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A blog for artists and lovers of the arts from around the world, featuring discussions, appreciation and commentary on visual art, performance art and art-film.

World Art - September 2006

Key Thinkers: Jesus

September 30th 2006 23:55
A secular treatment of Jesus that one would not readilycome across if sitting in a pew (in any denomination). Some of it Iliked, some of it was very hard to follow - I thought parts needed to bestructured better (like a better introduction, or simply Aintroduction).

Anyway, the lecture was podcasted. Its about 1 hour. Question time is good too and highlighted perhaps some of the pitfalls in the speaker's structure where he could have anticipated his audiences' concerns/expectations a bit better/more.

See it online here.



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"Call for Artists: Treasure Postcards Arts Contest"

September 30th 2006 23:46
Treasure Postcards Arts Project (Contest and Exhibition) aims to emphasize the role of arts in economic development and highlight the significance of preserving and protecting humankind's major cultural heritage sites and artistic creations.

Deadline for participating in the arts project is October 25, 2006. Interested amateur and professional artists from across the globe are invited to share their visual voices, and creative perspectives on arts' role in economic development and cultural preservation as well as arts added value in poverty reduction and social empowerment.

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Posted By: sam - Category: Exhibitions & Performances
   


E! Channel's 'Girls of the Playboy Mansion': Kendra Wilkinson

September 29th 2006 23:44
She's by far the hottest, funniest and cutest of Hef's three girlfriends. Can anyone argue with that?

Kendra Wilkinson
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SKIN: an exhibtion at the Pierre Menard Gallery

September 28th 2006 23:42
The Pierre Menard Gallery, Cambridge, USA is currently showing 'SKIN', an exhibition curated by Heide Hatry.In this group show Hatry brings together work by seven emerging artists from the United States, South America and Europe, aligning certain practices and tendencies relating to an unusual and controversial art material.

Skin has become the medium in which a small but thoughtful and obsessed subculture of artists has fashioned an expanding body of work in which fundamental existential and aesthetic questions are addressed, sometimes subtly, sometimes with all the force and immediacy to which the medium gives them access.
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Posted By: sam - Category: Exhibitions & Performances
   


Mr Olympia Ronnie Coleman on Australian tour!!

September 26th 2006 23:44
Apparently "the bodybuilding bug bit Steve Stanley after he watched the movie "Pumping Iron" as an impressionable fifth grader back in 1976. Coupled with the debut of "The Incredible Hulk" TV show a few years later, it sparked a desire in Steve to study and draw human anatomy -- although at the time it was mostly 'pea green' anatomy".

It's certainly not my cup of tea - kitsch as hell don't you think. But then part of my kinda likes this stuff and that scares me.
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Posted By: sam - Category: Popular culture
   


Hayao Miyazaki: Anime director.

September 26th 2006 03:05
I recently watched the anime film 'Spirited Away' and was struck by its originality and innocent vitality. I've never been much of an anime fan but after seeing the film I was moved to find out a bit more about the film's director

Hayao Miyazaki born January 5, 1941 in Tokyo directed the critically acclaimed 'Spirited Away' and is has been a director of Japanese animated films for over thirty years. He is a co-founder of Studio Ghibli.
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Mummified dog provokes local outcry

September 22nd 2006 22:58
Here's a weird one for you.The mummified body of a small dog, lying on a magnificent 18th century embroidered bedspread, has unleashed a torrent of emotion at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester. There have been complaints to the trustees and to the local council.

Regular visitors to the gallery are well used to its eclectic mixture of contemporary and conceptual art, antique furniture and paintings, in period rooms.
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Posted By: sam - Category: Exhibitions & Performances
   


CAFÉ CULTURE: Art & Society in Early 20th Century Austria and Germany

September 21st 2006 23:52
A really cute exhibition is opening this Autumn season in New York at the Galerie St. Etienne opens the with an exhibition exploring the impact of the café on the development of the visual arts in fin-de-siècle Austria and Weimar-era Germany. It's a social development that I've never really thought about, but I'd be very interested to know what effect the exhibition suggests that cafe culture had during this period.

CAFÉ CULTURE: Art & Society in Early 20th Century Austria and Germany, scheduled to run from September 19 though to November 25, will feature artifacts relating specifically to cafés (such as furniture, posters and artists’ depictions of the café and cabaret milieu), as well as works more loosely documenting the creative interchanges that this institution inspired. Among the artists to be included are Max Beckmann, George Grosz, Erich Heckel, Josef Hoffmann, E.L. Kirchner, Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka, Adolf Loos, Jeanne Mammen, Emil Nolde, Hermann Max Pechstein, Christian Schad, Egon Schiele and Bruno Voigt
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Posted By: sam - Category: Exhibitions & Performances
   


M.C Escher: Impossible Scenes

September 20th 2006 23:53
Maurits Cornelis (M.C.) Escher was born on June 17, 1898, in the province of Friesland, Holland. He took up art in 1919, and became famous in the 1940s and 1950s for his novel tesselations of the plane and realistic depictions of impossible scenes and infinite vistas. He lived all of his life in Europe, and died in Hilversum, Holland in 1972.

