Ernesto Neto

ernesto neto is considered one of the absolute leaders of brazil’s contemporary art scene. his inspiration comes partly from brazilian neo-concretism. at the end of the 1950s and beginning of the 60s the movement’s best-known proponents, lygia clarc and hélio oiticica, rejected modernism’s ideas of autonomous geometric abstraction. instead, they wanted to equate art with living organisms in a kind of
organic architecture, and invite the viewer to be an active participant.

ernesto neto works with abstract installations which often take up the entire exhibition space. his materials are gossamer-thin, light, stretchable fabrics in nylon or cotton. like fine membranes fixed to the ceiling by long, stretched threads his works hang down into the room and create shapes that are almost organic. sometimes they are filled with scented spices and hang in tear-shaped forms like gigantic mushrooms or huge stockings, sometimes he creates peculiar soft sculptures which the visitor is allowed to feel through small openings in the surface. he also creates spatial labyrinths which the visitor can enter and thereby experience the work and interact with it.

neto’s art is an experience which creates associations with the body and with something organic. he describes his works as an exploration and a representation of the body’s landscape from within. it is important to neto that the viewer should actively interact with and physically experience his work by feeling, smelling, and touching it.

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Full English

WILD HEARTS    by Julia Brodauf

Simon English doesn’t exclude anything from his subject matter. He throws a wild orgy of cross references including Pop music, literature, art history, politics, history and his personal deftness onto the canvas and out of it creates an opulent, but controlled chaos. The British artist, born in Berlin in 1959 but grew up in London where he still lives, began his career in the nineties through the Saatchi Collection as a virtuoso drawer of fragmented smorgasbords and is guaranteed the support of large international collections. And so he self-confidently turns towards the two-dimensional painting and hurls himself into a kind of love affair in his current exhibition “English Painting (Below the Belt)” at Galerie Volker Diehl (Lindenstr. 35, until 27th February).

In fact these paintings sink into a flesh-colored physicality that no longer distinguishes between eyes and nipples. The painting is so close to the subject that even inside and outside of painted bodies melt into an indistinguishable whole. English dissolves faces, limbs, and organs into surreal shapes, as if these were self-contained digestive systems– there is even a portrait in intestines– while also work as diagrams simultaneously. He does this by employing a flood of individual drawings of figures, faces, animals and a surge of textual elements and illuminations to populate and cover this peculiar imagery. This way English gains back his distance from the intoxication; pop music lies in the paintings.

http://www.simonenglish.com/Index.html


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Anish Kapoor

(Untitled) – Creation

Is it my role as an artist to say something, to express, to be expressive?  I think it’s my role as an artist to bring to expression, it’s not my role to be expressive. I’ve got nothing particular to say, I don’t have any message to give anyone. But it is my role to bring to expression, let’s say, to define means that allow phenomenological and other perceptions which one might use, one might work with, and then move towards a poetic existence.  - Anish Kapoor

The English artist Anish Kapoor has been invited to create a monumental installation specially designed for Nantes Museum of Art. This unpublished work is made up of a huge, moving red-wax block, slowly going through the museum, from the entry hall to the deep end of the patio, on rails placed at 1,50m high above the ground. This heavy wagon, moving very slowly between the too narrow arches of the patio, rubs off, leaving dramatic scraps of red wax on to the pillars. It is an allegory of memory and history, two themes in the very heart of the museum function.

Anish Kapoor (born in Bombay in 1954) competed for United-Kingdom in Venice in 1990 and won the Turner Prize in 1991. Both painter and sculptor, he uses illusionist properties of colour to give sensuality and ambiguity to his sculptures. He works matter, light, space, using contrasts such as empty-full, male-female, concave-convex, inside-outside, material-immaterial, visible-invisible…This planned ambivalence gives his works, every time more monumental, a quality of mystery and infinity.

