7 posts tagged “art”

Books, movies films, music; what's in your top 5 right now?

Oh, I'm crap at all-time best-ofs, so I'll just list some good things I've read, heard and seen in the past week:

Books:

1. The Slaves Of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton is a really absorbing novel. It's a portrait of a wartime English petit bourgeois boarding house, but I'm only halfway through, and suspect it's turning into a mildly hamfisted allegory of WWII (the nasty-yet-charming German woman and dim, unpunctual American 'lootennant' are the giveaway characters).


2. The Recording Angel: Explorations In Phonography by Evan Eisenberg is a good-ish read, but in his exploration of the philosophical implications of listening to recorded music, Eisenberg relies too much (for me) on classical and jazz examples, which sometimes makes it hard to grasp his points, which are loose enough to begin with. Anyone who can mention Marx, Glenn Gould, Plato and the wee dog from the HMV logo in one semi-colon strewn sentence is fine by me, though. Nice character sketches of record collectors and music-listeners, too.


3. One Place After Another: Site Specific Art And Locational Identity by Miwon Kwon is something I'm reading for work, because I've never known enough about the history of this kind of work, and obviously it's something that crops up fairly often. I'm getting a headache from raising my eyebrows at the artspeak, but still interesting.

1. Brick is a right giggle - American high school melodrama filtered through noir. Amazing dialogue. And the boy from Third Rock From The Sun has growed up to be a fantastic actor.
2. I also saw a great South Korean film, which was batshit insane. Ran from hilarious lesbian prison slapstick to really grisly paedophile revenge drama (like, footage of bound toddlers screaming for their mothers), with a brief stopover in Australia, and a recurring tofu-eating motif. Will find out the name of it in the morning.

Music:

1. Folk Songs And Instrumental Music Of The Southern Mountains is a sweet 5 LP box set I picked up the other week - '50s recordings of jug bands, storytelling and folk songs, all but one previously unrecorded. Weirdly excellent sound quality.
2. And I'm still loving the RRR Records California and New England sets -  not exactly easy listening, but at times they have more in common with the mountain folk stuff than you might expect (Amps For Christ could probably do a gig with Miss Margaret Purcell of Albermarle County, Virginia. If she weren't dead.)

And, even though you philistines didn't ask about the art: Mark Raidpere, an Estonian video artist, is showing at Tramway at the moment. Bloody great. (800 words in the Herald tomorrow, should anyone Scottish be reading. Distressingly the third thing I've given 4 stars to in the last three weeks. Note to self: see something shit soon.)

I love the warning given below work shown on Artfacts.net: Please be aware that the images can be assigned wrongly!

Good to know, on a website whose raison d'etre is to document work by artists.

An interesting method of evaluating work:

Art-O-Meter is a device that measures the quality of an art piece. It bases its evaluation on the amount of time that people spend in front of an artwork compared to the total time of exhibition. The measurements are graphically represented by comments and a 5 star rating system.

Two decent group shows, these. Thread is concerned with ideas around a work's place in its immediate environment, and the effect a work has on the space around it. All art has an effect on the space around it, obviously, but most of the artists gathered here do so explicitly.

Whatever Was In Your Head, by Smith/Stewart, Thread at Ingleby Gallery #2

Smith/Stewart's 'cardboard projection' is great - you can barely squeeze past it to get into the back room at Ingleby, and it has a lovely probing, beaky way about it.

Ninth Cu Prime, by Carl Andre, Thread at Ingleby Gallery

The Carl Andre pieces here work the other way around (you could be forgiven for missing them entirely). Something very interesting happens to Andre's work in this domestic space, too: you'd expect their impact to be lessened outside the usual austere white cube, but its actually heightened, because of a sort of tug of war between the arch minimalism of the pieces and their surroundings, so that the delineation of space and consideration of materials in the work ends up being emphasised. In other words, minimal work is more at home (pun intended) here.

Everybody Comes To Holyrood is... not so good, but still worth a look. There's a nice mix of established and emerging artists (or, at least, artists who aren't well known in the UK), but the supposed focus on our relationship with mass media, ideas of fame and glamour &c., is too loose. Dutch artist Risk Hazekamp does a sort of feminised take on the iconography of Richard Prince - ie. photos of slightly dykey women in denims in the desert - and Martin C. de Waal's hyperglam shot of grave models in eighteez make-up against a city skyline is funny (as in, 'Derek Zoolander would find it a bit much' funnny). But he signals a descent into unthinking meta-camp, or post-camp - reproducing tropes rather than examining them (eek, does that make it double-camp). Jonny Woo & Peter Podworski's Wizard of Oz documents a performance in which a drag Dorothy with a broken arm and bandaged face miming Somewhere Over The Rainbow in front of projected stills of bombed-out cityscapes, while a femme fatale Wicked Witch rides a bomb in the background. Fabulous, yeah? But are they just aping 80s queer performance or saying something about it? The former.

