David Barrie

Beer mat architecture

In yesterday's London Times newspaper, The Cratehouse in Castleford, Yorkshire was named one of the top ten works of public art in the U.K.

Created by German artists Wolfgang Winter and Berthold Hörbelt, it's made out of hundreds of bottle crates perched on a shipping container.

 

In their book on Fleeting Architecture and Hideouts, Robert Klanten and Lukas Feiress saw The Cratehouse as part of a general trend for modular building and another brick - or is it crate? - in the wall of architects

losing their traditional sovereign right to the formal design of buildings/spaces...the overthrow of established etiquette in our built surroundings...

What's great about The Cratehouse is that it's a mad mix of the beautiful and the useful.

So experimental film-maker Katie Clark has made this:

And for two years, the object has been used for poetry readings, school workshops, meetings of the Rotary Club, even as a Santa's Grotto and halloween hideout.   

A brilliant combination of walk-through sculpture - described by the artists as a space of light - and usable object.

In late 2008, The Cratehouse will move from Castleford, Yorkshire to Kielder Forest, Northumberland and  join a number of installations there that include a Skyspace by James Turrell. 

The artwork was commissioned by Arts Council England, Yorkshire, curated by Yorkshire Sculpture Park and managed by City of Wakefield Metropolitan District Council. Its fabrication was supported by Northern Containers, Hessle Fork Trucks Ltd. and HDS Associates.

 

Judgement of Paris

Rubens is my favorite painter of all time.

And this picture - The Judgement of Paris - is one of his greatest.

But forget all talk of composition, shape, form, blah blah - and any other pompous conoisseur catalogue stuff. 

For from the chasms of the Internet, by an artist of no known name, comes a perfectly executed version of the story that may express far more accurately what was really going on when Hermes brought the son of Priam beautiful goddesses to judge.

42 Ways to say no

Just when you might be lost for words, conceptual artist Mel Bochner comes to the rescue in a piece (resolutely) called No, currently on show at the Peter Freeman Gallery, New York.  (via Frieze).

Hello Kitty (with a little bit of hell)

The London Financial Times reports that China has overtaken France as a market for art sales.

According to a nameless art critic:

It is simply emblematic of the French decline. There hasn't been a brilliant French artist since the second world war.

China claims 15 of the 35 artists worldwide who command seven-digit sales, and the country's artists have seen prices rise eight-fold in the past seven years.

Last year I visited the art district of Tank Loft in Chongqing.

The area is decked out in ways that we can only dream:

At the center of the district is a network of artists' studios, located on the campus of the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute that's been designed with knowing understanding of military-industrial chic.

I've blogged elsewhere  about floors rendered smooth by the procession of Western art dealers and curators who have made pilgrimage here.

But what's great about the place is that alongside the professional artists is a network of studios of artists who are students at the Institute, like Liao Man:

Just check out her work.

Yes, it's saccharin and self-conscious.

And no, it doesn't command seven-digit receipts.

But there's a quiet, ironic exorcism and joke/celebration of consumerism going on here that loses nothing in translation.

Every image of her face bears a red mark that's a scar.

Art with baggage in tow

I love Takashi Murakami and his art.

The redeemed cosmopolitanism that curator and critic Dave Hickey highlighted in his Sante Fe Biennial back in 2001 was a fantastic catch-all for an artist who loves sheen, style, otaku and the baroque rendering of some kind of primordial iconography.

   

But there's something annoying about Murakami - and I can't quite work out whether it's him, the bad behavior of those who surround and promote him, a bit of both or a bigger message about art. :-S

There's a major retrospective of Murakami's work currently on show at the Brooklyn Museum.

At the gala opening last week, outside the museum, in pride of place, were street vendors

the kind typically seen on many New York/Hong Kong/Paris/whatever avenues, selling "Louis Vuitton" bags

writes Vanessa Friedman in the London Financial Times.