To a great article on Kapoor: http://www.anishkapoor.com/writing/homibhabha.htm

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Ant Farm


Media Burn integrates performance, spectacle and media critique, as Ant Farm stages an explosive collusion of two of America’s most potent cultural symbols: the automobile and television. On July 4, 1975, at San Francisco’s Cow Palace, Ant Farm presented the “ultimate media event.” In this alternative Bicentennial celebration, a “Phantom Dream Car” — a reconstructed 1959 El Dorado Cadillac convertible — was driven through a wall of burning TV sets.

Footage of the actual event, much of which was shot from a closed-circuit video camera mounted inside a customized “tail-fin,” is framed and juxtaposed with news coverage by the local television stations. Doug Hall, introduced as John F. Kennedy, assumes the ironic role of the Artist-President to deliver a speech about the impact of mass media monopolies on American life: “Who can deny that we are a nation addicted to television and the constant flow of media? Haven’t you ever wanted to put your foot through your television?”

The spectacle of the Cadillac crashing through the burning TV sets became a visual manifesto of the early alternative video movement, an emblem of an oppositional and irreverent stance against the political and cultural imperatives promoted by television, and the passivity of TV viewing. Examining the impact of mass media in American culture, Media Burn exemplifies Ant Farm’s fascination with the automobile and television as cultural artifacts, and their approach to social critique through spectacle and humor.

By Ant Farm: Chip Lord, Doug Michels, Curtis Schreier, Uncle Buddie. Artist- President: Doug Hall. Executive Producer: Tom Weinberg. Editors: Chip Lord, Skip Blumberg, Doug Michels, Tom Weinberg.

Link to Video:  http://www.ubu.com/film/ant_farm_media.html
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SUPRASENSORIAL: EXPERIMENTS IN LIGHT, COLOR, AND SPACE

Suprasensorial: Experiments in Light, Color, and Space, is the first museum exhibition to situate pioneering Latin American artists among the international canon of those working with light and space. The exhibition presents Latin America as the source of new ideas about the nature and function of art through the re-creation of important large scale installations by five highly regarded and influential artists: Carlos Cruz Diez, Lucio Fontana, Julio Le Parc, Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida, and Jesús Rafael Soto. The exhibition aims to illuminate the field by expanding the dialogue surrounding light-and-space practices in contemporary visual art beyond the California tradition of the late ’60s and ’70s, to include pivotal Latin American impulses expressed more than a decade earlier.

The five large-scale environments on view in Suprasensorial: Experiments in Light, Color, and Space exemplify the artists’ embrace of light, color, and space as art materials as well as their interest in forging a new object-viewer relationship. Conceiving works that require the active participation of the viewer, each sought to engender a sensory experience of art that goes beyond the aesthetic. This immersive encounter, which Oiticica described as “suprasensorial,” was intended to shift the viewer’s position vis-a-vis the artwork, bridging the distance between spectator and object, demystifying art by making it part of everyday life. The viewer no longer need stand in front of an artwork, as with painting, or walk around it, in the case of sculpture, but should enter it, becoming fully engaged in a kind of “sensorial exaltation.” Insisting on the viewer’s presence as necessary for the completion of the work, each of the artists in Suprasensorial makes him/her an indispensable part of the art-making process.

A highlight of the exhibition, Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’Almeida’s Cosmococa-Programa in Progress, CC4 Nocagions (1973) features a 90-centimeter-deep swimming pool installed amid colored lights and multiple wall projections of John Cage’s book Notations, a collection of music manuscripts, covered with lines of cocaine. The water presents a dynamic surface where the movements of the swimming participants are integrated into the work in a complete reinvention of art as an immersive, sensorial, and interactive experience. For MOCA’s presentation, the public will be invited to swim or lounge in the heated pool during museum hours, supervised by a lifeguard. Changing rooms will be available for visitors who bring swimsuits, and the MOCA Store will offer a line of disposable swimwear. Towels will be provided.

Organized by MOCA Senior Curator Alma Ruiz, Suprasensorial: Experiments in Light, Color, and Space will be presented from December 12, 2010, through February 27, 2011, at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, followed by a tour to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, in Washington D.C from June 23-September 11, 2011.

