Art resources for teachers

Bronwyn Lce breathes new meaning into 
the detritus of 
once-living things.

"This exhibition is an answer to that. Resuscitate is specifically about the fact that after some time creating these works I started a little private ritual where I would collapse them afterwards. It became a little funeral service for the work and I began to recognise that this was a part of my process that needed to move out of private space and into the conversation with the viewer." 

The show displays a series of installations either in the process of collapse or in their collapsed state. "They are works that I have made for various spaces and reasons and now it's their second life."

Alexander Calder’s Calder’s Circus, a toy theater piece the artist constructed between 1926 and 1931, and performed for decades, has the rag bag appeal of a much-repaired stuffed animal who’s loved into a state of baldness. This charm presented conservators at the Whitney Museum of American Art with a unique set of challenges.

On Monday James Cuno (CEO of The Getty Trust) published an announcement of the Getty’s Open Content Program, which has just made available over 4600 high-resolution images of the museum’s collection freely available in the public domain. You can download them, modify them, distribute them — do what you please with them.

We all thrilled to Johannes Vermeer painting his best-known portrait as dramatized in Peter Webber’s 2003 film Girl with a Pearl Earring. But for every heightened, scintillating feature film built around a well-known artist, there exists — or should exist, anyway — a documentary that examines the work itself in greater detail. For such a counterpart to the aforementioned Colin Firth/Scarlett Johansson vehicle, I nominate Joe Krakora’s 2001 Vermeer: Master of Light, a rich look at the paintings of the well-known visual chronicler of seventeenth-century middle-class Dutch life, whose use of color could reach pretty formidable heights of scintillation itself. Providing its narration, we have a certain Meryl Streep.

What looks like a giant pile of rubble outside the Shangri-La Hotel in downtown Vancouver is actually an art installation by Chinese art collective MadeIn Company titled Calm. All is not as it seems. Pass by in a hurry and you’ll hardly notice this giant pile of broken cement blocks, grass, and construction waste, but stand next to it for just a moment and you’ll notice something almost imperceptible: the entire pile of rubble is moving, slightly undulating atop a giant hidden reservoir of water.

Spanish muralist and street artist Escif hails from Valencia, Spain but is actively globally with recent works popping up throughout Canada, Italy, and France. His use of subdued colors and simple lines helps the artist communicate his humorous and often direct commentary on capitalism, politics, the economy and other sensitive social issues. His work is much more about the message than style.

Recently installed at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, this gigantic Gordian Knot was constructed by Brazilian artist Henrique Oliveira who is known for his near complete organic transformations of interior and exterior spaces. Titled Baitogogo, the work depicts an architectural grid of columns and support beams that seem to morph into a chaotic tangle of branches or roots.

If you like reading about visual art but don't like spending the considerable sums required to build your own library of vintage exhibition catalogues, feel free to borrow from another collector.

Visitors to a stretch of Northern California coastline near San Francisco may stumble upon a piano or two, thanks to the ongoing guerrilla art project “Sunset Piano Opus Two for Twelve Pianos” by artist Mauro Ffortissimo. Since late June, twelve pianos have been installed by Ffortissimo and his team in scenic outdoor locations along the coastline of San Mateo County. The pianos are expected to be available to the public for the next two weeks, depending on the response by authorities (the project is not officially sanctioned).

After the waning of abstract expressionism, Robert Rauschenberg’s exuberant prints, paintings, sculptures, and three-dimensional collages he called “Combines” rejuvenated the New York art world and helped bring pop art to prominence, anticipating Warhol’s experiments. And now students of twentieth-century American art can connect with all of the artist’s work in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection without setting foot in the Bay area, thanks to SFMOMA’s Rauschenberg Research Project, which allows users to download high res images of the museum’s Rauschenbergs.

Today, you can start watching The Art of Punk, a series of documentaries from MOCAtv, the video channel of Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art. Its trailer, which appears at the top of the post, emphasizes its focus on, literally, the visual art of punk: its posters, its album art, its T-shirts, and even — un-punk as this may sound — its logos.

Back in April, London-based artist Ron Mueck unveiled three new photo-realistic figure sculptures at his solo exhibition at Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris. Each sculpture focuses on the relationship between a pair of people—two teenagers, an elderly couple, and a woman and child. For more on Mueck’s work, see our previous post and this making-of video. Mueck’s Paris exhibition is open through September 29, 2013.

Kudzanai Chiurai's exhibition titled "16SNLV" encourages people to scrutinise their reactions to everyday brutality.

