sculpture 1

Alastair Sooke reveals the astonishing range of our medieval sculpture, from the imposing masterpieces of our Gothic cathedrals to the playful misericords underneath church stalls.

He shows how sculpture casts a new light on medieval Britain, a far more sophisticated, fun-loving and maverick place than we in the modern world commonly believe. But despite the technical and emotional power of these works, the notion of a 'sculptor' didn't even exist; most carving of the time was done by teams of itinerant masons and artisans working for the Church. The names of some, like William Berkeley, are known but most are lost to history.

This first golden age came to an end with Henry VIII's Reformation of the Church, unleashing a wave of destruction from which it would take centuries to recover.

Gustavo Hernandez

bbc sculpture 2

By the middle of the 18th century, Britain was in possession of a vast empire. It required a new way of seeing ourselves and so we turned to the statues of ancient Greece and Rome to project the secular power and glory of the British Empire.

The message was clear: Britain was the new Rome, our generals and politicians on a par with the heroes of the ancient world. The flood of funds, both public and private, into sculptural projects unleashed a new golden age, yet it was also a remarkably unorthodox one. The greatest sculptors of the 18th and 19th centuries were those mavericks who bucked prevailing trends - geniuses like John Flaxman, Francis Chantrey and Alfred Gilbert.

Alastair Sooke tells the story of these mavericks and reveals the extraordinary technical breakthroughs behind their key works: carving in marble with a pointer machine and the primal power of the lost-wax technique.

bbc sculpture

'Sculpture has changed more in the last hundred years,' says Alastair Sooke, 'than in the previous thirty thousand.' The third and last episode of the series tells the dramatic story of a century of innovation, scandal, shock and creativity.

It begins with the moment at the turn of the 20th century when young sculptors ceased visiting the Elgin Marbles at the British Museum and looked instead at the 'primitive' works of Africa and the Pacific islands. The result was an artistic revolution spearheaded by Eric Gill and Jacob Epstein that would climax in the anti-sculptural gestures of Gilbert & George and Damien Hirst.

Yet for all the provocation and occasional excesses of conceptualism, sculpture has never enjoyed such popularity. From the memorials of World War One to the landmarks of Antony Gormley and Rachel Whiteread, sculpture remains the art form that speaks most directly and powerfully to the nation.

The programme climaxes with a series of encounters between Alastair and leading sculptors Damien Hirst, Rachel Whiteread, Antony Gormley and Anthony Caro.

Gustavo Hernandez
gustavo@gustavo.bz

Museum needs £200,000 for Marc Quinn’s blood portrait | The Art Newspaper

Museum needs £200,000 for Marc Quinn’s blood portraitThe National Portrait Gallery is hoping to buy the artist’s latest version of the work for £350,000

By Martin Bailey | From issue 195, October 2008
Published online 2 Oct 08 (News)

LONDON. The National Portrait Gallery (NPG) is hoping to buy Marc Quinn’s Self, a frozen sculpture of the artist’s head, made out of his own blood. Quinn produces a new version every five years. The most recent, dating from 2006, is being offered to the NPG by the artist’s gallery White Cube for £350,000. Its open market value is said to be over £1m.

Quinn uses ten pints of his own blood for each self-portrait head. He told us that he needs over a year to produce sufficient blood. The Art Newspaper has tracked down the other three sculptures which have been produced so far.

The original Self, dating from 1991, is one of the iconic works made by the so-called YBAs (Young British Artists). It was first bought by Charles Saatchi, who is believed to have paid £13,000 for the work. It was then shown at the Royal Academy in the collector’s “Sensation” exhibition in 1997 which travelled to Berlin and New York.

Stories circulated after Saatchi’s marriage to food writer Nigella Lawson that builders improving the couple’s kitchen had inadvertently switched off the refrigeration unit, melting the work. Quinn dismisses this as an “urban myth”. In 2006 Saatchi sold his Self to Steve Cohen, the Connecticut-based hedge fund billionaire and major collector.

