Credo / Mark Oliver

Coming of Age: American Art 1850s-1950s

Edward Hopper

 

Frederic Remington

This was an exhibition I saw a while ago at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, which has a nice cafe. I wondered about writing a blog about the cafe's in art galleries. I once had quite an embarrassing exchange with a guy in the lobby of the Met in New York.

Me: "Do I need to buy a ticket if I just want to go into the cafe?"

Guy on door: (frowns) "I guess not ... "

From Russia

This is a very belated post but a while ago I saw the Royal Academy's blockbuster From Russia show; I had earlier gone to St Petersburg and Moscow with its curator and other assorted hacks to look at similar works that were going to be in the show. This is my main piece about it here - a travel piece about things to look out for when on an art jaunt to Russia.

I saw the RA show on a day off and after a very expensive but rather perfect breakfast omelet at the Wolsey (a sophisticated start for a sophisticated day!). I was very grateful for my press ticket as there was a huge queue (it was really crowded inside as well). It was a very good exhibition, and definitely worth seeing the Dance, though I still prefer Music:


I really enjoyed some of the art and artists which I had not heard about while on my trip. I loved Derain's Man with a newspaper.


I was also really interested in the room with a Tatlin towerand a great film showing his plan for an enormous tower in St Petersburg. My friend Danny pointed me to this link which has great examples of huge Soviet artworks that were never made.

The exhibition ends with an image of Malevicth on his death bed (which I can't find online) that Waldemar Januszczak describes as "an exceptionally touching ending to a particularly exciting show".

'A conductor of invisible orchestras'

Wandering around London's Tate Modern this week on a week off from work, I was really struck by a video installation by the Brazilian artist Rivane Neuenschwand and filmmaker Cao Guimaraes entitled Ash Wednesday/Epilogue. Basically it shows close-ups of ants picking up sugar-coated confetti which has been thrown on the forest floor. Ash Wednesday is apparently the day after Brazil's main Carnival parties.

I quite often wander into a video installation room and am back out again in seconds but this was really arresting and I sat and watched the whole thing. I just found a piece about the artist on Frieze.com which describes the 2006 film as an "absurd, mesmerizing, faintly magical depiction of epic achievement in miniature". The article goes on:   

Work and artistic creation become interchangeable with celebration: the title alludes to carnival, and the sprightly soundtrack is a samba played with matchsticks on a table-top. The video opens with a single ant dragging a piece of gold confetti, then another ant with a blue one. We then see two struggling to get a grip on some confetti and another pair squabbling over their find. More and more ants, and bright circles, become visible, some pieces of confetti disperse on the ground and others are waved like flags as they are toted from place to place. The ants perform amazing feats – racing up steep cliffs while lugging confetti ten times their size. Eventually we see the insects’ destination – a crevice in the earth – and colourful disks disappearing into its shadows before a fade to black.

There is also an article in the Washington Post about the film and Neuenschwand explains that she used a "salami flavor -- and honey mixed with water" to attarct the ants. She goes on:

"There's a very important reference in literature here, in the book "Macunaíma" by Mário de Andrade, to leaf-cutter ants. One of his sentences is, "Lots of leaf-cutter ants, and little health, are the evils of Brazil." It’s a very famous quote in Brazilian culture.

In the United States or Europe, I think confetti is used for other events, too, but here it's mainly for Carnival. There's a sense that you have something colorful and playful like confetti, but in contraposition you have those ants working hard. The ants are kind of carrying the leftovers of a celebration. There's Carnival, and then afterward, the melancholic aspect of the last day of Carnival -- it's the sort of contradictory feelings that we have here in Brazil."

Less intellectually, it also made me think that it would be a great Sony Bravio advert. Watching it, you can almost imagine Jose Gonzalez singing.

St Petersburg and Moscow

 

 

Russia flickr set

Genuine fakes and fake fakes

I recently visited an exhibition which the Metropolitan police put on at the V& A to educate art industry people about techniques used by art forgers.

It was interesting to discover that the head of the Met's unit recognised that some forged art works had value and ancient forgeries had in themselves become valuable. Other people I spoke to there hated the romance of the idea of the art forgers and made the point that it could ruin someone's life if they invested in an art work as a pension and then found it was worthless.

It was very interesting to see some of the materials which crooked art dealer John Drewe used to create false provenance for art works - such as adding invented art works by real artists to catalogues at the British Museum. The Met exhibition had a period typewriter he used - for authenticity's sake - and rubber stamps he created to forge official documents.

A while ago, Euan Ferguson wrote a good piece after interviewing John Myatt, the artist who Drewe persuaded to create these forged art works. Myatt now has a bona fide business rather wonderfully called Genuine Fakes in which he does copied art works for order. (Before Ferguson's piece a friend who knows Myatt had told me how he was selling copies to celebrities and I thought it was a story but regretably did not act on it quick enough - drats).

The detective I spoke to at the Met exhibition said he had gone to one living artist to say he had found some forgeries of his work and the artist apparently did not care and was kind of flattered. He did not say who it was. My money is on Damien Hirst.

Miguel Calderon paintings

Thinking about The Royal Tenenbaums reminded me about these painings, by Mexican artist and writer Miguel Calderon, the first two of which are on the walls of a room in one of the film's scenes. Years ago I went to a screening of the film which director Wes Anderson was at and he joked that he put the paintings - which he owns - into the film to increase their value.

Goodness knows what is supposed to be going on in the paintings, but you can't deny that they are powerful and cinematic and, well, "suggestive of story".