American artist, has a career that spans the last 40 years and is one of the most controversial and fascinating artists of contemporary art. He’s widely known for his early performances involved with Barbie dolls and Vaseline.
Currently he is making giant inflatable sculptures and exhibiting them worldwide. This piece, titled Complex Shit, was displayed over in Switzerland. One of the pieces of shit was picked up by the wind and eventually brought down a power line, broke a window, and ended up in the yard of a children’s home.
“Giant dog turd wreaks havoc at Swiss museum
Inflatable artwork blown from moorings and brings down power line”
The Guardian
To put it into perspective, the pieces of shit were each respectively, the size of a house. Now that’s some complex shit.
Pig Island, his latest work organized by Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milano (www.fondazionenicolatrussardi.com)
Wax people queuing
McCarthy has transformed famous people such as Angelina Jolie, Liz Taylor, Elizabeth II, presidents, dancers, Santa Clauses into grotesque figures.
His aim is to go to extremes with the clichés of a moralist American culture, combining glamour with the “dark side” of the American Dream. He shocks and amuses people with the famous combination: politics and sex.
However, many people critique this type of work for example:
How Far Is Too Far? Contemporary artists have made work depicting graphic sexual acts, damaging property, injuring their own bodies, or paying others to alter theirs. But when does art cross the line from avant-garde to unacceptable? by Phoebe Hoban
| WHAT DO YOU THINK? |
In The Map as Art, (Princeton Architectural Press) Katharine Harmon collects 360 colorful, map-related artistic visions by well-known artists—such as Ed Ruscha, Julian Schnabel, Olafur Eliasson, Maira Kalman, William Kentridge, and Vik Muniz—and many more less-familiar artists for whom maps are the inspiration for creating art.
The book is a collection of visionary topographies and imaginary geographies charted by artists including Vik Muniz (there is a work of his at the Palazzo Forti, Verona) who re-creates the globe from pieces of junk amongst others.
I haven’t read it, but it looks like a book I would like to buy and keep. I’m going to look into this through Amazon.
check out a review on http://www.coolhunting.com/culture/the-map-as-art.php
and the national post
A Draw-a-thon in NYC! A marathon of drawing and art where, in between avantgarde and voyeurism, punk painters and models in a tutu, posing nude is not even a trasgressive act!
living art
The artists perform and the people draw…surreal scenes where a room full of people, music, scenes and craziness.
www.michaelalanart.com check him out next time your in NYC for the next session!
foto courtesy of fast forward blog http://www.ffwdblog.it/2010/03/24/michael-alan-draw-a-thon-theatre-brooklyn/
great article in Marie Claire Italy http://www.marieclaire.it/magazine/fan-club/michael-alan
Balkan Erotic Epic
Women that massage their breasts under the rain, soaking wet and covered with mud.
and then
men dressed in traditional costumes have sex with the ground, then nude men masturbating into the earth
To help the grass grow, men masturbate into it
Popular songs and rites.
Crude images imbued with passion and signed by Marina Abramovic in the suggestive installation video where the Serbian artist entrusts a reflection on the relationship between eros and death in the popular culture of ex-Yugoslavia.
Balkan Erotic Epic is one of the works that was exhibited in the exhibition called “La sostenibile leggerezza dell’essere” that was on at Palazzo Pesaro Papafava in Venice www.palazzopesaropapafava.it/ from sept 13 to 23 nov 2008, on at the same time as the Biennale di Architecture where alot of my favorite artists exhibited their works: Candida Hoefer and Yoko Ono. They all confronted the issue of the concept of physical and cultural space.
The image of the woman fondling her breasts was everywhere and has become an icon. You still see it nowadays.
it moves you…maybe repulses you too.
Her latest challenge was The Artist is Present, a performance retrospective of her career, on at the MOMA, where she did an extreme performance: 7 hours a day, sitting and immobile, watching the visitors at the exhibiton without saying a word. It involves viewer participation (I love that in a museum, as you all well know), to allow visitors to experience the timelessness of the works.
The Artist is present
You can read a review by Germano Celant in Espresso, entitled “Monumento al silenzio” at
or the video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASS7xMOM1EE.
Have fun!
Korean artist Nam June Paik died January 29th, 2006. Many of his works make use of multiple TV screens in various physical layouts, playing back video imagery to form collages or repeated patterns.
Korean artist Nam June Paik. This modern media piece showcases a large television display consisting of 70 video screens with references to American politics and culture
January 30, 2006, 10.25 am
Paik’s journey as an artist has been truly global, and his impact on the art of video and television has been profound.To foreground the creative process that is distinctive to Paik’s artwork, it is necessary to sort through his mercurial movements, from Asia through Europe to the United States, and examine his shifting interests and the ways that individual artworks changed accordingly. This can be seen as a process grounded in his early interests in composition and performance which would strongly shape his ideas for mediabased art at a time when the electronic moving image and media technologies were increasingly present in our daily lives. In turn, Paik’s work would have a profound and sustained impact on the media culture of the late twentieth century; his remarkable career witnessed and influenced the redefinition of broadcast television and transformation of video into an artist’s medium.
Over the years, his success and renown have grown steadily.The wide presence of the media arts in contemporary culture is in no small measure due to the power of Paik’s art and ideas.Through television projects, installations, performances, collaborations, development of new artists’ tools, writing, and teaching, he has contributed to the creation of a media culture that has expanded the definitions and languages of art making.
