Get a little slice of history this Thursday afternoon with with this weeks VAC Video!
Gary Winogrand, once coined, “the central photographer of his generation” by John Szarkowski, the former director of photography of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, was a Jewish Bronx-born photographer and one of the pioneers of what is now known as street photography.
Winogrand is mostly known for his portrayal of the diversity of American life, from shooting the Bronx zoo and Coney Island in the sixties to the bohemian lifestyle of our own Venice Beach in the eighties.
Garry Winogrand: “Venice Beach, 1982″
Check out this seven minute “mini documentary” on Winogrand shot on Ocean Front walk and learn why he hated the term “street photography.”
Blogged by: Gabrielle Wooden
Gabrielle Wooden is a writer currently residing in Southern California. Currently she is a blogger for the Venice Art Crawl and is working on her first novel entitled Blue Barcelona at UCLA’S Extension Writers Program.
As we continue with our new year, we will be launching the VAC with a big bang– that means, more artist interviews, more events to look forward to, and of course, MORE VENICE ART!
Check out this interview that VAC board member Nicole Muyingo conducted with Venice Based Artist, Mark X Farina!
1. Who are you and what do you do?
Mark X Farina- Pop Artist, Reverse Engineer, Roma Gypsy.
2. In your words how would you define art?
Anything that sparks a reaction.
3. At what age did you realize that you were creatively talented?
I’m still not convinced I have any real talent, but I received a lot of art training, and I know I’m creative.
4. What’s your background?
Studied advertising and the media’s effects on people, but I love art and sports.
5. What materials/paints do you generally work with?
Anything available.
6. What art do you most identify with?
The conceptual scene that formed from the 1960’s – that’s a big area, but I really sync with that era/ movement.
7. Describe a real-life situation that inspired you?
Took a phone shot of the beach sunset one night, then tried to paint it.
8. What is an artistic outlook on life?
Observe (often through dark sunglasses) and report.
9. What superpower would you have and why?
Wow that’s a great question with so many possible answers for me, but I still dream I can fly, not very well, which sometimes abruptly wakes me up.
10. If you could live anywhere in the world where would it be?
Not sure, I’m still exploring.
11. Name three artists you’d like to be compared to:
Moe, Larry and Curly.
12. WHAT is your ‘method’?
Work fast, cure slow, destroy before collecting dust.
13. What is your preferred subject and why?
I like gradations and innuendo.
14. What’s the best thing about being an artist?
Freedom of expression.
15. What’s the worst thing about being an artist?
Self-criticism.
16. What advice do you have for aspiring artists?
Do the work, open the door- if you make it, someone will check it out and let you know.
Check out more of Mark X Farina’s work on his website and tumblr!
www.mxfarina.com / http://www.mxfarina.tumblr.com
Photo Credit: Mark X Farina
Photo: Chris Detrick/The Salt Lake Tribune, via Associated PressA Banksy work in Park City, Utah, in 2011.
It may be time for Banksy, the anonymous British graffiti artist, to consider television. A sitcom, perhaps, or a detective show, or maybe reality TV. His politically pointed satirical stencil works seem to be everywhere in Britain and the United States, after all, and things are always happening to them.
Banksy graffiti
When they appear, their social message is quickly decoded and discussed, and if the authorities do not immediately paint over them, the works seem likely to disappear under mysterious circumstances, only to turn up at auctions (which may be challenged by the neighborhoods where Banksy created the works, or people who object on other grounds), or bought by celebrity art collectors. Justin Bieber could make a guest appearance as a Banksy wannabe.
Banksy graffiti
In this week’s episode, a pair of Banksy pieces that turned up in Park City, Utah, during the Sundance Film Festival in 2010 – the year the festival screened “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” a documentary about the artist – were attacked by a vandal.
In one case, a stencil of a young boy kneeling in prayer, with a halo and angel’s wings added in pink, a clear protective covering was shattered and the image was painted over with brown spray paint. The second piece, which shows a cameraman filming a flower, escaped damage, but its protective cover was also broken.
A security camera outside the Java Cow Cafe and Bakery recorded a man trying to break the covering of the cameraman piece at about 2 a.m. on Tuesday, The Deseret News, a Salt Lake City newspaper, reported. The angel painting, on a wall near a parking garage on the same street, was not within range of a video camera.
Banksy graffiti
“It is such a shame, heartbreaking even,” Robin Marrouche, executive director for the Kimball Art Center in Park City, told the Deseret News. “Banksy’s voice and importance in our culture today is significant, and the vandalism against his street art is just as upsetting as vandalism you read about against works by important artists of earlier times.”
This post was originally posted by The New York Times.
