Test Lab this evening at V2 in Rotterdam, with demonstrations of 4 projects from artists who’ve been working there over the summer. I’m interested to see how the mix between demonstration/exhibition/talk format works. The Lab will be streamed live on V2 website, if it’s a good stream I definitely recommend watching as I suspect the projects will be both progressive and antagonistic. Review to follow!
Via Department 21, (An experimental interdisciplinary workspace at the Royal College of Art), we’ve come across this intriguing one-day free conference on Art School Alternatives, co-ordinated by Derek Horton, and taking place at Liverpool John Moores University on the 7th October. It may be that I’m just pro-actively looking for these things, but between this, the parallel school and the ‘educational turn‘ currently being debated, there seems to be a groundswell of interesting activities around informal, augmented, and creative educational experiences.
Image: Another Shadow Fight — David Osbaldeston (2008).
Digital prints in Vorticist mannerism originated from woodcuts based on
Sidney Noland’s Ned Kelly series (1946-7). Newspaper kiosk design by Herbert Bayer, 1924 (unrealised). Variable dimensions. 3rd installation
If you’re in Edinburgh or the general Scottish environs on monday ‘Investigating Premodern Futures’™ : 9th August 2010 will investigate the following questions:
Is Edinburgh a ghost city? What future awaits its ‘new‘ quarters (Quartermile, Fountainbridge, Edinburgh Waterfront) areas that have no past and that are yet to be occupied? What fate awaits older buildings that have fallen empty? An Unco Site! is focused on the way in which a fantastic neomedieval ‘history’ is routinely injected into Edinburgh’s Old Town (e.g. Auld Jock’s Pie Shoppe, Frankenstein’s, Armstrongs, etc.) Is there a space for the ‘new’ in Edinburgh? As the future shuts down does the past become all that’s left to sell? ‘Zombie capitalism’ and hauntology are key themes that our panel of experts will explore here.
Part of the ongoing works of the Confraternity of Neoflagellants.
If you’re in Glasgow over the summer, you might be interested in Futureproof at Streetlevel. It’d also be worth taking in Fields, Factories and Workshops by Simon Yuill at the CCA and other venues. Lucy Duncombe (grad vis com 2010) will be performing as part of a sound/music event on the 16th September, alongside a whole range of interesting discussions, film showings and other cultural and political events. In a slightly tangentially linked article (space, politics, sustainability, urbanism etc), other vis com person Alec Farmer and his ‘Nomadic Redux‘ were featured recently in treehugger.
Project produced by Rotterdam company V2, where Herman Asselbergh dismantles a brand new MacBook Pro piece by piece. Although the online video is only a clip right now, the still image makes me very exited to see the finished autopsy. Asselberghs comments on the contradiction between how often we see laptops in artworks and the ubiquity of them in our lives.
This post by Michalis Pichler, asks some interesting questions of appropriation. Courtesy of the very nice Donlon Books.
“If One Thing Matters, Everything Matters had a catalogue designed by Tillmans, which took the form of a chronological archive of more than 2,400 pictures, all reproduced at 6cm x 4cm, including most of those he had published or exhibited and a lot more that he said were important to him, starting with those he had made of the moon at the age of 10, by putting the camera against the eye of his telescope. In their profusion, they fostered the impression that Tillmans was bent on collecting every picture he’d ever taken. His intention, he explains now, was not that at all. “I don’t mean it as everything is the same, but that everything has the potential to be something, and that one should not close one’s eyes, just because we have preformed ideas about a value system – this is higher, this is lower. One shouldn’t use it in reverse, as ‘anything goes’.”
via Wolfgang Tillmans: the lightness of being | Art and design | The Guardian .
A couple of great links sent over by Sarah Tripp. Firstly the video above which provides some very interesting (and entertaining) ideas to digest. Meanwhile, this article in Frieze magazine looks at relationships between conceptual art and the design of experiences. Though I have some reservations about the connections being made in this article, (and the arguments being drawn from them), both the video and article are interesting at a time when the less informed are throwing the word ‘conceptual’ around with a lack of thought in assessments of various different design courses and degree shows, as the thin end of a thick wedge for needlessly polarising ‘ideas’ from the execution.
Definitely head over to the Glue Factory for MFA degree show, some great work in an unusual venue (which I gather wasn’t their original choice but there is some comments about that on their blog.) I haven’t been to the CCA yet for the other part but I’m interested to see the difference in the work between venues. I particularly liked Emily Donnini’s sound installation which had me walking round in circles to the amusement of the invigilator.
Anyway, second and hopefully less shallow post to follow…
Happening in Glasgow, Poster Club are a multi-disciplinary group interested in the form of the poster, and art, design, illustration and graphics.
GSA’s second most prolific bloggers have launched a great new blog with the distinct theme of the Treasures of GSA Library, to highlight the special and rare book collections.
Jim Naughten’s Re-Enactors is a personal project capturing a series of portraits of military re-enactors and their battles. Colour plays a big part in portraying the portraits as echos of the original events in time. It plays off his own childhood re-enactment with plastic toy soldiers.
You can view a series of spreads from the book here.
BBC 4 Produced an excellent documentary on the Political Satire maps of Fred Rose here.
Glasgow based creative agency small-media-large are hosting space made live – a visual artists take over of a Category A listed building as part of the West End Festival.
A call for submissions is currently underway. If you are interested in exhibiting and would like to know more about the project, visit http://www.small-media-large.com/space-made-live.
Streetland is a weekend of art events situated in Govanhill, happening 30th April through to Sun 2nd May, alongside many other ‘closing’ events for Glasgow International Art Festival. This set of events is entirely community organised and operating on a shoe-string, and organisers are looking for anyone interested in photographically documenting the events to get in touch. You can do that by emailing email.tomwarren[at]googlemail.com
If you’re interested in Networked/Digital design, art or architecture, sign up to this group for no apparent reason. Something interesting may come of it in the future.
Why the Art School needs (or should want) a formulaic approach to its visual identity is a puzzle to me, but this image above by (i think) Martin Boyce for a pre-brand-guidelines pre-’segment’ degree show invitation made me think that maybe he saw what was coming. This image is from GSA Flickr Archive.
Martin Boyce is very interesting as one of many contemporary artists using and referencing text and typography. More on that here. A separate, more detailed blog post on this topic to follow, sometime in the next 7 years.
Happy Birthday to Ronald Searle illustrator!
Note-to-self (2): remember to watch Arena: Brian Eno
A couple of interesting stories in the Guardian recently, regarding freedom to take images, and seemingly paint, in the public realm:
“I told them, I’m hardly a terrorist, I’m watercolouring. One policeman said, you’re not painting the airport, are you? I told him I was painting the sugar factory. He said no one paints factories. I told him Lowry painted loads of factories and made a mint. He got a bit touchy then.”
The Magazine Ning
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