Quinn’s second Self, made in 1996, was bought by Texan collectors Cindy and Howard Rachofsky. It is now partly owned with the Dallas Museum of Art (where it is currently in storage), and it will ultimately remain there as a full gift. The 2001 Self belongs to Korean collector Kim Chang-il (“C.I. Kim”), who has a private museum in a shopping complex he owns in Cheonan, outside Seoul.

The portrait the NPG wants to acquire was made in 2006, depicting the artist with noticeably more mature features than the 1991 original. The Art Fund has offered £100,000 and the NPG has raised a further £50,000, which means an extra £200,000 is needed. Chief curator Jacob Simon describes it as an “iconic” work of the YBAs.

Long-term preservation will pose a challenge for a gallery which acquires for perpetuity. A back-up power supply is enclosed within the stainless steel base, which houses the refrigeration unit. In a worst-case scenario, NPG director Sandy Nairne says the artist has agreed that the head “can be melted, recast and refrozen”.

Quinn says he would like to see all four heads brought together for an exhibition, emphasising the change in his body over time. For this, he was influenced by Rembrandt’s numerous painted self-portraits, done throughout his life. Quinn’s sculptures can travel, making an exhibition feasible, although it is a complicated procedure with the frozen heads being packed in dry ice.

The artist plans to continue to make a new Self every five years, until he is incapable of doing so. “The final one will be done after I die, with blood drained out of my body,” he told The Art Newspaper.


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via theartnewspaper.com

 

The naked truth about the British Art Show | Art

Naked truth about the British Art Show

british art show
Something for the girls: its a naked boy on a bench with a naked flame. What more could Roger Hiorns say of his Untitled?
british art showUgly mug: Milena Dragicevics Supplicant 13 if unknowable to her, even more unknowable to us Nothing wasted: Sarah Lucass NUD 3 what to do with your old tightsFamily heirloom: Andrew Gray aged 7 under Inges Patchwork Quilt by Alastair Gray, his father, the oldest man in the show

 

 

