Nathan Mudyi Sentance reviews Natalie Harkin's Archival-Poetics for the Sydney Review of Books: "poet Dr Natalie Harkin (Narungga) knows what many First Nations people know, that official archives are a powerful colonial weapon as well as a site of mourning".
Talia Marshall's River monster: My elusive and charismatic father, for North & South
The Whitewashing of “#WhitePeopleDoingYoga” by Chiraag Bhakta: "My artwork was about appropriation. San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum tried to appropriate it".
Improving records for First Nations collections at the National Library of Australia
Nina Siegal rounds up decolonising efforts in Dutch museums: A Dutch Golden Age? That’s Only Half the Story
Shelley Angelie Saggar's The Decolonial Dictionary
Miriama Aoake's Making sense of Tuia 250 through Barry Barclay’s prescient work for The Spinoff
Karin Chernick for Hyperallergic: How Women Artists Flourished in Northern Italy During the Renaissance
Robin Pogrebin and Zachary Small on the complexities of overhauling NYC's racist and sexist public monuments, for the New York Times: New York’s Race to Build Monuments Runs Into Friction on the Ground
Showing posts with label public art. Show all posts
Showing posts with label public art. Show all posts
Sunday, 27 October 2019
Saturday, 23 May 2009
Web muster
1.
Recently, Over the Net drew attention to Victor Berezovsky's new mural on the front of Freyberg Pool, and the expert committee that approved the work. This week, Ed Winkleman posted on debates around whether the public is the best judge of public art, drawing on Jonathan Jones' post about taking part in two debates on public art.
From Jones' post:
3.
More awesome from the Brooklyn Museum: they've launched a complementary game to their original collection tagging game, Tag - You're It!
Freeze Tag! encourages people to review tags that have been submitted by the public, but which have had their accuracy or relevance challenged. I've played quite a lot over the last four or five days, and it's both addictive and rewarding.
4.
A really interesting article by Robin Cembalest in ArtNews about how museum and gallery directors are reviewing their physical spaces, exhibition displays, interpretation and more, in light of both the recession and the in-reach that the social web has encouraged over the last few years via Mia Ridge)
5.
The Library of Congress releases one of Dorothea Lange's most famous images under the 'No known copyright restrictions' licence on The Commons on Flickr
6.
The Obama family is shaking up the White House decor, selecting works by Robert Rauschenberg, Ed Ruscha, Jasper Johns and Josef Alpers for display.
Image
Dorothea Lange, Destitute pea pickers in California, 1936. Library of Congress on Flickr
Recently, Over the Net drew attention to Victor Berezovsky's new mural on the front of Freyberg Pool, and the expert committee that approved the work. This week, Ed Winkleman posted on debates around whether the public is the best judge of public art, drawing on Jonathan Jones' post about taking part in two debates on public art.
From Jones' post:
It's as if we have, as a nation, turned into the board of some big company commissioning a portrait of the managing director. Or, rather, a bronze statue of John Betjeman, or maybe a gigantic homage to a sprinter like Manchester's B of the Bang (bang and it's gone). Most of the public art we're putting up is worthless.
The best interventions in public space by artists are often confrontational and controversial, from Richard Serra's Tilted Arc to Rachel Whiteread's House. All good art is private before it is public. The secret to finding great art for public spaces – and, for that matter, great art to change attitudes to disfigurement – is to find talented artists who happen to be interested in working in that arena. Then let them indulge themselves.
2.
3.
More awesome from the Brooklyn Museum: they've launched a complementary game to their original collection tagging game, Tag - You're It!
Freeze Tag! encourages people to review tags that have been submitted by the public, but which have had their accuracy or relevance challenged. I've played quite a lot over the last four or five days, and it's both addictive and rewarding.
4.
A really interesting article by Robin Cembalest in ArtNews about how museum and gallery directors are reviewing their physical spaces, exhibition displays, interpretation and more, in light of both the recession and the in-reach that the social web has encouraged over the last few years via Mia Ridge)
5.
The Library of Congress releases one of Dorothea Lange's most famous images under the 'No known copyright restrictions' licence on The Commons on Flickr
6.
The Obama family is shaking up the White House decor, selecting works by Robert Rauschenberg, Ed Ruscha, Jasper Johns and Josef Alpers for display.
Image
Dorothea Lange, Destitute pea pickers in California, 1936. Library of Congress on Flickr
Monday, 25 August 2008
Plop art
Just in time for One Day Sculpture, the New York Times affirms that "public sculpture — that is, static, often figurative objects of varying sizes in outdoor public spaces — has become one of contemporary art’s more exciting areas of endeavor and certainly its most dramatically improved one."