For full details and write up: http://www.moca.org/museum/exhibitiondetail.php?id=428
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Sean Foley at Mass Moca

Sean Foley’s new work Ruse occupies the over 100-foot long wall outside of the Hunter Center for the Performing Arts. Foley found the distorted, disproportionately long and narrow space appealing for a new work; in it viewers can never quite take in a singular image all at once, and instead are left to put the pieces together in their minds, to turn glimpses into a whole. Ruse begins with ideas of camouflage, a topic that has filtered into the artist’s work in the past.

Foley’s practice stems from painting but expands the medium beyond traditional definitions pushing it off the canvas and onto the wall — beyond figure and beyond abstraction into a kind of battle between wonder and the monstrous. Foley’s imagery explodes from his paintings into the realm of installation where he depicts the monstrous as shrouded in bright candy colors, hiding its true nature much in the way that carnivalesque imagery and camouflage function to make the viewer see the magic surface rather than the darker reality. Foley’s monsters represent life, which in itself exists as a continuous cultural camouflage from Fox News to images of wartime and depression. In Ruse, Foley provides the viewer with a space to contemplate the mystery that lies beyond the image.

For the complete write on Sean Foley at Mass Moca: http://www.massmoca.org/event_details.php?id=620

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Pipilotti Rist

Photo by Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Pipilotti Rist was born on June 21, 1962 in Rheintal, Switzerland.
She likes red beets a lot. Her focus is video/audio installations because there is room in them for everything (painting, technology, language, music, movement, lousy, flowing pictures, poetry, commotion, premonition of death, sex and friendliness) – like in a compact handbag. Her opinon is: Arts task is to contribute to evolution, to encourage the mind, to guarantee a detached view of social changes, to conjure up positive energies, to create sensuousness, to reconcile reason and instinct, to research possibilities and to destroy clichés and prejudices.
http://www.pipilottirist.net/
Bio lifted from artists gallery: http://www.luhringaugustine.com/artists/pipilotti-rist/#
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Angelo Plessas

Angelo Plessas, Monument to TowersAndPowers.com (offline monument), 2010; various media (print-collage); courtesy the artist and Gloria Maria Gallery – image and description found at  www.ArtLies.org

Angelo Plessas: Life through a Web Browser

“Greek-Italian artist Angelo Plessas’ interactive websites (Angeloplessas.com) integrate elements of drawing, sound, Flash animation and innovative HTML coding. Each of his online two-dimensional “sculptures” is sealed with a domain name that playfully evokes the language of philosophy, literature and drama. Challenging concepts of space and ownership on the Internet, Plessas’ websites are, like graffiti bombed on a public wall, the acts of a guerrilla artist intervening in public space.”  - Stephanie Bailey

Above excerpt from the article Angelo Plessas: Life Through a WebBrowser found on www.artlies.org

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jesse la flair

Jesse La Flair’s work ranges from sculpture and performance to sound as visual works.  For a very interesting look into this body of work check out his website: http://web.mac.com/jesselaflair/JesseLaFlair/Welcome.html

You will find dozens of experimental videos and sound works that are well worth your time.

above images were found at Mr. La Flair’s aforementioned website.

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Maryanne Amacher

www.maryanneamacher.org

An American composer and installation artist, Maryanne Amacher created massive psychoaccoustic illusions with her sound installations and pioneered new creative techniques “telematic performance” being but one example.  She is best known for her three major projects that span the last 42 years called “CITY LINKS” 1-22 (1967 – ), “MUSIC FOR SOUND JOINED ROOMS” (1980 – ) and “MINI-SOUND SERIES” (1985 – ).  Amacher was also well known for working with a phenomenon called octoaccoustic emission, which is an experience in which the ears become active in creating sound.  Her work is currently being cataloged and preserved through the website www.maryanneamacher.org

photos above found on Google Images.

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