By Brian Sewell

17 Feb 2011........In 1979, the British Art Show (BAS), in spite of a slightly shaky start, seemed a sound and sensible idea. Every five years we were to stare into the goldfish bowl and distinguish between clear water and the mephitic fish-shit at its bottom. We knew then that we had a number of artists worthy of international reputation since the end of the war in 1945 and that London had trounced the School of Paris into oblivion, but there were grave uncertainties about the generation from which the new Moore and Sutherland must rise. The old certainties then lay in the hands of Caro, Freud and Auerbach, but even of those we were not quite sure, for the promise of Hockney had already proved fugitive, the promise of Procktor was quite gone, and far too many proudly presented as The Future by Bryan Robertson and John Russell in Private View, their seminal tome of 1965, had in the 14 years since, fizzled and sputtered to a standstill. A scrupulous survey of who was in, who out and who coming up on the outside might have clarified our hopes and opinions, but the very first BAS, with over a hundred artists in it, had the air of uncritical pluralism and inclusivity for its own sake, and proved to be just another rambling exhibition. As it was not shown in London, few saw it, fewer cared, and it had no influence.In 1984, BAS2 had a fashionable Arts Council slant to it but, again seen only in the provinces, was a great thing of no importance. Only in 1990 did the BAS return to London and the Hayward Gallery, by then reduced to 42 artists, of whom three were soon to be nominated for the Turner Prize; in this, at least, it was Art Now, but in claiming that it was "the most controversial exhibition of the decade" its curators were impertinent. Then it spread its wings again and in its absence for two whole decades, its London audience has to all intents and purposes forgotten that there ever was a BAS. It was damned silly of the Hayward Gallery, to which the show "belongs", to let loose its grip and allow London to be deprived of it. I know all the arguments for sharing shows of every kind with the far-flung provinces and am wholly in sympathy with them, but London provides far the largest audience and should never have been eliminated from the circuit. It is in London, more than anywhere, that continuity matters for both the artist and the informed critical audience. Enthusiastically and unreservedly I welcome the return of the BAS and hope that five years hence I shall again see it in the Hayward.There is, alas, not much for me in BAS7. In his foreword to the catalogue the Hayward's director, Ralph Rugoff (who is unlikely to have seen any previous BAS), remarks that "changes in curatorial approaches and attitudes have radically affected what art means". They have indeed. The curator has become the artist. The artist needs only the junk yard, the junk shop and the local branch of Curry's to discover equipment, materials and objects that, at first glance unrelated to any aesthetic endeavour, can be converted into art by the interpretation of the curator - a few words of mumbo-jumbo in the catalogue and the Arts Council or the Tate will buy it. The two curators of BAS7, one from the Hayward, the other from the Henry Moore Institute, have rejected the basic but useful convention of the comprehensive survey and imposed a theme - In the Days of the Comet - potentially a Bed of Procrustes on which every exhibit must be made to fit, not by chopping off the legs or stretching them, but by Procrustes' own ingenious curatorial elasticity. The intellectual compression and extensibility in apology and exegesis of the show's twin curators is almost Jesuitical, their calling on authoritative sources worthy of doctors of theology.Their comet is derived from the title of a novel by HG Wells that sank without a trace of interest or influence, his vein of science fiction exhausted. That it was published in 1906 but set in 1910 immediately suggests that they too are looking a little into the future, beyond their bailiwick of British Art in the quinquennium 2005-2010, but there is nothing on view in the Hayward that is not dull-mindedly rooted in the recent past. Given the theme of the comet and the superstitions attached to it as a portent of change and its almost dependable regularity in orbiting, the chosen artists have largely ignored it - the curators thus shift their ground and argue with Jesuitical casuistry that the comet was less a theme imposed than "a set of coordinates and a method [means?] of navigation".They also argue that as a comet is not constrained by national boundaries, the Britishness of a British Art Show need not be British in any sense that the BNP might recognise - nor should it be, for what now passes for art is very much in international idioms devoid of national characteristics. But why continue to call this the British Art Show rather than Art in Britain Now?When the curators go on to admit that "art of the present requires no specialist knowledge; we are all experts in the present", they are in danger of explaining themselves away. If they are not experts, why are they in charge of this exhibition? Why should we believe anything they say of it or its exhibits? Old fossil that they may think me, they have given me equality and I shall use it to declare that nothing in this exhibition is art as I understand it. The inept practitioners of video and film should be packed off to the fields of cinema and television to see if their pretentious amateur productions, when deprived of the label "art", hack it as information or entertainment. Was there ever an "art" of more selfish form in terms of time and space? All take whole rooms and one exhibit in this genre endures for 24 hours, others of the ilk requiring a mere six hours and 45 minutes between them; has the Hayward made provision for overnight visitors?There is no painting here of any interest or quality - indeed, one might well argue that to attract the interest of the contemporary curator a painter must be technically maladroit and bungling and the daubing meaningless. Varda Caivano's muddied canvases make the point, yet here are praised as "fields of vision communicated with the least possible means and the greatest possible effort". Whoopee! Milena Dragicevic paints ugly heads so "unknowable" even to her that she wonders how they reached the canvas. Triffic! Michael Fullerton claims to be in debt to Reynolds, but his portraits could surely never scrape into the National Portrait Gallery's increasingly dire annual award for portraiture. Wicked! The best that the curators can say for Phoebe Unwin is that her paint, when applied to the canvas, "often visibly becomes painting". Shit and molasses! What is it when it doesn't become painting? And who decides?As for sculpture, Sarah Lucas puts it neatly with her declaration that as well as standing up, "a dick with two balls" can do and be everything else expected of the sculptor. "Michelangelo?" I murmur, "Bernini? Rodin?" With Roger Hiorns and Wolfgang Tillmans she was in BAS6 in 2005, and all three are now brought back into the light described as "major artists currently making the best work of their careers." In Lucas's NUD I see nothing but a repellent variation of an obsession first revealed by Charles Saatchi in 1997, foul flesh in visceral embrace. Hiorns, the dominant contributor to the show, is an ingenious fellow given to stuffing mind-controlling drugs into aircraft engines and growing copper sulphate crystals in council flats, and in Athens he smeared semen on the spotlights of the Acropolis.Speculation on the how of this last jape must render us incredulous - even with the help of a hundred fifth-formers in an all-boys public school And this was sculpture? Well, yes, quite clearly so to Sarah Lucas as well as to the curators who write movingly of his "visible and invisible tools of manipulation". In the Hayward his sculptures, all untitled "transformations", are disappointingly untransformed, the Mercedes engine a Mercedes engine, the epoxy resin girl a model from a Topshop window, the naked boy sharing a bench with a naked flame, exactly that - Untitled.As is always the way in the world of contemporary art, the curators present their chosen artists as thinker, seer, philosopher and shaman to whom we must bend the acquiescent knee. We should do nothing of the kind. There is no wisdom here. The curators' choice of hapless artists and their wretched art is utterly conventional, rooted in the narrow orthodoxy and even narrower patronage of the Arts Council and the Tate, absolutely safe for aspiring young professionals with their eyes on the ladder of preferment. Here this is nothing that in some sense we have not seen before, that in concept and execution veers from Saatchi-Serota precedents; the names change, but the ideas remain the same, the execution growing shoddier. Nothing in this show is beautiful, intense, deep or desirable, nothing is even decently well-made. It tells a truth, however - that the contemporary art now institutional in Britain is a thing of infantile decadence - but not the whole truth; I fervently believe that curators of independent mind could find an altogether other truth founded, not on fad and fashion, but on honest connoisseurship.

