Tree, by Simon Heijdens, is projected onto several facades in the city, including dark corners and alleys. The main location has a 3x8 meter drawing of a tree projected onto the facade of a building. The branches and leaves move slightly, with an intensity that depends on actual wind gusts.(Found here)
With our present-day awareness, the arts as we have known them up to now appear to us in general to be fakes fitted out with a tremendous affectation. Let us take leave of these piles of counterfeit objects on the altars, in the palaces, in the salons and the antique shops.
They are an illusion with which, by human hand and by way of fraud, materials such as paint, pieces of cloth, metals, clay or marble are loaded with false significance, so that, instead of just presenting their own material self, they take on the appearance of something else. Under the cloak of an intellectual aim, the materials have been completely murdered and can no longer speak to us.
Lock these corpses into their tombs. Gutai art does not change the material: it brings it to life. Gutai art does not falsify the material. In Gutai art the human spirit and the material reach out their hands to each other, even though they are otherwise opposed to each other. The material is not absorbed by the spirit. The spirit does not force the material into submission. If one leaves the material as it is, presenting it just as material, then it starts to tell us something and speaks with a mighty voice.
Other works which deserve mention are those of Yasuo Sumi produced with a concrete mixer or of Toshio Yoshida, who uses only one single lump of paint. All their actions are full of a new intellectual energy which demands respect and recognition.
RoseLee Goldberg, Founding Director of PERFORMA, has announced programming plans for PERFORMA05, the first biennial of new visual art performance in New York City.It's interesting to note the term they use is "new visual art performance" - at last starting to clean up the conceptual mess the word "performance" has been creating.
We have perhaps more need of great men without works than great works for which such a heavy price has to be paid in terms of human souls. But at present we barely understand what a great man without works might be.This raises several interesting questions. For one, how good is a good work of art? Is it enough for an artist to make good/pretty art (does it even help?)? Or is art more of a personal fancy, an entertainment? And does aspiring to more make sense? Are the people educated on Mozart and Shakespeare, on Bacon and John Cage, better people? Or is the talk about educating through art, or even evolving thanks to it, pure bluff of those who simply enjoy being the elite? Nietzsche seems to be saying that one can do better than art. So here is my question: can an artist do better than art?
The performance is translated into pictures - and what we have is actually archive footage. This is a very interesting phenomenon in live art - the "live" part becomes ambiguous. But not put into question, only blurred. We need the conscience of it being, or having been something real. Once we have it, it can very well be represented by a picture, a film, a text or a fingernail. Because through this footage we get to travel in another way. Maybe it's a little like the fascination for biographies?
site-specific dance is of one place and no other. Without the site, the dance ceases to exist. “To move the site-specific work is to re-place it, to make it something else,” writes Nick Kaye in Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation, echoing visual artist Richard Serra’s definition of site-specific: “To move the work is to destroy the work.”This definition is a challenge to an artist. I would dare say that even Richard Serra himself wasn't always up to it: some of his works seem simply placed somewhere and not made out of somewhere. Then again, nobody says site-specific is better. Still, it can be a new way of looking at things, from the ground up. And here is the thing: if you know it, and you're honest with it, it might just work. But it's very easy to misunderstand the names, to misuse them, to create a light version. To choose a shortcut. And then the works seem like decoration, like ornaments. And then I so often wish the work had been kept in a room, black, white, or of any other color.
Both pictures are of the exhibition How Are You Today?, by Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset (2002, Galleria Massimo de Carlo, Milano)
The noblest in art is the nude. This truth is recognized by all, and followed by painters, sculptors and poets; only the dancer has forgotten it, who should most remember it, as the instrument of her art is the human body itself.
- Isadora Duncan (1878-1927), The Dancer of the Future (1928, written ca.1902)
Julita Wójcik, Peeling Potatoes (Zachęta Polish National Gallery, 2001)I think now is a good time in art for women, and for folklore. What is being underlined are small, intimate human gatherings. A niche culture appeared, created for a very small group of viewers, almost for oneself. I mean internet galleries and the possibility for anyone to create his own page.Oh, if you follow the link in her name, I think you will agree with me that it is very far from a "full naturalism" or, even more, "realism" (and she doesn't want us to reflect on it? pl-lease!). It is a type of visual poetics we can find in the Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos, playing with the traditional, the simple, the everyday, and giving it new meanings, "elevating it" to the statute of high art - or rather, as I imagine Wójcik would prefer, elevating the so-called "high-art" to the level of true human, intimate creation.
