1000 years of Play

Tom Dixon’s 1000 Years of Play, shown as part of Reconstruction #3, The Artists Playground, at Sudeley Castle. The collection includes five pieces of outdoor furniture, including this swing chair. A stunning piece of design influenced by industrial form and mechanism, this piece is made from 30mm flame cut steal.
Superb!!

On show from 1 June — 31 October 2008. Leading international artists and designers involved in the exhibition include Jeppe Hein, Carsten Höller, Zaha Hadid and Lawrence Weiner

Nostalgia*1: Diabologum

La maman et la putain, Diabologum
Uploaded by mudar1488

Tune by Great French band from the nineties, Diabologum
Footage from Jean Eustache's cult movie "La maman et la putain"

Behind every plastic bag, a poem

Laura Braun's hand-made book "dalston polaroids"( edition of 25) is a record of the streets of Dalston, innit, East London. Discarted crap is everywhere, and Laura can see beauty in all this junk. If only the local authorities knew.





dalston polaroids is available in selected bookshops in London:The Photographers’ Gallery Bookshop in Covent Garden, Claire de Rouen Books on Charing Cross Road and The Bookart Bookshop on Pitfield Street near Old Street tube station.
Each have a few copies in stock.
www.laurabraun.net

Journée sociale pour bonhomme 42-347

www.leprogrammedujour.com

Frosty mood

Winter walks near Motovun, Croatia, by Bosnian photographer Vanda Vucicevic.

Sifferent yet diffimilar

Biomechanical work by artificial limb designer and hobbyist robotics engineer stroke artist Christopher Conte. His robotic objects are fully articulated and he makes them from scratch, assembling antique parts and seeing what comes together.
More here and on his website .

lineman

British artist Paul Fryer has created a large scale installation commissioned for the Guido Costa Projects gallery in Turin. In Loving Memory is born out of Paul Fryer's research into the origins of technology and the labyrinths of science. The elements used to construct the artwork are stainless steel, wax, Plexiglas, human hair, Tesla coils, computer, light system.

The work is inspired by an event which made news at the end of the 19th century. A Western Union lineman, John Feeks, employed alongside others to hang the thousands of kilometres of wire connecting one building to another and providing the city of New York with electricity and information was accidentally electrocuted and his corpse dangled for hours in a tangle of wires above the Manhattan streets, to the horror of thousands of onlookers. His fate became symbol of the perils of technological progress.



More on we-make-money-not-art.com

The Fourth Plinth

What do you think about having high-profile contemporary art in public spaces in London, such as on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square?

Public art is part of art, part of life, part of society and part of democracy.
Now, the interesting thing, the plinth project on Trafalgar square. I would love Jeremy Deller's The Spoils of War (Memorial for an unknown civilian) to be on the plinth (picture above). I think it would be seen and 'heard', I think it's needed and missing and this piece feels exactly like this: filling a hole. As soon as I imagine it up there, it becomes very obvious to me. Synthesizing many things at once, this piece would make our consciousness manifest.

‘It is not an artwork, but the remains of a vehicle that has been destroyed in an attack on civilians in Iraq’ says Jeremy Deller.

Right. The other pleasing proposal (below) to see on Trafalgar square is Bob & Roberta Smith Faîtes L’Art, pas La Guerre (Make Art, Not War), powered by the sun and the wind. It's all positivity, feel good plinth artwork. So?
Join this exciting debate here.

NEW PURE EVIL

NO FUTURE FOR THE POLAR BEARS OF THE ARCTIC CIRCLE



PSYCHO PENGUINS

I like the current bestiary theme.
You can find out about him and his work on his website, and buy it on Beautiful Crime and Stella Dore, which both showcase art work that 'transcends traditional perceptions of the classic graffiti style'.

And here he is in his evil rabbit suit. He lives in London and recently had a show at 798Space, a great contemporary art complex in Beijing.