Purry Furry Version 2 by Jemima & Dolly Brown, Attic Salt

Jemima Brown's stuff is better - the louche kitty-man is wonderfully mucky, and you can just imagine Kenneth Anger's perv-suicide write-up in some alternate reality Hollywood Babylon.

Give Me Your Blacklisted by Jemima Brown, Attic Salt

But when you look at the wallpaper above, again you have to wonder if this is naive teenage outrage, or art about naive teenage outrage. (I'll give her the benefit of the doubt).

I dunno, I guess it all just reeks of some warehouse in Mitte or whichever corner of the East End is currently en vogue, which puts me off.

Here's my review of the Robert Mapplethorpe show at SNGOMA, from yesterday's Herald:

The first photograph you see in the Gallery of Modern Art's survey of the work of Robert Mapplethorpe shows a little girl in pigtails, clutching her toy bunny rabbit. It is not what most visitors will expect, and serves as a statement of intent: this is a show that seeks to puncture the image of Mapplethorpe in the popular imagination.

There are some of the photographers more notorious works here, but the focus is firmly on his formalism, classicism and compositional eye. His portraits of one-time partner Patti Smith are a case in point. On the one hand, they are a record of Smith's beauty, on the other, each is an exercise in the arrangement of the human body against the geometry of the room around it. And Mapplethorpe goes further in his photographs of men, homing in on body parts, presenting them as forms - an architectural arch made of feet, two arms clasped around a white block - working with light more than he works with people.

Most of all, though, this is a show devoted to Mapplethorpe as portrait photographer, and on the evidence here, he took two kinds of portrait.

First, he was a sensitive collaborator, allowing his subjects to project themeslves, and, more importantly, the image of themselves they wished to show. Keith Haring, balding and bespectacled, plays the consumate geek, but his arched eyebrows reveal his savvy status. Lawrence Weiner, the conceptualist who replaced his work with instructions on how it might be made, is cast as a revolutionary thinking aloud, his beard cribbed from a bust of Marx and a star tattoo on his wrist.

Second, in a show that seeks to reposition Mapplethorpe, it is fitting that there are so many works here in which the photographer seeks to undermine his subjects. Truman Capote, photographed in 1981, has gone to seed, but oozes a quiet confidence, and is content - is this the man behind the shrill wit, or Mapplethorpe's invention? William Burroughs, usually photographed with a gun in his hand and a sneer on his face, is pensive, deep in thought, his head bowed and hands clasped. More simply, Iggy Pop is transformed from wild man of punk into a bewildered simpleton.

And then there is Warhol, who looms large over this exhibition. Mapplethorpe began their relationship as an adoring fan, and ended it in a position of mutual mistrust, to put it mildly. Here, three portraits border on the cruel. In the first, Warhol is allowed to display his usual blank expression. In the second, Warhol is exposed, his public image as asexual being mocked, his hands positioned like one of Charles Dodgson's little girls, and what looks like fear in his eyes. The last is pure parody: Warhol as a Warhol, his head floating in high-contrast space. The favour is returned, too, with the Warhol screenprint of Mapplethorpe shown here, a glib monochrome taken from a snap of the photographer looking rather kindly, in marked contrast to his self-portraits.

Talking of which, it is hard to know how serious Mapplethorpe was in presenting himself as an artworld outlaw. Playing the knife-wielding street tough, Mapplethorpe is thoroughly unconvincing. And yet, when he casts himself as Patty Hearst, gripping a machine gun, it is deadly earnest. And he pulls it off. The same goes, surprisingly, for Mapplethorpe as horned and horny devil, a bullwhip up his bum.

It is worth noting that this is one of very few images from Mapplethorpe's long investigation of the S&M scene. A portrait of Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter shows the pair trussed up in their leather finery, but seated in a prissy suburban living room. Cock And Devil shows a bound penis, captured by a trident-bearing statuette of Satan. It is a silly, painfully obvious work: Catholic Guilt For Dummies. Balance is provided by Dominic And Eliot, an upside-down crucifixion, like St. Peter's, and a 'portrait' that dehumanises its subject, reducing him to nothing but genitals and leather straps. Still, there is a sense that this show - which leaves much out, and is, tellingly, mostly drawn from a single collection - goes too far in revising Mapplethorpe's reputation.

This MetaFilter post tipped me off to the existance of the Fine Art Adoption Network, a site that lets you choose a work of art and look after it, assuming the artist likes the cut of your gib and you can afford the shipping costs.

On a whim, I signed up and had a look around - most of the work available is, without wishing to be rude, total mince. But I found a small sculpture I liked, and that fits in with the stuff I already have (I have things that involve text, diagrams and systematic marks), and I'm now in the process of having it shipped over from the US.

FAAN is definitely worth a look if you want to have some art in your house but, well, don't want to spend any money, or don't have any money to spend.