Video Flag, 1985-1996, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden:
Paik’s life in art grew out of the politics and anti-art movements of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. During this time of societal and cultural change, he pursued a determined quest to combine the expressive capacity and conceptual power of performance with the new technological possibilities associated with the moving image.
Using television, as well as the modalities of singlechannel videotape and sculptural/installation formats, he imbued the electronic moving image with new meanings. Paik’s investigations into video and television and his key role in transforming the electronic moving image into an artist’s medium are part of the history of the media arts. As we look back at the twentieth century, the concept of the moving image, as it has been employed to express representational and abstract imagery through recorded and virtual technologies, constitutes a powerful discourse maintained across different media.The concept of the moving, temporal image is a key modality through which artists have articulated new strategies and forms of image making; to understand them, we need to fashion historiographic models and theoretical interpretations that locate the moving image as central in our visual culture.
Paik’s latest creative deployment of new media is through laser technology. He has called his most recent installation a “post-video project,” which continues the articulation of the kinetic image through the use of laser energy projected onto scrims, cascading water, and smoke-filled sculptures. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Paik’s work shows us that the cinema and video are fusing with electronic and digital media into new image technologies and forms of expression. The end of video and television as we know them signals a transformation of our visual culture.
Nam June Paik, Buddha game 1991. Collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales
Paik envisioned a different television, a “global groove” of artists’ expressions seen as part of an “electronic superhighway” that would be open and free to everyone.The multiple forms of video that Paik developed can be interpreted as an expression of an open medium able to flourish and grow through the imagination and participation of communities and individuals from around the world.
Paik, along with many artists working as individuals and within collectives through the 1960s 14 and 1970s to create work for television as well as for alternative spaces, challenged the idea of television as a medium and domain exclusively controlled by a monopoly of broadcasters.
This paradox in a twentieth-century modulation connects us to the Sartrian paradox “I am always not what I am and I am always what I am not.”6 -Paik, 1976
b. 1921, Krefeld, Germany; d. 1986, D�sseldorf
Joseph Beuys was born May 12, 1921, in Krefeld, Germany. During his school years in Kleve, Beuys was exposed to the work of Achilles Moortgat, whose studio he often visited, and was inspired by the sculptures of Wilhelm Lehmbruck. Beuys began to study medicine in 1940, but his studies were interrupted when he joined the army and served as a fighter pilot. During a mission in 1943, he was badly injured when his plane crashed in a desolate region of south Russia. This experience would resonate in all of his later work.
After the war, he decided to dedicate his life to art. In 1947, he registered at the Staatliche Kunstakademie D�sseldorf, where he studied under Joseph Enseling and Ewald Matar�. After Beuys graduated in 1951, the brothers Franz Joseph and Hans van der Grinten began to collect his work. Eventually becoming his most important patrons, they organized his first solo show at their house in Kranenburg in 1953.
Beuys was appointed professor of monumental sculpture at the Staatliche Kunstakademie D�sseldorf in 1961. The year after, he began to associate with Fluxus [more] artists, principally Nam June Paik and George Maciunas, and later he met Minimalist artist Robert Morris. He helped to organize the Festum Fluxorum Fluxus at the Staatliche Kunstakademie D�sseldorf in 1963, and he participated for the first time in Documenta in Kassel in 1964.
In 1967, Beuys founded the German Student Party, one of the numerous political groups that he organized during the next decade. In 1972, he was dismissed from the Staatliche Kunstakademie D�sseldorf amid great controversy for admitting to his class over 50 students who previously had been rejected. The following year, he founded the Free International University for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research. He increasingly became involved in political activities and in 1976 ran for the German Bundestag. In 1978, he was made a member of the Akademie der Kunst, Berlin.
The 1970s were also marked by numerous exhibitions throughout Europe and the United States. Beuys represented Germany at the Venice Biennale in 1976 and 1980. A retrospective of his work was held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1979. He was made a member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Stockholm, in 1980. During the inauguration of the 1982 Documentain Kassel, Beuys planted the first of 7,000 oak trees; in other cities, he repeated this tree-planting action several times in the following years. In January 1986, the artist received the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Prize in Duisburg. On January 23, 1986, Beuys died in D�sseldorf
door structures
The work of Pierluigi Calignano, artist from Puglia migrated to Milan, explores fantastic worlds that live between sculpture, installation and artisan craftsmanship. From the robots to impossibile machines, from the fairytale cities to the submarine decorated as architecture. Pierluigi develops visionary situations, with a sophisticated construction, utilizing everyday materials which he then completly deforms and reconstructs something new in its function and use. He has had numerous one man and collective shows between galleries, museums and residencies. He went to New York in 2007 for a prestigious artist-in-residence. I liked his work when I saw him at Colombo Art at ARt Verona. Someone to watch.
Futurist dinner
The group of five young Florentine architects created in 2001, Arabeschi di Latte, is a creative conglomerate about food and the passion for being together around food. Francesca Sarta, Alessandra Foschi, Silvia Allori, Francesca Pazzagli and Francesca Sorga make “eating events” between art, fashion and a live show, occasions where food is the instrument to create relations, pleasure and socialization. Also creativity at its most! They do them at homes or in the piazzas, with the active participation of the public. I wanted to do a dinner with them at Palazzo Forti: we had planned on having hundreds of green apples all lined up that would be peel all twirled and the apple peel would become the carpet. Didn’t happen. The catering aspects are inspired by the everyday and the popular culture. They even opened up a shop called Mia Market in Rome. Don’t live there, so can’t see their stuff. But they did do this dinner in Verona and a Futurist dinner too. Love them.
artjennycreationstation
What do you think??