Le Sale Boulot

'Le sale boulot' ('dirty work') is the theme of Vladinir Cruells' artistic research. Like a metaphore for contemporary society, the ambiguous phrase suggests a complex take on reality. Concerned with the details that make up history, his work aims to make us think differently about our surroundings, tracing the path of a dissident memory.

All images from the series 'Encombrants et autres monstres'(2007)

Talent from Holland

Grown on the body



Exploded view

'Lucy and Bart is a collaboration between Lucy McRae and Bart Hess described as an instinctual stalking of fashion, architecture, performance and body. Explosive_high impact_suggestive photography, with no specific intention, other than to make and metabolise.'
More here.



Dripping Colour

David Lynch on product placement

Not my favourite chair

But still, it's good. Well illustrated by the words of Richard Artschwager, found in the China Chair Exhibition's catalogue introduction:

“Art is useless; furniture is useful. If you sit your ass on it, it’s a chair, if you walk around and look at it it’s art …In fact, the more layers of meaning, the better.”


This particular chair entitled Jabba the Hug (fibreglass) is by Chinese artist Xiang Jing. Long live Chinese contemporary art and design! It is so good.

more here.

Happy new year!

Laura has been photographing cars in London with her phone. "It's just for fun" she says.
Here's a selection.

See Laura's work on her site.

blog art

Japanese architect and photographer Kazuhiko Kawahara (aka Palla) has been using his blog, Pallalink.net to better his art.

“In 2002, Palla began digitally manipulating urban snapshots and posting them on his blog, Pallalink.net. This led to a little ad hoc crowdsourcing: Site visitors left remarks and suggestions that Palla channeled into his art. "Thanks to everyone's comments," he says, "the quality of my work has gotten better."

More here.

Seen on a bridge in Amsterdam

...In october this year.
Via the Wooster Collective.

Running from camera

Here is an interesting blog/project from Dutch-land! It's called 'Running for camera' and it does not require much explanation! Go and have a look at the blog here.

Distillation

Thomas Doyle’s little sculptures…

Via Who Killed Bambie, again.

Truck Crash

This is Big Rig Jig, a sculpture seen at this year’s Burning Man to represent the precariousness and danger of the oil economy. Maybe it’s still there, in the Black Rock Desert.



Here is an extract from the Wired article:

“Mike Ross, a New York sculpture artist, and a rotating crew of four to 16 friends, built the piece in an Oakland, California. (…)
Ross had conceived the project before hearing of Burning Man's "Green Man" theme this year. He and his crew repurposed decommissioned trucks they found while driving around the San Francisco Bay Area. "We drove the trucks right into the warehouse and started chopping them to pieces." (…) "When people stand under it and see a big truck hovering over you, it should give a sense of danger and fear and that something is wrong."

Romanticism died in New York in 1979. Or did it?

On Sunday I saw this series of photographs at the Panic Attack! Exhibition at the Barbican in London. The set is called Arthur Rimbaud in New York (1978-1979), by David Wojnarowicz, and consists in a series of twenty-four black-and-white gelatin silver prints showing a friend of the artist wearing a mask of Rimbaud, photographed in a variety of sordid New York settings.

The following text is an extract from an essay by David Kuspit, which can be found here, on the Queer Cultural Center website:

“Wojnarowicz’s identification with Rimbaud is clear, and there is a startling resemblance between their lives, and even their art. (…)
Wojnarowicz was born in 1954, exactly a century after Rimbaud, and died in 1992, living one year longer than Rimbaud, who died in 1891. Both were the products of broken homes and abusive parents; both ran away from provincial homes to the big city; both traveled widely; both were gay. Both needed a loving relationship with an idealized father figure and artistic mentor to stimulate and support their own art—Paul Verlaine in the case of Rimbaud, the photographer Peter Hujar in Wojnarowicz’s case—and both were violent personal- ties—Rimbaud eventually shot Verlaine, and death and destruction run rampant in Wojnarowicz’s imagery.”