Showing posts with label Venice Biennale. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Venice Biennale. Show all posts

Saturday, August 31, 2013

31/8/2013: WLASze Part 1: Weekend Links on Arts, Sciences and Zero Economics

This is the first WLASze: Weekend Links on Arts, Sciences and zero economics post for this weekend, so enjoy and stay tuned for more.


Random complexity arising out of the hand-drawn patterns virtually freely visually narrated by Marlene Huissoud are creating interesting, dynamic textures in these drawings and textiles:



Artist website: http://www.marlene-huissoud.com/ It is an object of utilitarian design (hence the 'shop' section of her website), but in my opinion it is an expression of art - non-conceptually driven compositional flow that explores dynamic of line and space absent a premeditated attempt at a composition.

Cy Twombly being the pioneer here, and there are indirect parallels to Lucio Fontana. In a distinct approach, the line drawings of Egon Schiele were actually figurative, hence non-random. Yet they are all united by the simple difference between human error / deviation that distinguishes them from replicative mathematical chaos and makes each line uniquely determined when it is created by a person.


Returning back to last week's theme of the Venice Biennale: some additional links relating to previous notes on the exhibition:
Russian pavilion: 


Spanish rock garden:


Retrospective of national pavilions: 



Out of the Biennale's 'rock halls' into rock sculpture project by the Next Fab Studio by Gabriel Boyce and Preston. The duo constructed a "simple, organic rock" "using digital fabrication equipment". NextFab "developed a Rhino model of the rock, which was digitally divided into sections and cut from acrylic on NextFab's laser cutter. Gabriel and Preston then assembled the 150-plus sections into the complete ROCK sculpture." Daft? Not really - rather quite striking:




An interesting story from the city that is currently assessing its art collection for sale: Detroit. Detroit's brilliant DIA (I cited its excellent collection earlier here) has digitalised its world-famous Diego Rivera murals. The story of digitalisation is here.

Digitalising works of art is a superbly challenging technical and mathematical problem, even though it seems like a relatively simple task. The most fascinating story of digitalisation of art was written up back in 2005 by the NewYorker: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/04/11/050411fa_fact. It tells the story of two applied mathematics geniuses you won't hear much about, David and Gregory Chudnovsky:

The duo have pioneered the algorithmic approach to large scale digitalisations. Humorous take on their fascination with visualising mathematics is the floor of the Chudnovskys' lab at Brooklyn Polytechnic University which bears an orbital pattern mapping of mathematical equations


What a brilliant link: from the decay of the fractal definition to the decay of the entire city and onto eternity of mathematics and art… to large scale numerical computations… from Communist Ukraine to Communist murals… See more on the two: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/3210/04-chud-06.html and at http://www.math.poly.edu/people/faculty.phtml. Oh, and the murals, of course: http://it.phaidon.com/agenda/art/articles/2013/august/08/detroit-digitizes-its-diego-rivera-murals/

Do note, Chudnovsky's worked extensively on 'pi'. I covered the visualisations of 'pi' before here.  So for some additional images: pi, fi, e, combined from the above-linked posts by Martin Krzywinski (http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/pi/art/):






Now on to science: the geeks have been armed with a HD camera and a submarine… outcome: live broadcast of an eruption of the underwater volcano. Here are the videos (H/T to ‏@alexwitze): http://www.interactiveoceans.washington.edu/story/Visions%2713+Videos. They'll be back with live stuff in 2014… smokey stuff… maybe they can roast some marshmallows on that Axial Caldera next.


In case you need a dose of laughter after all this heavy heady maths, here's some humorous take on the subject: http://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2013/08/21/five-math-experts-split-the-check/


Geeks with cameras and formulas above, followed by geeks with computer codes next: an amazing story about the Israeli army tech-intelligence unit that is behind some major ICT innovations and entrepreneurs. The story really goes to the heart of learning-by-doing models of training (via @GPIngersoll and @BI_Defense): http://www.businessinsider.com/best-tech-school-is-israels-unit-8200-2013-8. The story also highlights the non-linear nature of human capital formation. Military leadership has always been at a premium in the civilian business life, but now direct skills are also becoming marketable.

And to further illustrate the same points, here's the 'governmentorial' - a promotional site for NASA claims of contribution to civilian everyday world: http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/technologies/spinoffs.html
Est Cool… But not to get too futuristic with all of this tech: although the space age might be relatively young, our capacity innovate in relation to space is not… back in ancient Egypt, meteorites were deemed to be valuable enough to make it into jewellery:
http://scinewsblog.blogspot.ie/2013/08/ancient-egyptian-iron-beads-were-made.html


Stay tuned for more WLASze links later.

