Tom Heatherwick's Seed Cathedral

I honestly don't know how to start writing about this. It is just one of the most amazing things I have seen, I can't articulate my thoughts on it right now but if I had enough money in my account to fly to Shanghai just to see this, I would do it in a second.

This is the link to the video:

http://www.heatherwick.com/uk-pavilion/

Bodies in Urban Spaces

Bodies in Urban Spaces was a great free event put on as part of the fringe. It was an interesting mix of street theatre and acrobatics, a circus led tour of the backstreets of the city. Highlighting the overlooked spaces in our urban environment, performers choreographed a relay, slotting a mind boggling amount of bodies into the smallest of spaces. It was impossible not to marvel at the strength of the performers, some holding themselves up, four foot off the ground behind a road sign. They literally highlighted these overlooked spaces, dressed in a uniform of bright, block colour, enlivening the places which just don't see. It was a really enjoyable, light weight piece of street theatre that had a great atmosphere. I’m putting up some photo's I took on the day.

“In learning how to write, the first step was always to fill pages with letters. In art, it was to fill pages with horizontal and vertical parallel lines.”
Luis Camnitzer

The link below is for an article in the Guardian with Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate Modern answering questions from readers and members of the art world. It is pretty long, covering a lot of issues, really worth a read.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/apr/25/serota-tate-modern-tenth-birthday

Corona, Peter Sedgley

Angel, Mark Wallinger

The Gathering

The Gathering is the exhibition currently held at the Longside Gallery, Yorkshire Sculpture Park. The Gathering is the result of the first curatorial competition for post-graduates held by the Arts Council back in 2008. The winner, Robert Dingle, focussed the exhibition on how key pieces have been collected by the Arts Council Commission over the last forty years, an interesting view of how and why these pieces are being exhibited and their historical significance.


Two key pieces for me stood alone. The first is a Video by Mark Wallinger, Angel, 1997, part of the Talking in Tongues trilogy. The seven and a half minute video portrays Wallinger as his blind alter ego, walking on the spot at the base of Angel tube station, London, his stick tapping across him rhythmically. This is the first time that I have seen this piece and there is something subtly uncanny about the whole piece. The other commuters as they travel along the other escalators seem to be walking in the wrong direction and Wallingers speech, an excerpt of St Johns Gospel, has a disjointed quality. In actuality Wallinger learnt the entire passage backwards which was then edited and the film is seen in reverse. At the end Wallinger ascends the escalator to the sound of Zadok The Priest. The whole piece is very witty with a dry humour and the overblown theatricality of the ending is the perfect crescendo. This piece obviously deals with issues surrounding religion and the symbolism is plane to see; the all seeing blind man, the divine placed in context of the mundane, his ascension to heaven and the way the contradictions in how it was filmed and then shown supposedly reflects contradictions Wallinger sees in the Christian faith.

The other piece that caught my attention was Corona, 1970, by Peter Sedgley. A member of the Op Art movement Sedgley's Corona is a painting approx. two metres by two metres of concentric, boldly coloured circles which blend and meld into each other beautifully. It is a quite simple design which could quite easily be taken as just that and overlooked but deserves a lot more time and attention. As you stand in front of the painting the circles begin to oscillate and move until suddenly, in the blink of an eye, one of the rings will change colour. This piece has mastered subtlety, balancing on the edge between noticeable but not obvious, like when a light flickers so momentarily that you are left unsure whether it was just your eyes. It is through a combination of coloured kinetic lights directed onto the painting that these changes occur and when you look from light to canvas you can dissimilate how it is done. However even when you knew the workings of the illusion, when you looked back form across the room all you see is a static painting, the only clue to the illusion is others visitors reaction.

