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Clay or soil is all around us but we hardly take notice. But in the hands of this artist, such a familiar material challenges the viewer to pay attention. Clay was the main cast in two performances presented by Indian artist Anindita Dutta in which the artist orchestrated performers coated with clay from top to toe to perform against a backdrop equally covered with soil. The performances were part of Dutta’s artist-in-residency programme at Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Kyushu Island.
As some of the surrealists’ more creative exhibiting strategies showed - the dark and disorientating environments of the 1938 and 1947 international shows stand out - the group could make great use of interiors when they chose to. Day to day, however, and however rude André Breton was about the bourgeois nature of Sigmund Freud’s rooms, the group’s living conditions never got far from the reality they so despised.
Frank’s Cafe and Campari Bar, run by Frank Boxer and his “fantastic chef partner Michael Davies”, is the accompanying catering to Bold Tendencies 4, a sculpture outpost of Hannah Barry’s Peckham gallery. Back in the pre-lottery pre-Brit art UK of the 70s/80s, gallery catering stretched to curly sandwiches and tepid tea. Now exhibition spaces are more considerate of their public, adding culinary satisfaction and physical comfort as serious components to the viewing experience. At Frank’s on the top of Peckham’s multi-story car park, the London landscape is laid out in such a way as to surprise and inspire even the least creatively inclined amongst us.
Rude Britannia: British comic art It is a striking paradox that whereas comedy occupies a central and revered position in our literary tradition, in the plastic arts it has always been treated with unease, suspicion or disdain. The very foundations of our language, through Chaucer and Shakespeare, feature the comedic in all its variants, including the grotesque, the absurd, the satirical, the scatological and the obscene. It is a grand tradition which extends back in time to Aristophanes, and forwards to Dickens, Beckett, Wodehouse and Ayckbourn.
Colour Country: Art from the Roper River Colour Country: art from Roper River is showing in its final venue in Darwin, in Australia’s Northern Territory, this month. It is a profound exhibition of beautiful paintings from a small community of distinctive artistic endeavour, the Roper River. The Wagga Wagga City Council put the exhibition together as part of their Mawang (Altogether) Programme to celebrate Indigenous Culture, to showcase the Aboriginal art and to be inclusive in cultural terms. Mawang means “altogether” for the Wiradjuri people who are the traditional custodians of the Wagga Wagga region.
Wolfgang Tillmans: A Photographer at Large Wolfgang Tillmans as photographer/printmaker is the perfect antidote to the framing of the world, to so-called verité as manufactured in contact prints, the staging of every aspect of modern life as if that had been unconsciously set up. However successful Tillmans now is, the artist has not lost his focus or his innocence in exposing through his own production the myths and lies of contemporary media.
Now in its final year, Jerwood Contemporary Painters opens a window on to the diverse practice of 24 emerging artists. The exhibition brings their vibrant works together under the light of a crisp white gallery. All have graduated from UK art schools since 2000 and each receives an equal share of the £30,000 prize money from the Jerwood Charitable Foundation.
Francis Alÿs: A Story of Deception As curator Mark Godfrey guides us through Francis Alÿs’s exhibition at Tate Modern he tells us, “you have to ask what kind of meaning a poetic act might have in a highly charged political situation”. While taking no moral high ground, without ridicule or malice, Alÿs clears convoluted rhetoric from urgent contemporary concerns, the magic of Alÿs’s work lies in his combining praxis with trickster and in this way his subversive actions dance in the face of governments.
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Luis Camnitzer is a 73-year-old man “who still wants to change the world”. He is a key figure in the international art scene. As an artist he was one of the pioneers of Conceptual Art along with North American artists such as Joseph Kosuth and Mel Bochner. He is also a well-known educational and art theorist who has written many books and articles on Latin American Art, Art Education and Conceptualism. As a professor, Camnitzer taught for more than three decades at the State University of New York and in addition to this he was one of the founders of the New York Graphic Workshop.
Australians have long been aware of what Geoffrey Blainey called, The Tyranny of Distance. Overseas travel has always been vital to Australian artists, and a central theme in the development of their work. Where travel was done for lengthy periods of time, artists such as Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan and their generation who travelled to Europe and stayed for some years, travel today can be quick and regular, enabling artists to exhibit abroad, to visit the circuit of international fairs and biennales, to be active players in international art.
“And how old is the artist?” is amongst the first questions asked by collectors pondering the purchase of a new talent, to which the correct answer is always young, very young. Because quite simply the vectors of an artist’s potential success, and thus financial appreciation, can be precisely plotted by how much they have already achieved by a certain age, and the marketability of their fresh jeunesse. Of course everyone enjoys betting on emergent young talent in every cultural domain, the latest teenage novelist or prodigy musician, the difference being that with art you can actually make a monetary profit on your gamble.
Another World: Dalí, Magritte, Miró and the Surrealists In Edinburgh this summer, coinciding with the Fringe Festival at first, and then extending into next year, the Dean Gallery’s exhibition of surrealist art is an appropriately escapist and inventive choice. The show is both comprehensive and accessible, displaying masterpieces by Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, René Magritte, Alberto Giacometti and Joan Miró. It is also the highlight of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s 50th birthday celebrations, and indeed expresses a mood of wonderment and celebration, featuring works such as Picasso’s Lee Miller (1937), and Edward Wadsworths’ Pendant (1942).
Close Examination: Fakes, Mistakes and Discoveries A great deal turns upon the evaluation of the authenticity and provenance of an art work. In today’s inflated art market, it can mean the difference of several millions of pounds, making a highly valued work worthless, or vice-versa. It can have profound consequences for collectors, especially professional gallery and museum staff responsible for institutional purchases. New or rejected attributions can also transform our perception of cultural history.
The idea of the small habitable space has long fascinated architects. As long ago as 1972 Joseph Rykwert had written a scholarly, in-depth historical study of The Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural History. Much later in 1972, Nold Egenter developed a research series on architectural anthropology which drew new paths for architects from his own discipline, but not unaided by Rykwert’s work. Now running through Curator Abraham Thomas’s catalogue Introduction one also finds clear reference to the highly relevant work of Juhani Pallasmaa.
Fiona Banner: Harrier and Jaguar Fiona Banner’s new work brings to mind a certain now legendary but relevant painting. When James Rosenquist exhibited his painting F111 (1965) at the Leo Castelli Gallery that year, and then at the Jewish Museum in New York, it was set to become an iconic piece of the art of the so-called New Realism of that time.
Bones and blood. Feathers and shells. Insects and animals. Plants and flowers. It is not possible to pinpoint precisely when these and other remnants of life first appeared in art. Like the human need to create, it seems that organic materials have always been a source of inspiration and materials for artists, priests, shamans and alchemists. In some cultures, once-living materials are still used as ritual items, talismans, fetishes and conduits for transformation.
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