Sunday, August 25, 2013

25/8/2013: WLASze Part 2: Weekend Links on Arts, Sciences and Zero Economics


In the previous WLASze post, I promised to cover in more detail the Future Generation Art Prize 2013 at Venice Biennale. Here are some links and this year's artists.

The newsletter covering applicants and participants is here,  and you can explore all of the artists exhibited in Venice here.

An architectural/spatial geometric installation with fractal-like dynamic repetition of the subsets is somewhat clinical in nature, yet, the size and span of it do impress, as well as superbly un-natural and inorganic reduction in size...

Like extra-human on extra-terrestrial scale...


Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is a well-recognised painter and her work deserves some series consideration: "Underlife" illustrates


Although not all of it is of consistent quality (I guess this is why she is still in the 'future generation' league), as "The Edifying Oracle's Cheque, 2012 shows:


Incomplete work both compositionally and figuratively.


Jonathas de Andrade from Brazil "Nostalgia, a Class Sentiment" is an installation that merges the lego-like figurative formalism (not quite an abstraction) with text-based contextualisation. The result is rather poor attempt at making cataloguing fun...


I am not a fan of this stuff... It is neither nostalgic (being deprived of emotional content) nor sentimental (being deprived of emotive form). It might be relevant to 'class' as it speaks directly to the academists... Why on Earth would I care to put this here? Precisely because someone, somewhere on this plant thought this is a potential for the Future in art... right...


Neither am I a fan of post-Rauschenbergian collections of refuse as installation art. Rauschenberg was an indisputable master of assemblage: http://www.rauschenbergfoundation.org/ and since his works, the approach of amassing discarded objects into some sort of meaning has become a very-hard-to-execute form of art. Abigail DeVille's "Nostalgia, a Class Sentiment" just doesn't cut it:


According to curators, DeVille "creates archaeological constructs full of cultural and historical references. Her dark sculptural installations steeped in “destruction” and “decay” are a reflection on social repression, racial identity and discrimination in the ruinous decadence of the big city. With building waste and rubbish from the streets, which she incorporates as found objects and “intergenerational debris”, DeVille builds black holes and vortexes like metaphorical time warps. In the periphery of this constructed decay, or once through the vortex, we meet lost individuals, grotesque parodies of how blacks were perceived in the American past."

Blah, blah, blah... DeVille's 2012 installation, "a vortex representing street life based on Claes Oldenburg’s found object environment The Street at the Judson Gallery in New York 1960."


Sorry, folks, but Oldenburg was cool. DeVille missed the point: there is no need to 're-narrate the 1960s'. This isn't Hollywood, where routine running out of plots to produce movies on results in re-narration of old classics. Oldenburg's links: http://www.moma.org/collection/artist.php?artist_id=4397 and http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/claes-oldenburg-1713 and http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/artists/bios/689 and so forth... I just don't dig this 'connection' to De Ville - except at the most superficial...

Between - assemblage, cataloguing and objects-based installations are best exemplified by the master of the art: Ilya Kabakov (http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/ilya-kabakov). Eat your "vortex representing ...life ... based on... found object environment", DeVille:


 and your sentimental nostalgia catalogue, Jonathas de Andrade: 


Source for the latter: http://contemporaryrubbish.wordpress.com/garbage/the-garbage-man-the-man-who-never-threw-anything-away/#main for the former: http://noyspi.com/kabakov.html

Enough of stuff I don't like, here's some that actually looks good.

Mykyta Kadan from Ukraine has a classical education in art and this shows - in contrast to the majority of Western artists who often have only scant command of composition and practical experience in 'crafting' their works. Ideas are fine and necessary, but remember - art, like poetry, maths, philosophy etc is more than just ideas. it is also about execution.



"Kadan combines intellectual reflection with continuous social engagement, using his artistic practice to act in the socio-political discussions in Ukraine. With a strong historical awareness, Kadan focuses his research on the urban transition of Kyiv, a city in continuous transformation losing its historical roots and its public spaces to commercialism. Kadan works mostly in painting and sculpture, and in his use of abstraction and modelling he references the Russian avant-garde movements from the turn of the 20th century." Can't agree more. Fantastic dynamism, merged organically with pure statism, accentuated by the intensity of colours.

Saturday, August 24, 2013

24/8/2013: WLASze Part 1: Weekend Links on Arts, Sciences and Zero Economics

Due to travels, I have taken a break away from posting WLASze: Weekend Links on Arts, Sciences and zero economics last week. This is the return of my blog's regular weekly feature.

