GeGo - Defying Structures

To be honest I had never heard from GeGo, or Gertrude Goldschmid (1912-1994) . Even though I now understand that she grew up to be one of the most significant South-American artist of the second half of the twentieth century, as famous as Brazilians Lygia Clark and Mira Schendel.
They seem very fragile, her sculptures, even though they are mostly made from steal and lead, connected and intertwined together.
The drawings dont appeal to me so much but some pieces I find simply beautiful like this one.

Originating from a Rectangle II, 1958















The pieces made in the sixties I find the most endearing, the way she draws lines with metal remind me of Frank Plants work.

"The vulnerability Gego introduced into her work in the late sixties enabled her to convert transparency into the driving force of sculpture. This paradox of the transparent structure – which places her above the art conventions of her time – is clearly reflected in the “Dibujos sin papel” (Drawings without Paper), which bring the exhibition to an end. Usually made from waste materials she found lying around her workshop, these “Dibujos sin papel” float on the wall and compose shapes that are once again either random or geometrically organised. The variety of their sizes and formal combinations bears witness to the dedication which, towards the end of her life, Gego continued conceding to assemblage, poor materials and formal experimentation."

Read the full press text from GeGo in the Macba.

More pictures from the exhibition:

Stuffed rabbit

For some installation piece I want to make, I need to find a stuffed rabbit. Though browsing the net has not yet brought me much further on my quest I did encounter something else, of course, thats the nature of the net, but I did encounter a big stuffed rabbit.
















Read more here, in case you would like to see it in person, its on a mountain in:
Artesina, Piemont, Italy
From 2005 - 2025

This piece must really confuse the aliens.

This artist group, gelitin make more funny things. Then of course there is always the argument that blowing up an object does not make something art... but what does make something art?
It is also possible to see it from space, like it was ment to be there, looking at the shape of the road.

The Diamond Sutra.

Imagine this: A book published in 868 AD - The Diamond Sutra.

Living beings are repeatedly reborn into the illusory material world. This is a world characterised by suffering. They can only escape the cycle of rebirth by acquiring sufficient merit through good deeds and words, thereby atoning for previous bad deeds and words. They then progress at each rebirth up the hierarchy of living beings to the pinnacle of Buddhahood. Buddha explains here that more merit is attained through understanding four lines of this sutra and explaining them to others, than through any amount of charity.

You can read more from the first published book in the world here. It takes some time to download:
http://www.bl.uk/collections/treasures/sutra/sutra_broadband.htm?middle

Last year a meditating teenage boy declared himself to be Buddha-reincarnate...
He went missing on March 11, 2006. His present whereabouts are unknown.

Fosfor in Fallujah (Old news....)

Jamail writes in his weblog : 'Burhan Fasa’a, an Iraqi journalist who worked for the Lebanese satellite TV station, LBC and who was in Fallujah for nine days during the most intense combat, said Americans grew easily frustrated with Iraqis who could not speak English. “Americans did not have interpreters with them,” Fasa’a said, “so they entered houses and killed people because they didn’t speak English. They entered the house where I was with 26 people, and [they] shot people because [the people] didn’t obey [the soldiers’] orders, even just because the people couldn’t understand a word of English.” He also added, “Soldiers thought the people were rejecting their orders, so they shot them. But the people just couldn’t understand them.” A man named Khalil, who asked not to use his last name for fear of reprisals, said he had witnessed the shooting of civilians who were waving white flags while they tried to escape the city.'

This is absolutely NOT news of the day, in fact it comes from late 2005 (ages away) but I keep getting stupidified by the new and old news coming from the land beaten up to save democracy.
http://dahrjamailiraq.com/weblog/archives/dispatches/000317.php#more

Please do read more hot news in the log from Stan van Houcke

Het centrale Koe Examen

In October 2006 Paradiso became the domain of Bertha the cow during het Centrale Koe-Examen in Paradiso in Amsterdam. For this event I made a little installation consisting of the eyes, stomach and tong of a cow.

We , the consumers have no clue what we are eating. We dont know what part of the cow we are eating, what the cow has been eating, what kind of hormones have made her grow, or, did she manage to stand on her own legs? There is lots out there about the not so nice life of cows.

Title: Methyltestosteron, methylboldenon, corticosteroïden
stanozolol & hydroxyprogesteron

"I wonder if he ever told her"

In the C3 BAR in the CCCB.

You can rationalise it later

I am bemused by some people´s obsessive fascination with cars. Although I understand the fascination I do not share it and suspect we are being sold a myth.This piece tries to make sense of this obsession by juxtaposing the slogans used in car advertisements with photographs of one of my obsessions, trees.

In Can Felipa till 31 of january, Barcelona

Public Space / Two Audiences. Works and Documents from the Herbert Collection

Coming in the Macba soon are works from the Herbert Collection.

Gerhard Richter has stated, “I am suspicious regarding the image of reality which our senses convey to us and which is incomplete and limited". The series on the Baader-Meinhoff events, October 18, 1977, for which New York MOMA paid some $15 million, depends almost entirely on a knowledge of the German history of the time; for the great many without that history, it is hard to see how those paintings will significantly communicate more than a rather vague sense of foreboding.
































The three paintings Dead 1, 2 and 3, are alternately-sized versions of the same source photo. The original image is of the dead body of Ulrike Meinhof, who hung herself in her Stammheim prison cell on Mother's Day in 1976. The original image is shocking, graphic, and gruesome; her neck having been cut through by the home-made cord she used to end her life. These images are also unique in the cycle; they represent an event that occurred more than a year before October 18, 1977.

There is and has been written loads about Richter, but quite an interesting article you can find here. And more about the exhibition of the Herbert collection in the Macba.

Poster Project - Hans Haacke

Hans Haacke is one of my favourite artists. He makes very intelligent, ironic and critical work that makes you think and wonder without being dogmatic. Or as Brian Wallis says it so well:
"One of the least apparent, though most politically expedient, aspects of Hans Haacke's work is the way in which it addresses and challenges its audience. For while the ostensible subjects of Haacke's works are the specific social and economic conditions he bares, the real political consequence is the education and transformation of the viewer."

To commemorate 9/11 he made a poster featuring negative space in the shape of the the twin towers. You can now download a desktop application version of the project from the New Creative Time website.

Video Times, 1965-2005

Finally saw Video Times in la Caixa Forum at the last day. There is little video art that grabs me. Thats what it should do preferibly, grab you the first moment you walk in and keep you fascinated for as long as the video lasts. Every frame should make you want to stay. Therefore it is such a difficult medium and very often it bores people because of being too long, too obvious, pretentious or simply incomprehensible.
A pioneer and a bit of a genius is artist Nam June Paik. He was the first to introduce TV images into a museum space, in 1963. Two years later, he created 'Moon is the Oldest TV'. A simple adjustment to one of the black-and-white televison tubes of the time produces an image that seems like a shot of the moon, and also appears in a sequence of phases when the deflector magnet is shifted.

Moon is the oldest TV

There were about 30 artists so impossible to hightlight them all but another piece I thought to be very strong was the piece by Isaac Julien, Baltimore.

Starring veteran actor Melvin Van Peebles, BALTIMORE was designed in part as an homage to Van Peebles' movies. The film installation includes three Baltimore institutions - the Walters Art Museum, the Peabody Library and the Great Blacks in Wax Museum. As in previous series, Julien uses museums as a key location and theme, uniting these cultural institutions with blaxploitation cinema as a symbol of black empowerment, which Van Peebles helped usher in in the 1970s.

Text coming from the Progressive Art Collection.