(...) But you leave this niche.
I am a simple girl and feel no need to pretend, to pose as someone else. Making art I'm not doing anything different than any person on any given day. I don't want the spectators to reflect on anything for even a second: it is all already given [literally: "served" - Vvoi]. The more realism, the better. A full naturalism, that's the way I am, simply Julita Wójcik.
And that, my dear friends, is why I like Peeling Potatoes.
I know, I know this is too easy. But somebody had to do it. And I shouldn't be always so damn serious.
There is something immensely attractive about chaos. Participating in it, even witnessing it, enchants, makes it difficult to resist, as if it - made sense? All the Pollocks of the art world know it - their chaos makes sense, it is no chaos, it has a structure, a fine combination of hazards and traps that guide you into something, and thus out of chaos?
Roadsworth was arrested for over 80 counts of mischief and is now facing up to $250,000 in fines for his street liberations.The CitizenShift site has the whole story with pictures, films, and some text. For the street-art curious, there is a decent links page. The site seems to defend Roadsworth, as do Wooster Collective. I would defend some of his work, but there seem to be several works which as a driver (or pedestrian) I would simply find dangerous. They go beyond a subtle intervention (as is the case on the first picture you see) and change the street signs quite drastically. And that, my friends, seems like a naughty thing to do. Especially, since Roadsworth really doesn't seem to have anything against the fact that Montreal has street signs to direct the traffic. And if he doesn't, why subvert it? Unwilling sabotage?
Peter Greenaway, the Welsh author of such films as Pillow Book and The Draughtman's Contract, who is also a multimedia artist, working in media from projections to complex installations/performances to sculptures to painting, has recently participated as Video Jockey in Amsterdam's VJ Temple 11.
This wheelchair is made of cardboard. It was made by Chris Gilmore. When I first saw it, I thought it was brilliant, extremely powerful. The object of fragility, but which at the same time to many people signifies strength, and ability, here is useless, and (therefore?) meaningful. It is a simulacrum, an image of itself, a fake that is the thing itself - as a disabled person may seem (often to himself) the other version of himself. The perfection of the work makes it all the deeper, all the more painful.
Juan de la Mora is a Chicago-born Mexican-American artist living in Madrid. His background is in architecture, but his true passion seems to be stencil art. His works are precise games of colors and forms, often introduced in "low-profile" street contexts. While it is clear de la Mora spent a substantial amount of time experimenting with graffiti on the streets, it is no less clear that in his recent works he takes it to another level, creating multi-layered works with autoCAD (architectural software) and specialized cutting-plotting machines. The exhibition I saw in Montemor-o-Velho (here in Portugal) had two distinct parts. One was the manipulation of the word manipulation, starting with a line and then turning it into a wor(l)d that could be inhabited, though remaining ambiguous, something between a room, a house, an abstract form, very much in the modernist spirit. The other (partially shown here) was a grungy, funky yet surprizingly clean way of playing with stencil forms, using the theme of a gorrilla to create dense, powerful imagery. The two parts might seem completely different, until you meet the man - and discover his passion for art, architecture, street creation, freedom, traveling, and... cooking. His dream - to have a restaurant were everything would be de la Mora design. From the space, through colors, smells and tastes. Now that's a new way of understanding Gesamtkunstwerk!
Look 
in a teddy?
didn't make me laugh (though some might find the beginning amuzing thanks to the subtly stylized persona of Rose). Once you get it, it's really quite creepy. What I found interesting was that the whole thing would be rather weak - if it weren't presented by this character, which seems from a completely different story. And that's what gives the show its credibility. It's as if the old lady made it easier to swallow something so bitter we are usually tempted to refuse it as a "performance", or even as a direct social commentary.
