Monday, December 29, 2008

Jonathan Swain - Holed Up














Holed Up mirrors the vain attempts by high street banks to plug gaps left in their buidings by the ad hoc removal of redundant ATMs. Jonathan Swain uses current art world trends to highlight evidence of contemporary urban decay and commercial deception. The exhibition at The Grey Area in Brighton, was accompanied by a series of discussions and tours of cash machines throughout the city.















www.a-n.co.uk/artists_talking
thegrey-area.blogspot.com

Saturday, December 20, 2008

Tai Shani - Tetragrammatton's Home In The Abyss Reduced To 6













With over twenty performers and music by Guapo, Tai Shani’s fantastical and dreamlike installation, Tetragrammatton's Home in the Abyss: Reduced to 6, is a Busby Berkeley-style extravaganza exploring the glitches and folds of the universe’s multiple realities.

www.taishani.com
21st December 2008
7.30pm - 10pm
6 Burlington Gardens
Royal Academy Of Arts
London
W1S 3EX

Friday, December 19, 2008

Event Horizon - GSK Contemporary

Event Horizon - GSK Contemporary Season At The RA continues with Event Horizon, curated by Temporarycontempory, Anthony Gross and Jen Wu, a dynamic programme of new commissions by major London-based artists. Event Horizon traces a British avant-garde as sculpture transforms into social experience with new sculptural installations, and a social club infrastructure housing over 30 nights of live events.

SCULPTURE BECOMING
: Environments by Marc Camille Chaimowicz, David Medalla, Georgina Starr, Brian Griffiths, Plastique Fantastique (David Burrows and Simon O'Sullivan), temporarycontemporary.














BEYOND THE HORIZON : Installation, social events, and performance by Spartacus Chetwynd (Helmut Newton Ladies Nights), Bob & Roberta Smith with Le Suisse Marocain and Leonardo Ulian (kiosk & piano bar), Mark Titchner (artist residency acid test), Gail Pickering (convention centre), Tai Shani (tableau performance feat. Guapo), Reza Aramesh (street occupation), Alexander Hidalgo (fashion/music event), Lindsay Seers (cinema performance), Pil and Galia Kollectiv (banquet), Anthony Gross (LED eyes), Luke Oxley (shop), Adam Nankervis (performance), Paul O’Neill (General Idea films and DJ set), David Burrows and Kit Poulson (contacting angels), David Blamey and Craig Richards (sound).











LAST DRINK FOR 1000 MILES
: Live music by the Apathy Band, the Readers, the No No Band, Victor Mount, ‘Sawing off the Branch I’m Sitting on’: Selection by John Millar with Ruby Pester & Nadia Rossi, Hysteria On Film (films by Carol Morley and Richard Squires), Cara Ball Tolmie, Omnivore Demon, Let Me Feel Your Finger First, Ming Ming and the Ching Chings and Colin Miller & David James Grinly. Mark Pearson, Jason Underhill (karaoke), Evel Gazebo play Hawkwind's 'Space Ritual’. Young UK fashion show, Poker All Stars, Bistrotheque Monday Cabaret with Bourgeois & Maurice and Jonny Woo, and more...














About GSK Contemporary
31 October 2008 – 19 January 2009
This year marks the beginning of a season of contemporary art at 6 Burlington Gardens. GSK Contemporary features more than 20 art exhibitions, 40 live events and 100 film screenings.

The season sees East End restaurant Bistrotheque set up as FLASH, a temporary restaurant designed especially for GSK Contemporary. There is also a cafe and late-night art bar in an installation by temporarycontemporary.

The programme is divided into two main parts; Part 1, Molten States, explores the links between art, performance and experimental theatre. Part 2, Collision Course, reveals an apocalyptic vision, including a tribute to the artistic legacy of William Burroughs.

Also launching during the season is Event Horizon, a programme of new commissions by major London-based artists.