I saw an article recently (in the March edition of the British Journal of Photography) raising questions over the future of traditional print magazines. With more and more people accessing information online print is struggling, the journal itself just having returned to a monthly format after 146 years as a weekly. Subscriptions are becoming cheaper and cheaper. It has recently been announced that from June this year The Times and The Sunday Times will be charging for access to their online sites, following the decline in newspaper sales. There is no question that the internet has opened up information, its wide-reaching, global readership allowing for rich discourse and learning, but the article raised interesting questions on the limits of internet based publications. The internet provides people with the opportunity to follow the stories and articles best aligned with their interests, with related articles often suggested for further reading, but does this ease blind sight readers from what else is going on? Where as magazines are about “showing readers something they don’t already know”, widening their knowledge in all sorts of directions, are internet based readers restricted?

I’m not sure if I see internet based publications as hindering people’s wider knowledge, people will always gravitate towards articles which interest them most, and they will always flick past the ones which interest them least. I don’t think the format of an article has much effect on whether some one reads it or not. I personally spend a lot more time looking at online publications than I ever have print, down to a combination of ease of access and funds, and I follow a wider variety of publications with wider ideas and subjects. In terms of online art publications I generally find them quite diverse and though I might read more articles on sculpture than video installation I would do that regardless of the format. However as much as I might use online resources more I think there will always be a place for print, especially with art publications because they aren’t just read once and thrown away, they stay relevant.

Marjan Teeuwen, Verwoest Huis

Verwoest Huis, 2010
http://www.cokkiesnoei.com/index.php?

This exhibition of Marjan Teeuwen's work was one of the most arresting and intriguing of the smaller, commercial galleries that I visited in Amsterdam, showing around 10 large, photographic prints. I haven't been able to find any information in English on the project, but I'm intrigued as to whether the photographs acted as documentation of an installation or as the art work it self.

The sheer volume of objects confused the perspective of the viewer having a disorientating effect which made it difficult to discern the original orientation of the structure. Room after room seemed to lead onto one another, at first glance the images seemed to have been taken from afar but on closer inspection the scale of the installations is revealed. Although this wasn’t consistent in every shot it broke up the possible monotony of the series.

The organised anarchy of miscellaneous objects defined the space with meticulous control in a contradictory of way. There was a sense of spontaneity in the images, harking back to images seen of typical hoarders and their homes, but the ordered nature of the stunning amount of "stuff" contains undertones archival instinct. It would be really interesting to find out what the artist herself says about this series.

"My criterion for an installation was what do you do with the space...? What cues did you take from it? How did you manipulate, alter, reconfigure, redesign it for another category or variety of experience?"
Patrick O'Doherty

Kendall Buster, Model City, 2005

Near and Far Part I

Grand Parades current exhibition, Here and Now Part I, showcases an eclectic mix of mid degree level work. The attempt at the integration of all four courses by Barry Barker produced a disjointed, enlivened but not coherent exhibition.

The sheer amount of work resulted in it feeling cramped at times and any useable space being allocated to students. Any blank wall was used, regardless of how suitable or viable for the viewer. It did create a busy, livened environment but at times I think the work suffered from the lack of space, with too much work on one wall and pieces displayed along a busy corridor.

That said the most interesting part of exhibition for me was a direct response to this lack of space, where some of the students had been more experimental with their use of the space. Reacting insightfully to otherwise overlooked areas of the space pieces such as the spider installation displayed their work in a more considered, site specific way, within the main gallery but viewable in its entirety only from the mezzanine level.

The piece that most captivated me was Near and Far. A steel and glass staircase leading up towards a bell was, for me, the most complete and successful of all the work. The sensation of being at once both near and far, of the bell being just out of reach whilst ultimately inaccessible was all clearly communicated within the structure itself. The temptation to ring the bell, to use it and animate it only heightens your sense of distance and the fragility of the glass as a material reinforces its do not touch, do not use purpose within the gallery space. The piece clearly articulated its intended response and I don’t think necessarily needed this reinforcing in its title.

Independently the work stands well alone however the chaotic curation let down some of the students, often overwhelming the smaller, more intimate pieces.