Guy Trebay in the New York Times gives an eyewitness account:

Standing outside them were men who resembled the African immigrant vendors who haul around telltale bundles of alluring, cheapish and almost-right copies of stuff from Gucci and Louis Vuitton. This time, however, these characters were playacting. The goods laid out on trays and tarps were real Vuitton accessories. They cost, as they do in the stores, a bomb.

The entire stunt - or piece of performance art, to use Friedman's words  - was designed to publicize counterfeiting.

In the words of the Chief Executive of Louis Vuitton:

It's an opportunity to send an artistic and political message, showing that street vendors can be good - they're part of the life of a city - but that counterfeit is bad - it destroys that life.

What is all of this? Art? Politics? Pure public relations?

Yes, to all of them.

But Murakami needs to watch out.

It's great that the street show defiles those who cherish the idea of art as the creation of a unique primary object and exhibitions as a pompous opportunity to celebrate and investigate all of this.

It also great that the blood boils when street culture is appropriated and selectively edited to make a pseudo political/promotional point on behalf of a luxury brand, and for an elitist band

who had almost certainly never bartered for an $80 copy of a $1,400 bag off a blanket on the sidewalk.

But Murakami is in danger of becoming a vehicle for moral judgement - and judgement over an economy that's a well-spring of his happy aesthetic.

For the black economy is an intrinsic part of the energy and joy of the city, its obsessives and obsessions. 

And it's somewhere in this culture that Murakami and his art finds its strength and expression.

Images of Brooklyn Museum street market courtesy of Athlete Movie.

Art's best kept fashion secret

What fuelled the action painting of American artist Jackson Pollock?

Was it angst? Nope.

Testosterone? Nope.

A sublimal drive towards fractal expressionism? Nope.

Tucked away in the print edition of this month's edition of V Magazine is the answer:

Pollock wore Converse All Star sneakers!

Time to re-write that macho history of Abstract Expressionism?

Over the counter avant-garde

According to Estates Gazette, the real estate magazine, artist Damien Hirst is to open his first art shop in Marylebone, London.

Known as Other Criteria, the store is to sell artwork, T-shirts, postcards, plates and books featuring the artist's work.

The London Evening Standard reports that

Among the Hirst items on sale will be an 18-carat gold charm bracelet featuring different types of pills as the charms. It costs £250,000, while a set of 12 plates decorated by the artist costs £10,000.

A key reason for the venture, according to one of the directors of the new retail company is that

Art has to be experienced and the shop is where people can experience it in a democratic atmosphere rather than a West End gallery.

In an age in which Kate Moss designs clothing for Topshop and pitched battles mark the opening of sales at Primark, it feels right for the avant-garde to see the shop floor as the contemporary Palace Square.

Even better, Hirst's diversification suggests a total revision of the history of art - as a canon of artists as unfulfilled shopkeepers, not angst-ridden expressionists.

Duchamp doing bathroom fittings.

Fragonard retailing cosmetics.

And Caravaggio doing Pinot Grigio - with a personal shopper service downstairs devoted to Colt Leather.

Luxury erotic

Some collect Panini stickers of soccer stars. Others porcelain ducks. I....I seem to be collecting JPEGs of photographer Steven Meisel's series Four Days in L.A.: The Versace Pictures.

Meisel made his Versace photos over four days in two L.A. mansions in 2000. As Pernilla Homes writes, nearly-identical supermodels Amber Valetta and Georgina Grenville are

primped and preened within an inch of their lives, dripping in gems and gold, they are surrounded by orderly opulence from Old Master paintings to hyper-groomed poodles.

So why am I collecting these things?

Because they're gorgeous. But also they're vacuous.

Nicolas Ghesquiere, the creative director of Balenciaga, once said the most fantastic thing:

We have idols but no models to follow. You have to define your own model.

Meisel gets this.

In the L.A. series, he creates a model from an idol - and vice-versa.

And rather than be political and meld and switch between the authentic and ambiguous in a Hillary Clinton kind of way, these images are totally inauthentic *and* ambiguous.

Pure sheen. I love  it.