If we started out by apprehending what we see in the media through Kudzanai Chiurai’s 16SNLV, rather than the other way around, I think we would better grasp the nature of a violence-soaked world. With his latest work the artist disrupts the steady stream of graphically violent images and descriptions all around us, poking a sharp stick into how society increasingly shuts down in response to public violence.

The reigning Standard Bank Young Artist of the Year for Visual Arts, Mary Sibande, talks purple, the end of Sophie and Lauryn Hill’s influence on her. She chats with Percy Mabandu on the back of her award and new work, which premiered in Grahamstown.

It seems to me that Georgia O’Keeffe tends to get pegged as a regional Southwestern painter or as the woman who painted close-ups of flowers that look suspiciously like female anatomy, or both—a casualty of marketing for the dorm-room set. As in many a stereotype, there’s some truth in both over-simplifications, but O’Keeffe was, of course, much more, as she was more than the passionate younger wife and frequent subject of Alfred Stieglitz, though that is also a true and lovely story. Like any artist—like any human being, perhaps—Georgia O’Keeffe does not reduce into a single portrait.

In this series of photographs by Carl Warner, human bodies have been contorted, lit, and manipulated to form expansive landscapes reminiscent of barren deserts and mountains. The London-based photographer who might be best known for his Foodscapes, says that he shoots all of the forms in his studio to focus attention on “one person’s body, creating a sense of place so that a body that is lived in becomes a place to live.” The images are then digitally pieced together using Photoshop

Flickr Finds returns with its 32nd installment here on Colossal. These are just a few of my favorite photos seen on Flickr the last few weeks, I urge you to click through and learn more about all the different photographers.

Korean artist U-Ram Choe lives and works in Seoul where he creates highly ornate kinetic sculptures that mimic forms and motions found in nature. Choe uses various metals, motors, gears, and custom CPU boards to control the precise motions of each sculpture that are at times perfectly synchronized and other times completely random. With names like “Unicus – cavum ad initium” and “Arbor Deus Pennatus” it’s clear the artist treats each new work like a brand new species.

From Pauline Gutter to Da Vinci's anatomical drawings and the revised White Paper on the arts...lots to read in the August edition of the SA Art Times

Today, digitally empowered to take, view, and share a photograph in the span of seconds, we think nothing of the phrase “ïnstant camera.” But to celebrated Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, who died in 1986 after living almost his entire life in the Soviet Union, the technology came as a revelation. He had, of course, to use a primitive Polaroid camera, but, Tarkovsky being Tarkovsky, his aesthetic sense still came through its little square, self-developing frames loud and clear — or rather, it came through, rich, pensive, solemn, and autumnal. In 2006, Thames & Hudson published Instant Light, a book collecting “a selection of color Polaroids the filmmaker took from 1979 to 1984 of his home, family, and friends in Russia and of places he visited in Italy,” and you can see some of these images on the blog Poemas del río Wang.

Morrel Shilenge returns to the rural village of Xigalo where he grew up, and faces the emotions and images that come with the return.

"This is Xigalo, a rural village near the Kruger National Park, Punda Maria Gate in Malamulele, Limpopo. It is a typical rural South African village. Most of the people that I observed and captured here are my family and neighbours. This is a visual memoir of Xigalo, I wanted to capture what I felt, not just what I saw while revisiting the village I grew up in as a young African male."

Every day thousands of hands stretch out along commuter routes across Gauteng speaking a silent language of taxi gestures. Developed from necessity, and with ingenuity, this silent exchange of signs is the fundamental unit of communication for millions of minibus taxi commuters. Artist Susan Woolf is probably one of the few people who can signal any destination in the province. Petite and blonde, with a pixie-like appearance and a gently charming manner, she is also the least likely to be identified in a line-up as having frequented taxi ranks from Bree Street to Roodepoort.

Last weekend the National Mall in Washington, D.C. was covered in one million handcrafted human bones in the collaborative art project, “One Million Bones.” The installation served as a “visible petition” against ongoing genocide and mass atrocities in Sudan, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burma, Somalia, and Syria. The bones, made of paper maché, clay, and other materials, were made over the past 3 years by 100,000 people in 30 countries. “One Million Bones” was created by The Art of Revolution.

Volume 28 of Hi-Fructose: The New Contemporary Art Magazine has recently been announced and will feature brilliant artwork created by skilled contemporary artists from around the world. You can preview and pre-order a copy of this quarterly art publication online, which is set to arrive in July 2013.