Escher's first print of an impossible reality was Still Life with Street, 1936. His artistic expression was created from images in his mind, rather than directly from observations and travels to other countries. Well known examples of his work also include Drawing Hands, a work in which two hands are shown, each drawing the other; Sky and Water, in which light plays on shadow to morph fish in water into birds in the sky; Ascending and Descending, in which lines of people ascend and descend stairs in an infinite loop, on a construction which is impossible to build and possible to draw only by taking advantage of quirks of perception and perspective.
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Posted By: sam - Category: Art reviews
   


Elmore Leonard: 'The Complete Western Stories'

September 19th 2006 22:51
Heads up to all western fans. I'm reading a really great book at the moment that's just been released by a subsidiary of Penguin and which will surely whet the appetite of those who love to read tales about the Old West. It's a compilation of Elmore Leonard's western stories called predictably 'The Complete Western Stories'.

The book's structured chronologically so that it starts with the first piece that Leonard got published in 1952 'Trail of The Apache' and finishes with the last western story that he wrote before turning to the the crime genre. For those who love the genre and would like to read a true master of it I highly recommend this book. Also, for those who are new to the genre or enjoy reading short stories there is no better linguistic or narrative craftsman than Leonard. The book is available to purchase here.
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Posted By: sam - Category: Art reviews
   


'Shiny': A new exhibition at the Wexner Center for the Arts

September 18th 2006 23:38
At the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, USA. The exuberant exhibition Shiny, featuring 13 (literally) shiny works by nine artists, opens this Autumn at the Wexner Center. Shiny offers a playful and insightful look at the culture’s love of luxury, love of spectacle, and, of course, love of shiny things.

Organized by the Wexner Center, it will be on view September 16–December 31, 2006.Showcasing the work of mostly younger artists from the U.S. and Europe working in a variety of media, Shiny features pieces with reflective, shiny, mirrored, sparkly surfaces, many of them produced in the last five years. Some of the work is made of metal and mirrors, offering the viewers twisted and contorted glimpses of themselves and the galleries.
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Posted By: sam - Category: Exhibitions & Performances
   


'Material Girls' is a silly disappointment

September 17th 2006 23:27
I'm a huge Hilary Duff fan. I ove the girl's look, music and usually her movies. I have to say though I was pretty underwhelmed by Hilary's latest offering 'Material Girls' in which she stars alongside her real life sister Haylie.

Here's the basic plotline: The Marchetta sisters Ava (Haylie Duff) and Tanzie (Hilary Duff) live the good life. They are heiresses to one of the most successful cosmetics companies, which since their father's death is run by their uncle Tommy Katzenbach (Brent Spiner). All they have to do is make an appearance here and there. After a television exposé about the company's night cream causing scarring and disfigurement, the girls' credit cards are frozen and cosmetics queen rival Fabielle (Angelica Huston) makes a take-over bid for the company. In a bid to clear the company name, Ava and Tanzie investigate the matter with the help of a legal aid worker (Lukas Haas) and Marchetta company chemist (Marcus Coloma).
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Posted By: sam - Category: Film reviews
   


Art Legends: Rembrandt

September 13th 2006 23:57
Today's featured artist biography: Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (July 15, 1606 or 1607– October 4, 1669). A visual artist who is generally considered one of the greatest painters in European art history and the most important in Dutch history. Rembrandt was also a proficient printmaker and made many drawings. His contributions to art came in a period that historians call the Dutch Golden Age (roughly coinciding with the seventeenth century), in which Dutch world power, political influence, science, commerce, and culture — particularly painting — reached their pinnacle.

It is importamt to remember that for most modern observers Rembrandt's art has attained a kind of universal familiarity and popularity. Yet the biblical scenes and the self-portraits that today form the hallmark of his art were by no means typical of Dutch pictures of the 17th century; more commonly, his contemporaries produced landscapes, still lifes, or genre scenes of daily life that never held great interest for Rembrandt. In his own era Rembrandt achieved greatest fame as the most fashionable portrait painter of Amsterdam during the 1630s, but he was eventually eclipsed even during his own lifetime by younger rivals, including some of his own students. Another major field of accomplishment lay in the medium of etching. Rembrandt commanded high prices for his prints even during his lifetime, and his technical mastery had a lasting effect on printmakers for centuries.
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Posted By: sam - Category: Artist profiles
   


Jean Baudrillard and 9/11: 'The Spirit of Terrorism'

September 12th 2006 23:23
In the wake of the 9/11 five year anniversary I've been wondering once again what motivated the attacks. Conventionally, Islamic extremism is blamed, that is, the cause for the attack is found in competing and contrasting ideologies, Islamic religiosity versus Western capitalism. However, an interesting and unconventional account that I've come across recently provides a very different explanation. It's complex and I don't fully understand it yet but here's the best summation I've got presently.

