untitled photos, 2009

Per Kirkeby at Tate Modern

Going to come back to this artist at a later point in time since
I'm working on translating from the French an early collection of
writings by him entitled Manuel (Manual) which accompanied an
exhibition at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (planning
on posting excerpts from the translation on this blog), but for
now it's good to see he's still producing new work; this show opens
tomorrow in London:

http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/perkirkeby/default.shtm

David Wilkinson

David is a sculptor/sausage maker here in Budapest.


Sausage skins. He fills these with plaster.


Some studio views....

redefining "ROTFL"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQ5boOTyz_4

new music

I've put up some music on a fresh myspace page
www.myspace.com/klicova

ka-chaaa!

the new Towner art center in Eastbourne (uk)

Towner art center, debut exhibition. These images are from the
first floor gallery. Don't have any of the artist's names (sorry),
though the title of the show is "Lost Horizons".
above: hand driers like the ones typically found in wc's. Speakers
mounted above each one turn on when the drier is activated,
playing recorded conversations apparently taken from
interviews with people on the streets of London. One of
these the interview turned into freestyle rapping ( a good
way to answer questions).





work for a living turns into work or a living


plexi display holding plaster casts of socks,
many of them child-size










guardian review

Kenji Fujita

Saw this show at Samson Projects when I was last in Boston,
now that I'm here again for a few weeks was reminded of it.

"The title, Debris of Life and Mind, was taken from a Wallace Stevens poem.
I wanted the conversation between painting and sculpture to take a different turn.
I had done this earlier by examining the convention of wall-based work and turning
the assumptions that we have about the wall into a question: if something is going
to exist on the wall, how does this happen? I wanted to reflect more on the work’s
physical placement in an architectural setting and how that placement in space
determines meaning. I also wanted to play with things that have a certain weight
and that cause pressure. The original idea was to make these works freestanding,
but I soon realized that the bases would overwhelm the pieces. This led me to take
one side of the base, a two-foot square piece of plywood, and use it to prop the piece
against the wall. A plywood support and a compressed sphere coated with plaster
cloth combine to meet the back of the piece against the wall, creating support that
is both functional and sculptural. It’s still a conversation about painting and
sculpture, but the conversation is now taking place in an architectural space."
(from SP website)


It's always pretty amazing to think about how much territory is still open for
exploration, just taking, for instance, how the floor meets the wall, -even after
Tuttle's, McCracken's, Serra's and innumberable others' forays into the question.

the relapse of 1991

"If there's a problem, yo I'll solve it, check out the hook while my dj revolves(not resolves) it."

1991...just a few years MTV has been out and dances and dance parties are the thing to do. An obsession of self expression, a next generation of working class kids who could learn nothing of self expression from their uniformed nurse mothers and their mechanics' suit fathers were going for it, our eyes were not tired from images, we had the subtlety of our communist enemies in relation to culture, but we broke their backs and so they continue with their fire red lipstick and pegged pants as we move through the subtle gray period, the natural eye shadows and Morandi.

But perhaps this relapse you predict will be so...but never back to my favorite neon sweatshirt worn inside out, this can only be for the kitsch, the rich...only the rich will risk or afford(in time, energy and funds) the french cut thai pants. We will have utility with hype:see $300.00 Uggs for example..."

(written by cheryl robinson)

walking,

going with the prospect of good tomatoes and beets and finding the best earth
which accepts plants, the meanwhile talking of summer, renting cottages if it's
not too dear ("we shall scrimp and save") & getting muddy without care
in the plateau of thought by a lake designed for that purpose by someone.
horses, so de stil and prancing that they are creamed, and the tails of little striped
birds fluttering as if in perpetual love of the last few hours of daylight in

a reappearing forest

rem koolhaas onward & sideways

paving the way for buildings to be "about diagonality"...(that's a new one)
the staggered floor heights revealing the secret of the structure is the best part, I think.

related: great FT article about the New New York.

grass collage!

some serious manicuring going on!!!!!!

long is the arm, short is life

"The word 'technology' comes from the Greek techne, often
translated as 'art', but closer in meaning to 'skill'. The first
translation is particularly misleading because techne included
both what we call 'art' and what we call 'technology', which,
since the modern emergence of the aesthetic and the 'fine arts',
have become so separated as almost to be opposite. Techne was
was originally related to words having to do with building, like
the buliding of walls. The Latin ars, from which our 'art' more
immediately descends, is related to 'arm', perhaps associating
skill especially with the making of weapons ('firearms', 'armour')
and tools, but also with the shoulder (armus), the arm of the body,
and more specifically, the skillful or 'dextrous' arm (and hand),
activity as it were using the stronger right hand, or perhaps most
generally activity increasing the power to act effectively. When it
began its historical life, then, 'art' had meanings rather like that
preserved in the kinship of the word 'craft' and the German Kraft,
'power' (even though 'crafts are for us now 'minor arts', another
casualty of the historical emergence of 'fine arts'). In antiquity,
the terms now translated by the word 'art' referred to useful adult
human pursuits running the full range from perfumery and
beekeeping to geometry and astronomy. The arts were regarded
as teachable and cumulative, skills to which some practitioners
made new contributions as the generations passed. Teachability
implied codification and principles, and those arts with theoretical
principles came to be regarded as higher than those without them,
so that, to keep our examples, geometry was higher than beekeeping,
even though it was necessary to be taught to be a beekeeper, and even
though it was possible to be a good beekeeper or a poor one..."

(From Real Spaces, by David Summers, a massive volume of
world art history. Found this passage after seeing the Elgin marbles
again last week, after not having seen them in a while... "if you can
hold a chisel, come to Athens!")

revisiting budapest (pt.1)

these wall-drawing pictures are coming out of art storage,
about 7 months after the fact...this piece was at its best at
the moment of the top photo (rounding the corner it got
a little too cerebral)


hard to shoot because of the morph


other work from the same show (this one was based on
Marshall Islands navigation charts)



and an imploding drawing

You can read all about the show in Hungarian on the gallery's own blog here,
and there's an enlightening review of the show here, which pointed out that
the saxophone music was too short compared to the curator's opening statement.