Event Horizon
31 Oct 2008 — 19 Jan 2009
6 Burlington Gardens
Royal Academy Of Arts
London
W1S 3EX

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Friday, December 12, 2008

Mark Waugh - Come














The ear is an open vein. Knowledge is a drug.To start the story now when batteries are so low. As the Winter closes in and the books come out.
Every horizon is obsolete.
This story would not be easier to tell if I hadn't already tampered with the text. Like a lover I worked with the words until their meaning was mined and gushed it's lubricant into fecundity. The dirt on the disk has consumed passion. Time seals the tombs of Pharoahs. The crimes of the future are taught in the past. Love is a corpse wrapped in transparent plastic.
So now you know nothing of the story that hides behind this fog in an ocean on translucent words..
So now you read the letters c-o-m-e with cruel indifference and who knows what special effects raise the machine from the dead.
So know you now both coda and tail?
Words are mnemonic equations that derail the senses as they track a world that disappears before them. In books words convey cultural traffic across invisible borders. Words are signs that lead us astray.


www.bookworks.org.uk

Friday, December 5, 2008

Tatsumi Orimoto






Punishment - When communication is wasted


DNA Gallery
Auguststraße 20
10117 Berlin
Germany
www.dna-galerie.de
29. October - 20. December 2008

DNA is proud to present for the first time in Europe Tatsumi Orimoto's Punishment. Following in the footsteps of the artist's "Communication Art", this performance also features bread as its main element. Orimoto often uses bread because of its fundamental and basic nature. However, he does not only use it as a symbol for universal communication - something to which everybody can relate - but also as an allegory for Western culture. In the occidental context bread does not only take on meaning as part of the diet of the population but also because of its symbolism in Christianity, where it represents the body par excellence.

With this background Tatsumi becomes in Breadman a sort of living sculpture, his head twined with a bundle of baguettes, who brings art to the people. Nevertheless, bread and its former mentioned function as a tool for communication take on in Punishment a more tragic nuance. Twenty-six blindfolded people, tied to a mast, are carrying a box full of bread. One after the other, each of them falls over, spilling the bread on the floor.

Tatsumi's performance may be referring to Japanese history. On the 5th of February 1597, during the Azuchi-Momoyama Period, the government crucified 26 Christian missionaries in Nagasaki. At the time, Christian missionaries, who initially had been accepted in Japan in order to restrain the influence of Buddhist monks and to consolidate commercial relationships with Europe, were perceived by Toyotomi Hideyoshi as a destabilizing force and therefore were persecuted. However, Orimoto seeks to disconnect himself from historical references in order to stress the universal and recurrent: the bread bearer, a prophet who carries a different message, is seen as a threat against the establishment and is repudiated and martyred. Thus his message spills, the box is empty, and communication fails. The message, as well as the bread, putrefies.










At the same time Punishment could also refer to Orimoto's private situation, especially to the lack of recognition his works has received in his own country, about which Tatsumi often complains. It is not new that the artist makes from his private issues a public matter. This is most evident in his project Art Mama, through which Tatsumi publicly documents the physical and mental decline of his mother, Odei, who has the Alzeimer disease and whom he takes care of since 1996. Through the bread that stays on the floor in Punishment we are witnesses from another decadence as well: the one from a wasted communication.

Tatsumi Orimoto (Kawasaki, 1946) studied at the Institute of Art, California. In 1971 he moved to New York, where he assisted Nam June Paik and was introduced to Fluxus. He returned to Kawasaki in 1977, where he currently lives and works, and takes care of his mother. His performance Breadman was shown in several countries in public as well as institutional contexts, such as the Biennales of Sydney, Sao Pablo and Venice.










A panel Discussion was held on 2nd November at the Goethe Institut Berlin The dilemma of collecting art in times of dematerialization Organized by Galerie DNA and Valeria Schwarz.

Speakers: David Elliot, artistic director of the Sydney Biennial 2010, Jan Hoet, director of MARTa Herford museum in Herford, Fumio Nanjo, director of Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, Berta Sichel director of audiovisuals at Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sophia in Madrid, Mark Waugh exective director of the A Foundation in London and Liverpool. The panel was chaired by Mark Gisbourne, who is based in Berlin and is part of the editorial board at ART.ES.

Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Monday, December 1, 2008

Mark Leckey


"With wit and originality, Leckey has found a variety of forms to communicate his fascination with visual culture."