In Jean Baudrillard's essay 'The Spirit of Terrorism' he characterises the attacks on the World Trade Centre as the 'absolute event.' He sought to understand them in terms of an (ab)reaction to the techno-political expansion of globalization, rather than in terms of a religious or civilization-based conflict. He termed the event and its consequences as follows (p. 11 in the 2002 version):
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Michele Zalopany racism and economics collide in art

September 12th 2006 01:15
With September 11 just behind us I thought I'd focus on American Art over the next couple of days. Here's an interesting exhibition out of the US currently showing - 'the first solo show at Esso Gallery by American artist Michele Zalopany'.

An artist that I've folowed for a while Michele Zalopany is hell cool. Through her labor intensive pastel paintings, Michele Zalopany speaks of mysterious objects as a keen observer of the seemingly irresolvable problematic of the racial divide. Born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, she bears witness to the disintegration of what was once the fulcrum of the American economy, as a result of the historic dilemma of institutional racism. Art has a strong, silent power of creating images that subvert the institutional language and each of Michele Zalopany's paintings add a new part to her grammar to make sense of the world.
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Posted By: sam - Category: Exhibitions & Performances
   


Andalusian International Artists: Fuengirola Showcase

September 7th 2006 23:57
For international visitors - here's an exhibition that caught my eye coming out of Spain. Andalusian International Artists Group, consisting of 18 artists from 9 countries showcase their work at the La Plaza Cafe and Gallery, Fuengirola, between 1st to 30th September. This is the AIA groups inaugural exhibition at this prestigious location.The gallery will display 50 works and is located in Constitution Square. Roger Cummiskey, chairman of the AIA is reported to have said "I am excited to have had the opportunity to include the works of such diverse artists in a vibrant and prominent location".

Word is that there's a compelling range of media, themes, figuration and abstraction, many with Spanish influences, which will be boldly presented .
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Posted By: sam - Category: Exhibitions & Performances
   


Taradise: Tara Reid's image disappears from E!

September 6th 2006 23:34
Look, I have to confess, I really like Taradise, the E! Wild On spin off hosted by Hollywood bette noir Tara Reid. Basically the show goes like this: Tara Reid, notorious party girl, is let loose in europe. The audience watches as she parties at various exclusive locales totally trashed, and occasionally Tara gets most of her kit off for a raunchy photo shoot.

It's not highbrow entertainment by any stretch of the imagination but then the last time I checked you didn't tune in to E! for opera and interpretive dance. The show has everything you could want from an E! program: exotic locations, the 'reality' element, celebrities, near nakedness. So it confuses me that the show's been cancelled and that there's so much Tara Reid hatred out there when the show's brought up.
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Solo-Exhibition with New Works by Zeng Fanzhi

September 5th 2006 23:31
China is booming economically at the moment, that's well known. What's less publiclyknown is that there's also a cultural boom happening, centred around the Chinese capital Shanghai. A prominent artist in what's coming to be termed the 'Shanghai Renaissance' is Zeng Fanzhi (b. 1964).

'ART Gallery & H-Space'in Shanghai is currently presenting a solo-exhibition with new works by Zeng Fanzhi. According to sources close to the gallery this new work "delivers an art that feels new, not in its premises, but in its intense, yet refined vitality, and constant renewal."
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Posted By: sam - Category: Exhibitions & Performances
   


Farewell to Steve Irwin

September 4th 2006 23:56
I know this is totally outside the scope of this blog but I just wanted to acknowledge what a great guy Steve Irwin, aka the Croc Hunter, was. For those who haven't already heard the sad news Steve was killed yesterday filming an upcoming movie when he was pierced through the heart by the barb of a giant stingray.

Primarily I will remember Steve Irwin as an incredible nature conservationist. His love and passion for the natural environment was unparalleled, absolutely first rate. He showed the public that crocodiles, snakes and other 'dangerous' animals were not to be feared but ought to be admired and respected.
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Posted By: sam - Category: Miscellany
   


Adri A.C. de Fluiter: A Retrospective

September 1st 2006 00:06
In the 2005, it was 25 years ago that visual artist Adri A.C. de Fluiter began his career as a professional visual artist. On that that time he was already 40 years old and graduated from the Royal Academy of Art at ‘’s Hertogenbosch (NL). From the beginning there was a lot of interest in his work. He started with sacklike, soft forms lined up in the environment. Monumental site specific projects, for example in Amsterdam (NL), Paris (F) and Germany. Until 1985 the works were only monumental with sometimes sketches and drawings, but from that year on there appears also smaller objects. Also at that time the sacks changed ito ‘wrapping sculpture’. The fabric used for the sacks was used in stripes to enwrape it around skeletons made out of wood and steel. A method which made it possible to make large scale site specific projects with not to much technical assistance. This wrapping monuments took also international interest and from that time on De Fluiter worked in several countries and on several continents. Europe, USA, Japan, Corea etc
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