 

 

British Art Show 7: In the Days of the Comet is at the Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, SE1 until April 17. Daily 10am-6pm. Admission 8, concs available.

 

ART.. An Orgy of the rich?

Protesters' 15 minutes of fame at Warhol auction

Rob Parsons and Godfrey Barker
16 Feb 2011
Protesters hijacked an auction in the West End where million of pounds of contemporary art was being sold to hold a demonstration against cuts to public services.Nearly a dozen intruders set off alarms and threw fake �50 notes in the air at Sotheby's before unfurling a large banner bearing the words "orgy of the rich".They started their protest last night with the sound of moaning as Andy Warhol's Nine Multicolored Marilyns was unveiled, while others invaded the press seats and made similar noises, boosted by sirens and alarms.They were quickly evicted, although other protesters were holding a demonstration outside the building in New Bond Street featuring a mocked-up auction of public services workers.The demonstrators, many of whom came in costume and brought along picture frames as props, came from protest groups including Arts Against Cuts, UK Uncut and Space Hijackers. They held up posters with messages including "1 Warhol = 1,222 tuitions."The protesters said they targeted the auction house's contemporary art auction because of the high prices commanded for contemporary art while cuts were being made to public services.The Warhol piece was sold for �3.2 million, while Gerhard Richter's Abstraktes Bild went for �7.2 million.Auctioneer Tobias Meyer had just proclaimed the Warhol piece as lot 36 when the moaning started, stopping proceedings as the 1,000-strong room turned to look at the banner.A protester calling himself Matt said: "It is obscene that the amount of money being spent at this auction could be the difference between having some form of local services which exists in the community and not."Belgian collector Mark Vanmoerkerke said the auction house took the interruption in its stride. He said: "It's fun to see people stand up for what they believe in. An orgy of the rich? They're not exactly wrong."The sale concluded with 95 per cent of works sold and works by David Hockney and Antony Gormley sold close to the top of their estimates. A total of �44.4 million of art was sold.A pile of hand-painted porcelain sunflower seeds by Ai Weiwei - like those on display at Tate Modern - sold to a telephone bidder for �349,250, or about �3.50 per seed.