Thus, fresh from Biennale in Venice, few thoughts for the opener of this week's WLASze. Enjoy


Overwhelming sense of being underwhelmed is the best way to describe the Biennale 2013. My concern was evident from the main pavilions of Giardini on: much of this year's Biennale is banal, over-selected, non-challenging and yawn-inducing academism of post-modernist art. It is as if the two sources of artistic expression: ideas and forms, all have been mined out to hollow caverns filled with brackish polluted water and no longer capable of producing gem stones.

Perhaps the best performance art (and there was some around that pretended to be such, inclusive of two women moaning at each other in the middle of the large hall in the main hall of Giardini - I personally thought the moderately-sized crowd of art-refusnik professorial types gobbling it all up watching them was probably a better part of the performance) for the entire Biennale is the permanent installation of Venezuela pavilion next to Switzerland. What a contrast to the irony and though-free general outlook of the Biennale itself. The juxtaposition of a resources-rich self-impoverished economic blackhole of Venezuela and self-made resources-impoverished uber-rich Switzerland.



Let's go for the rest of it.

Spanish pavilion was… booooooring… it contained a large collection of various piles… of various stuff… bark, rocks, dirt…


The best bit was a small lizard that made the pile of rocks its home and calmly lazed about while viewers were exerting much effort to comprehend why would an insolvent Spain send to Venice a pile of rocks, plus three tiny weeds that sprung leaves from the pile, allegorically suggesting green shoots amidst what appeared to be a representation of Spanish housing market collapse... Neither intended, both more original than the installation itself.

Dirt-in-the-room thingy has been done. Ages ago. Walter de Maria did it best - DIA still has it…


Reinventing the wheel… Enough said.

Still, little delightful surprise (albeit in a very large shape) awaited us in the next pavilion - Belgium, which was represented by Berlinde De Bruyckere's Kreupelhout – Cripplewood.




I like Coetzee's work, fine writer, full of textbook sensitivities, yet very much outside the traditional space of 'African' literature. Alas, I disagree with Coetzee: knots of human reason are infinitely more complex than knots of that occur in nature. Nature has finite dimensions, until a human being enters the picture.

Yet, more good stuff awaited in Mark Manders's "Room with a Broken Sentence" at the Dutch pavilion:



Aurelien Froment, Pulmo Marina and other from the Future Generation Art Prize


I am planning to post more on this later.


In the main hall of Giardini, majority of works were fully captured by relentless academism. Formulaic stuff, delivered with competence and, thus, made even less exciting.

Here are few exceptions, though even these are not exactly earth-shattering. Jean-Frederic Schnyder's Swiss folkeshism so much loved by kids...



Thierry De Cordier's series of dark, brilliant oils... begging for some larger canvases and bigger walls:




Sarah Sze's installations at the US pavilion were quite a hit, an occasionally intricate, but at times perhaps too-direct interplays between nature, stasis, imbedded dynamic and restraint, they were fresher than the average stuff on show.



Sarah Sze did grand work also mixing up some clinical variety of counterbalancing thought and expression. Her brilliant triple point (planetarium) is large, lab-reminiscent and only tangentially related to stars… which is a sort of… the main point o a planetarium



And this brings us to my favourite of the Biennale 2013: the Russian pavilion, where performance art of high quality infused sarcasm and satire, mixed up with some basic ethics, amidst what would pass for a good quality installation art too… Vadim Zacharov pulled no punches in his work:



Double-take on 'semechki'... :-) I smiled... MrsG loved it... and then there was the main installation (which we first experienced by MrsG walking under the coins shower):




You can see the coins rain:

Note: only 'ladies' (no girls or men or boys) were allowed to walk under the 'rain' and collect coins to bring back into the entrance hall. The rain, however, was generated by a man:


Sort of gender play / role restatements.


Russian pavilion was simply brilliant. By far the best of all we have seen, followed by the US pavilion.


I shall take a break… stay tuned for Part 2.

Saturday, July 27, 2013

27/7/2013: WLASze Part 1: Weekend Links on Arts, Sciences and zero economics

This is the first part of my regular WLASze: Weekly Links on Arts, Sciences and zero economics posts for this weekend. Enjoy...