Transforming society spud-by-spud

This is a photo of artist Kathryn Johnson's giant and very weird potato presentation at the Really Super Market art fair earlier this year in Middlesbrough, North East England.

Johnson's latex and polyester sculptures were a high point in an event curated by Bob and Roberta Smith and the culmination of a design project on food systems in the town.

Here's artist Bob and Roberta taking it easy during the event - and yes he's one person...

...and here's a dish served up at the event that was created from fresh produce cultivated by a thousand new 'urban farmers' in containers across the town.

Over 6000 people attended the Super Market event; and the food project - Dott07 Urban Farming - was a great success.

On one level, it fostered new enthusiasm for growing produce in the town. The town's new 'urban farmers' plan to run the process again in 2008. Local government is planning to release vacant lots across the town for new urban food production. And plans are moving forward to create a new restaurant in the town that will be organized as a co-operative social enterprise and supplied by the town's new farmers in the future.

But the initiative wasn't just a success because it offered people an opportunity to grow stuff. It worked because it created a new opportunity for people to communicate - and it now seems no accident that the culminating event was framed by an artist.

In his book on relational aesthetics, French curator and art critic Nicolas Bourriaud writes of

the dawning of the society of extras where the individual develops as a part-time stand-in for freedom, signer and sealer of the public place.

In discussing the work of artists like Rirkrit Tiravanija, Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Carsten Holler, Bourriaud celebrates the end of modernity's regressive fantasy of sacredness and singularity.

He sees in their art a reintroduction of the idea of plurality

...inventing ways of being together, forms of interaction that go beyond the inevitability of families, ghettos of technological user-friendliness, and collective institutions on offer.

In Bourriard's  mind, this is an urge towards creating new models of sociability.

In our post-industrial societies, the most pressing thing is no longer the emancipation of individuals, but the freeing-up of inter-human communications, the dimensional emancipation of existence.

More often than not, urban renewal and public involvement projects keep their creative and intellectual thrust hush-hush.

The sociability of public art also often plays second fiddle to imaging and market.

But it's interesting to start to see participatory design, art, social and economic renewal projects in the same frame as, say, Carsten Holler's metal slides at the Tate.

And be reminded that these projects are not just confirmation of how great it is to be alive, kicking and sociable. They are also microscopic opportunities to transform society step-by-step, spud-by-spud. 

Potato image courtesy of earth2potato.

Dump Damien Hirst

The Sunday Times reports that arts bodies in the U.K. await a funding bloodbath.

The Arts Council - a government body dedicated to the promotion of the arts in the U.K. - is to

scrap funding for nearly one in five of the theatres, orchestras and arts organisations that it supports...Nearly 200 arts bodies are being told that their Arts Council funding will end from next April. For most it will mean closure or, at best, a struggle to survive.

To state the bloody obvious, privatization has hit the arts big time.

As Bill Clinton's first secretary of labour Robert Reich puts it in his new book,

the institutions that used to aggregate citizen values have declined.

We have been spending the last decade or more trying to get the state off our backs and out of our lives so an axe has been taken to the common good.

What's more, as an article in a recent edition of Mute makes clear, as the market for contemporary art becomes a sector for increasing private investment

arts funding is increasingly drained in anticipation that it will be supported by such private interests.

Simultaneously, government policy seeks to attract international capital and its institutions and staff by promoting the global city through large scale signature events with a global span such as the Olympics that cannot be financially leveraged by private capital alone.

So what to do?

One route is to follow the advice of a recent review of Reich's book:

We should be paying more attention to the things that the state can do.

But this may just rationalise cuts.

Another is to start to try to understand where expression ends and consumption begins.

For as Suhail Malik of Goldsmiths writes in Mute

the critical-political claims of contemporary art, such as they are, are given the lie by their service to securitising the massive liquidity that now dominates political economy - and which shapes politics.

In other words, do something that I'd find impossible and stop adulating the likes of Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin for in their name the privatization of culture just deepens.

Tricky business art and money...