Art resources for teachers

A streak of playful wit and winning charm runs through the 2013 Turner prize shortlist – not least from what the chair of the jury, the Tate Britain director, Penelope Curtis, called the "black humour" and "macabre quality" of the work of David Shrigley.

Jaco Sieberhagen’s exhibition, “The Carnival (No dogs allowed)”, though nowhere nearly as in-your-face as Brett Murray’s “Hail to the Thief”, which featured “The Spear”, is arguably far more critical of the current regime’s iniquities and two-facedness. Yet the official response to the sculptor’s work has been a profound silence. J BROOKS SPECTOR examines the startlingly different responses to two exhibitions.

Across the street from that now infamous gallery space where Brett Murray’s The Spear became the object of so much angry dialogue, debate and, ultimately, desecration last year; this time around, it is another gallery, Artspace, that is hosting its own display of dangerous art. Jaco Sieberhagen’s sculptures are now on display, grouped together in a show entitled: “The Carnival (No dogs allowed)”. This clearly seems a wink-wink-nudge-nudge reference to a certain recent comment by the South African president about the now-misaligned relationship between dogs and men, juxtaposed with the human carnival that is contemporary South African politics.

Jonathan Kyriakou photographs from the centre of Cape Town to Macassar

Duet of politics and money, Tretchikoff’s Chinese Girl comes home, and the best of Daily SA Art News

Marhsmallow Laser Feast is a London-based creative studio that harnesses technology to create visually striking installations and shows around the central theme of light. The studio’s latest project is “Laser Forest,” an interactive musical instrument made up of 150 musical “trees” made of rods and lasers. The Creators Project recently profiled the studio and “Laser Forest” in this article and video.

If you head to SFMOMA’s café on Third Street in San Francisco, you can order up some Damien Hirst “Amylamine” lemon velvet cake, Donald Judd tomato soup, and Mark Rothko Toast. The Rothko Toast comes painted with apricot butter along the top, and wild blueberry jam along the bottom, creating an edible imitation of Rothko’s painting known as “No. 14, 1960.” The paintinghangs at SFMOMA, the West Coast’s first museum devoted to 20th century art.

Five years ago Polaroid announced that they would no longer make analog instamatic film. At that moment, if one listened carefully, one could almost hear some of the 20th century’s most famous artists wail in despair, even from the grave. Ansel Adams loved Polaroid and shot some of his famous Yosemite images in that format first.

But a technique with that kind of following doesn’t die off easily. Two ardent Polaroid fans—ardent enough to actually attend the closure of a Polaroid factory in the Netherlands—met and came up with a plan to save the factory and Polaroid instant film. They called their plan the Impossible Project. They leased one of the Dutch factory buildings and eventually fired up the machines again, turning out new instant film.

Lucky for us. Artists like David Hockney have long made beautiful use of Polaroid instant photos to construct cubist collages. One of the best at this is the Italian photographer Maurizio Galimberti who creates terrific celebrity portraits using a Polaroid.

Ai Weiwei is the most important artist in the world right now, a visionary who is defying an entire political system. He is a hero. And yet, is he actually an artist at all? Has his art vanished into the storm of polemic?

You don't have to go to an art gallery to encounter Ai Weiwei – indeed, it might be the last place to look. London theatre audiences are currently admiring him in the play The Arrest of Ai Weiwei, which is based on a book about his ordeal called Hanging Man. There's the film, Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry. And last but definitely not least there is the powerful voice of the man himself, constantly needling China's authoritarianism and anyone in the west who apologises for it.

Tonight, windy and desolate in downtown Johannesburg, marks the opening of Mikhael Subotzky’s new exhibition Retinal Shift. At the age of 32, the Standard Bank Young Artist of 2012 has become an important, uh, ‘voice’ in South African art photography.

Susan Sontag once wrote: “To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them that they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed.”

And through his new body of work, characterized by documentations of sport and crime, mementos symbolizing the subtle heart and mindless degradation of our society, Subotzky has beautifully violated, contained and stuck up on the wall the characters and ideas that make contemporary urban South Africa unique. Unlike his previous work, such as the unflinching record of the squalor found in Beaufort West or the sullen humiliation of Pollsmoor Prison captured in Die Vier Hoeke; with Retinal Shift he has crafted a dense and complex series of work.

This weeks Last Sunday - Samora Chapman takes us down the back alleys and inbetween the sky rises of Durban. Some great shots...or perhaps that's just me :)

Considering the possibility of a truly proletarian art, the great English literary critic William Empson once wrote, “the reason an English audience can enjoy Russian propagandist films is that the propaganda is too remote to be annoying.” Perhaps this is why American artists and bohemians have so often taken to the political iconography of far-flung regimes, in ways both romantic and ironic. One nation’s tedious socialist realism is another’s radical exotica.

But do U.S. cultural exports have the same effect? One need only look at the success of our most banal branding overseas to answer in the affirmative. Yet no one would think to add Abstract Expressionist painting to a list that includes fast food and Walt Disney products. Nevertheless, the work of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning wound up as part of a secret CIA program during the height of the Cold War, aimed at promoting American ideals abroad.

We meet the curator and several sculptors currently exhibiting at the Nirox sculpture park. Trust us, you won’t want to miss this.

A man named Innocent stands at the small clothing shop he keeps inside a market in Abidjan, Ivory Coast on January 15, 2013. “I want to be independent financially. I want to be I independent...

Which best describes your museum-going experience? Inspiration and spiritual refreshment? Or a soul crushing attempt to fight your way past the hoards there for the latest blockbuster exhibit, with a too-heavy bag and a whining, foot sore companion in tow?

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to lose yourself in contemplation of a single work? What about that giant one at the top of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Grand Staircase? For every visitor who pauses to take it in, another thousand stream by with hardly a glance.

The above commentary by curator of Italian paintings, Xavier Salomon, may well turn Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s The Triumph of Marius into one of the Met’s hottest attractions. It’s often difficult for the average museum-goer to understand what the deal is in one of these densely populated, 19th century oils. Salomon supplies the needed historical context—general Gaius Marius parading captive Numidian king Jugurtha through the streets upon his triumphal return to Rome.