Let's start with some music: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEB6bX35aHk
H/T to t.j greene @greentak : Gipsy Kings - Duende

And while on music front, memory brings me back to one of my most favourite composers of all times: Arvo Part's his Fratres was recently heard by myself and MrsG in Dublin's NCH. Different performance, but equally sublime: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KddCQz_Ru_w


Of Fratres in us all… and science-linked, too: Nothing - emotively or nostalgically - comes close to seeing the Earth from outer space… and this photograph from July 19, 2013, the wide-angle camera on NASA's Cassini spacecraft, showing Saturn's rings and our planet Earth and its moon in the same frame does the job superbly:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/multimedia/pia17171.html#.Ue7tE2SglF_



Art merged with (sort of) science, or may be with just raw (accident-driven) curiosity?
http://www.wired.com/rawfile/2013/07/who-knew-golf-balls-could-be-so-arty/?viewall=true
Images are stunning. My favourite?
http://www.wired.com/rawfile/2013/07/who-knew-golf-balls-could-be-so-arty/#slideid-27451
and

Reminds me of Kenneth Noland and Josef Albers. Kandinsky described circular form as one of the most natural and challenging simultaneously. Geometrically-speaking, circle is also conceptually one of the unique basic 'natural' shapes (Platonism)… go figure it is all inside a golf ball…


"The robots are even more baffled by Bernanke than the humans" - yes, I know - this is 'zero economics' post… but this is very, very good...
http://qz.com/108089/the-robots-are-even-more-baffled-by-bernanke-than-the-humans/
Need I to say that at a higher level - more 'Earth from Saturn' of a vantage point - Bernanke is baffling to humans too. But that has more to do with my Impossible Monetary Dilemma (you can search my blog for that to read my musings, or one of the summaries is here).


Prix Pictet photographer, Simon Norfolk, captures harsh reality of life in Afghanistan


Simon Norfolk, "The Disaster Season", 2013. Photo: Simon Norfolk for Prix Pictet

"After winning the coveted Prix Pictet commission, the British photographer Simon Norfolk travelled to Bamyan Province in Afghanistan's Central Highlands in February to shoot the landscape as it changed through the seasons. There the climate can wreak havoc on the local farming communities—May is known as the “disaster season”, when the sun melts the deep winter snow, sending it crashing down the valleys and often ripping through villages in its path. "Every year the beautiful, pristine blanket of white holds within it the possibilities of destruction and death," Norfolk writes in the Financial Times newspaper. Norfolk's series, also called “The Disaster Season”, depicts scenes photographed from the same vantage point roughly six weeks apart. The body of work is due to go on show at Somerset House in London from 10 to 27 October."

You can see more of his work here: http://www.simonnorfolk.com/burkenorfolk/photos.html


His other work - equally stunning:


Oak trees at Blenheim Palace, copyright Simon Norfolk. Read more: http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/project/1650104/simon-norfolk-trees-blenheim-palace#ixzz2a5qMQuuV


Science and art: take a fixed spot in the sky. Take a shot every 10 seconds. Form a day-long movie of these shots. One movie per day over 360 days. Combine. Get: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap130724.html Creative, imaginative, structured, replicable, not confirmable. Science and art. I loved this.


And then, take the most sacred in science (speed of light) and freeze it:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23925-light-completely-stopped-for-a-recordbreaking-minute#.UfITIWSglF9
"While light normally travels at just under 300 million metres per second in a vacuum, physicists managed to slow it down to just 17 metres per second in 1999 and then halt it completely two years later, though only for a fraction of a second. Earlier this year, researchers kept it still for 16 seconds using cold atoms."


But just taking fixed-point photographs does not guarantee attainment of value.
"A new exhibition by Magnum photographer Peter Marlow - opening today at London's The Wapping Project Bankside" - July 24th is an exemplification of the above statement.

Frankly, I'd run away from this parade of banality. As an architectural cataloguing project, this might fly. And the architecture is rather impressive, beyond any doubt. But as art this photography is static, boring, compositionally unchallenging and exploratively flat. Textures, tonalities, light remain unexplored, space is drained of its meanings.

Quote: "These days, Anglican cathedrals attract more tourists than churchgoers - though in some respects, both are arguably worshipping something greater than themselves. And while we wait with bated breath for the next 'starchitect' masterwork to be erected, it is worthwhile to remember that these religious shrines have withstood a test of fortitude (think two World Wars) far greater than any modern pinnacle might face - for centuries in fact."  Yes. But none of this has anything to do with Peter Marlow's effort, which, in the end, is itself a quintessentially a replica of the shallow tourist view… sans John Baldessari's capacity for sarcasm:




In contrast - a superb, absolutely superb work at the Irish pavilion at Venice Biennale 2013 offers an excellent viewing:

Panoramic landscapes from the range of geographies - rich, luscious, dynamic, juxtaposing war and peace, calm and tension, colour and depth - by Irish artist Richard Mosse's. Mosse uses infrared film to re-narrate space:


Ireland put one of the top 5 pavilions in Venice Biennale 2013, if not the best. Well done!


Stay tuned for WLASze Part 2 later… Enjoy… and think… and marvel… and question…