Wednesday, 12 March 2008
Tease
I've been checking the One Day Sculpture site faithfully since Friday 7 March, as I'm genuinely interested in knowing who's doing what when (see Over the net's post this morning to this effect).
Now I find out I need to wait for another fortnight.
'This website will go live on 28 March 2008' - One Day Sculpture splash page.
Now I find out I need to wait for another fortnight.
'This website will go live on 28 March 2008' - One Day Sculpture splash page.
Tuesday, 12 February 2008
I feel the earth, move, under my feet ....
New Plymouth's unmatchable kitsch-tastic Festival of Lights finished this past weekend, so on Saturday night I took the opportunity to see Grimace the Gorilla (don't even ask) and a performance of Len Lye's Big Blade.
The sculpture was scheduled to perform (an odd phrase, I thought at the time, but what else can you say - 'go off'?) at 9.30 on the Fred Parker Lawn. The band played their final set, and then the sculpture was introduced.
It was a funny experience. It was the most public performance of public art that I've been to - there must have been 300 people watching. The audience wriggled round from facing the stage to facing the sculpture. There was an atmosphere of intense, slightly puzzled interest.
At first, nothing happened. And then the sculpture began its sloooooooooow 360 degree rotation. As the audience started to get restless and to heckle, I began getting that cold-stomached feeling that you got when you watched your 6-year-old sister forget her lines at the end-of-year recital; that feeling you get when something you strongly believe in is failing to impress, and there's nothing you can do about it.
Finally, the ball started knocking and the crowd began to get a bit engaged. During the pause that followed the first burst they applauded, and after the second burst, when the blade does its shimmying thing, they clapped again (I think some people thought by that stage the work was sound activiated). I paid more attention to the conversations I could overhear than to the sculpture, really - lots of variations on the 'that's not really art' theme, and some excitement during the most percussive session which made the ground vibrate, causing the kid behind me to condescendingly tell his brother "It's a sculpture that makes the earth shake, that's the whole point".
The disappointing thing was that Big Blade's performance was truncated compared to the smaller version at the GBAG: it didn't go through that part when the blade is bends over backwards, and then slams into the ball: the free-form, whipping and whupping bit, that bit that makes you go holy hell, there's some power leashed up there. I'm not sure if this larger version isn't engineered to do this, or if it was being run gently to preserve the mechanism. I wound up feeling like the crowd and the sculpture had been shortchanged, and had to fight back that impulse you get to bail people up and say 'no, it's actually really cool - you see, what normally happens is ....'
Images
Top: Green waterfall, by Rich Childs, on Flickr.
Middle: Len Lye, Blade, from Art New Zealand
The sculpture was scheduled to perform (an odd phrase, I thought at the time, but what else can you say - 'go off'?) at 9.30 on the Fred Parker Lawn. The band played their final set, and then the sculpture was introduced.
It was a funny experience. It was the most public performance of public art that I've been to - there must have been 300 people watching. The audience wriggled round from facing the stage to facing the sculpture. There was an atmosphere of intense, slightly puzzled interest.
At first, nothing happened. And then the sculpture began its sloooooooooow 360 degree rotation. As the audience started to get restless and to heckle, I began getting that cold-stomached feeling that you got when you watched your 6-year-old sister forget her lines at the end-of-year recital; that feeling you get when something you strongly believe in is failing to impress, and there's nothing you can do about it.
Finally, the ball started knocking and the crowd began to get a bit engaged. During the pause that followed the first burst they applauded, and after the second burst, when the blade does its shimmying thing, they clapped again (I think some people thought by that stage the work was sound activiated). I paid more attention to the conversations I could overhear than to the sculpture, really - lots of variations on the 'that's not really art' theme, and some excitement during the most percussive session which made the ground vibrate, causing the kid behind me to condescendingly tell his brother "It's a sculpture that makes the earth shake, that's the whole point".
The disappointing thing was that Big Blade's performance was truncated compared to the smaller version at the GBAG: it didn't go through that part when the blade is bends over backwards, and then slams into the ball: the free-form, whipping and whupping bit, that bit that makes you go holy hell, there's some power leashed up there. I'm not sure if this larger version isn't engineered to do this, or if it was being run gently to preserve the mechanism. I wound up feeling like the crowd and the sculpture had been shortchanged, and had to fight back that impulse you get to bail people up and say 'no, it's actually really cool - you see, what normally happens is ....'
Images
Top: Green waterfall, by Rich Childs, on Flickr.
Middle: Len Lye, Blade, from Art New Zealand
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