Bourgeois, Emin, Macke, Baldessari, De Waal, etc

At the weekend we went down to Cornwall for a couple of days, avoiding most of the Jubilee stuff - Took in the Tate, the Newlyn Gallery and some of the Cornwall Open Studios. Will post about that shortly - For the moment, however, here are some blog posts and other stuff from the web that I've liked recently:

Lisa Thatcher's piece on Louise Bourgeois. If you're interested in Bourgeois I can recommend the DVD about her life and work: The spider, the mistress and the tangerine.

Tracey Emin's interview about her homecoming exhibition at Turner Contemporary in Margate (until 23 September).

Poul Webb's piece on August Macke (part 1 of 4 - select the links from Poul's blog).


Tasseomancy - Reminds me of the McGarrigles and the Incredible String Band from the early 70s.

A Brief History of John Baldessari, the influential conceptual artist, narrated by Tom Waits.

Edmund de Waal, the ceramic artist, introduces his ceramics installations at Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire. See the Guardian review here.

And finally, Skymonk's interactive kaleidoscopes (right click on the images and zoom in to see less symmetric patterns).

A Top 5 of Living Female Artists?

We're almost at the end of the Phoenix 'isms' classes (previous posts here, here and here). In this second batch of five sessions Nicci has done a great job of presenting 20th and 21st century art by themes - gender, identity, the gaze, vanitas, momento mori, and so on - rather than by art movements ('isms'). We also focused on some favourite individual artists including Frida Kahlo, Nan Goldin, Yoko Ono, Lucian Freud, Andy Warhol, Rachel Whiteread, Paula Rego and Peter Blake.

Cindy Sherman at MOMA until June 2012 (with make-up)

In week 4 we also looked at Cindy Sherman and debated the claim that she is the greatest living female artist. I'm a sceptic and started to think about the competition. As a result I've come up with the following Top 5 female living artists as follows (in no particular order and using the usual criteria of - influence on others, subjective judgement, personal prejudice, etc):

1 - Yoko Ono - Hugely influential artist working in a number of media. Her involvement with John Lennon led many people to become aware of and investigate modern art (me included).

Jenny Savile

2 - Jenny Saville - Real painter of women in the tradition of Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud (and Picasso and Rubens?) with a distinctive and visceral style.

Paula Rego - Betrothal from Hogarth tryptich

3 - Paula Rego - An artist who tells stories using a variety of different, but recognisable, styles, normally in pastels. Her images are often animalistic - a feminist artist who produces unsettling work. (See this facebook page for further Rego images - thanks Ernesto).

Tracey Emin - Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made

4 - Tracey Emin - A member of the YBAs, she has transcended this and shown herself capable of producing a range of impressive work including installations, paintings, neon, and use of fabrics (and more) which is largely autobiographical.

Bridget Riley

Finally, at joint No.5 (cheating here) - Bridget Riley - the queen of Op Art, who has consistently taken the form in new directions from the 1960s to the present time; and Elizabeth Fritsch - a studio potter whose work is perfection (and is often influenced by music, painting, and architecture).

Pots by Elizabeth Fritsch

Runners-up: Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, Rachel Whiteread, Nan Goldin, Marina Abramović ... ?

In the final week of the 'isms' course we're getting an early look at The Perfect Nude exhibition, which runs from 29 March to 12 May at the Phoenix. A hundred artists have been invited to make paintings on the theme of The Perfect Nude. The aim is to "create a rich network of images that will establish a context for representation of the body in contemporary painting". Should be interesting.

The picture above is not from the exhibition, of course - it's an output from the life class I attended last year - far from Perfect, but I like to think that the subject would hit it off with the guy in the flyer above ...

Modern Art - Is this how it happened?

Finally, if you're looking for an online Modern Art History course, why not take a look at this one which does an excellent job of covering the development of art from the late 1800s to the 1960s, with plenty of examples and lecture slides. You can also read further in the book chapters referred to throughout (History of Modern Art by Arnason - a big and expensive book, but more reasonably priced secondhand copies of older editions are plentiful).

Tracey Emin - Love is What You Want

The Tracey Emin exhibition Love is What You Want finishes at the end of September at the Hayward Gallery on the South Bank. Unfortunately, I am unable to make it.

Emin is, to quote the Hayward publicity, one of Britain's most celebrated contemporary artists - The Queen of Britart, but not universally loved. A number of the exhibition reviews have been hostile or dismissive but I am a confirmed admirer.

Like most successful artists, in any field, she is a bit of a chancer but she is also charismatic and multitalented  (in contrast, I would suggest, to fellow YBA Damien Hirst). There is an excellent review of the exhibition and Emin's career to date in Nedira Yakir's isendyouthis blog.

The catalogue for the exhibition is a hefty volume which does a pretty good job of both pulling together the threads of Emin's work and reflecting both its diversity and its oneness. If, like me, you have missed out on seeing the exhibition then there is also an opportunity to see some of the highlights with Tim Marlow on Sky Arts.  But, if you can, why not get along to the Hayward before the end of August and judge for yourself?

Douglas Adams ... And thanks for all the fish

When I started this blog I was worried that I may not have enough to write about. The reality is that, despite regular blogging, I’ve struggled to keep up with events  - a sign of scraping the barrel bottom, perhaps?

Which is why I am only now writing about Towel Day. This day, the 25^th May, marks the untimely death in 2001 at 49 of Douglas Adams, best known as the author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The name "Towel Day" comes from the Guide, which defines the towel as the most important item a hitchhiker can have and then goes on for a page or so extolling the virtues of the towel and all the uses to which it can be put. The Towel Day website shows how widely Adams is read and, incidentally, shows people celebrating with their towels ...

Douglas was in my year at school and, although I did not know him at all well, he seemed a nice enough guy – although he was on a different intellectual plane to me and most of my classmates. At a careers fair he was the one earnestly discussing a career at the BBC, while I was meandering aimlessly from stand to stand, picking up bits of promotional stuff and wondering what job two mediocre A levels would equip me for.

I haven't read much of Hitchhiker’s Guide recently. I did watch the 1981 BBC adaption (Douglas’s overtures to the BBC had paid off) with some admiration – more for the cleverness of his constructed alternative world than anything else. I’ve only seen snippets of it since, but it does feel a bit dated – which is generally not good for a piece of science fiction, even a humorous one.

The film in 2005 still appeared dated but also lacked the warmth of the TV production.

But I did enjoy the adaption of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency that the BBC showed last year. Critics said that this wasn't very close to the original and I'm sure that the cast - Stephen Mangan, Helen Baxendale, and Darren Boyd - contributed much to its success. Nevertheless, I'm glad to say that the BBC is now filming a further three episodes, and these will appear on BBC4 later this year. Here's a link to the BBC preview to the pilot episode.

Incidentally, other luminaries from my year at school included Charlie Thomson of the Stuckists - who was in my class but I don’t recall being very ‘arty’; and Griff Rhys Jones (actually in the year below, although we probably overlapped in the sixth form) – who I don’t recall being especially 'funny'.

Tracey Emin, Charlie Thomson and Billy Childish
(before they fell out and Tracey became rich and famous)

Both seemed nice enough guys then, and they haven't done badly since. Griff got a share of £62m when he sold Hat Trick Productions, and Charlie is a fairly (in)famous artist - although he seems more than a little nerdy in this video on the Stuckists website.

Anyway, to get back to Douglas Adams: Although he achieved a lot in his life, the biggest impact on me was to make me think – pretty much for the first time – that we are all getting older and are all mortal. Heavy, man ...