Original Post: http://nyti.ms/1axbJ1y
Gabrielle Wooden is a writer currently residing in Southern California. Currently she is a blogger for the Venice Art Crawl and is working on her first novel entitled Blue Barcelona at UCLA’S Extension Writers Program.
From a provocative upcoming Metropolitan Museum show to adoption-ready “purr-formers,” the art world is exploring the shock of the meow!
Balthus: Cats and Girls, the exhibition opening September 25th at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was originally called just that.
The title is accurate: Felines and females abound in the work of the French-born, classically inspired, figurative painter, who was a familiar art-world name at the time of his death, at 92, in 2001. In this country, though, he hasn’t had a big show in three decades.
So the general public might not be aware that these cats aren’t cute or grumpy at all. Rather they are sinister voyeurs of pensive adolescent girls, rendered in enigmatic and erotically charged poses.
Suggestive and disturbing, to our contemporary sensibility they may well seem even more provocative than they did the last time the Met did a big Balthus show, in 1984. To acknowledge that some viewers might find some content offensive, the museum added a subtitle: “Paintings and Provocations.”
Focusing on work from the mid-’30s to the ’50s, the exhibition coincides with the publication by Rizzoli of Balthus and Cats, which traces the cat motif throughout the artist’s career. The Met will show–for the first time in public–the charming ink drawings Balthus made at the age of 11 for Mitsou, his story about a stray tomcat; the book was published in 1921 by Rainer Maria Rilke, a close family friend.
Later Balthus began to pair these felines with tweens or teens poised in what curator Sabine Rewald describes as “self-absorbed languor,” draped over chairs, lost in a dream state, unself-consciously (or not) lifting their skirts to reveal their white panties. His models grew up and moved on, but Balthus stayed fixated on his nymphets. The cats beside them—sometimes rubbing suggestively, sometimes lapping at milk, sometimes staring amused (the way the models never do) at the viewer–play off the idea of budding female sexuality. Even more so, they act as stand-ins for the artist himself.
The Met show will make two cat-themed museum offerings in New York this season: It opens on the tails of the Brooklyn Museum’s inauguration of “Divine Felines: Cats of Ancient Egypt,” a long-term installation exploring the role of cats, lions, and other feline creatures in Egyptian society, religion, and everyday life.
So cat art, in one form or another, has been around as long as cats have—over the centuries, the creatures have been imagined as goddess, hunter, consort and thief, as Sarah Hanson wrote in our pages in 2007, when Abrams brought out a massive cat-art tome. In recent years, especially with the rise of internet cat memes, the kitty has become associated with kitsch. But cats are also marking their territory in the avant-garde.
A landmark in the annals of cutting-edge cat art was the 1994 book Why Cats Paint: A History of Feline Aesthetics. Using copious photos and fluent artspeak, it revealed the achievements of Minnie, the Abstract Expressionist; Bootsie, the Trans-Expressionist; Princess, the Elemental Fragmentist, and other nascent art stars. Several readers believed this amazing story of painting cats, which included references to the “Scraatchi Collection” and an author named R. Mutt. Why Cats Paint, of course, was an elaborate, hilarious hoax.
Or maybe just ahead of its time.
While the two New York museums were planning their cat-art history, two local alternative spaces were pushing cats into the realm of performance and social practice. Last spring Flux Factory in Long Island City staged Kitty City, an environment created by artists, kids, and city planners that culminated in a kitty adoption drive.
Currently White Columns, in the West Village, is housing “The Cat Show,” an exhibition organized by Rhonda Lieberman that features cat art by figures from Andy Warhol to Matthew Barney, Olaf Breuning, Mike Kelley, Nina Katchadourian, Barbara Kruger, Elizabeth Peyton, and many, many others. The paintings, sculptures, videos, and more are there to spotlight the inspiration for the show, “The Cats-in-Residence Program.”
For various days during the run of the show (which ends July 27), on a playground designed by architects Gia Wolff and Freecell, cats from Social Tees Animal Rescue adoption—“purr-formers,” in Lieberman lingo—will lounge, play, and hopefully find permanent homes.
“Cats rule the internet, but they are really underdogs in the city shelters,” says Lieberman, describing the artistic ambience as a strategy to “show strays as the gorgeous creatures that they are.” In keeping with the art theme, though, she has given her kitties art-world monikers: Frida Kahlico is “into indigenous calico culture”; Kitty Sherman “questions the representation of cats in society.” Bruce Meowman “believes art is an activity, not a product”; Claws Oldenburg is “fascinated by everyday objects.” Then there’s Richard Paw Prints. “Don’t call him a copycat,” says Lieberman. “He’s an appropriator!”
Other cat stars–particularly Henri, Le Chat Noir–have emerged from the Internet Cat Video Film Festival, which started as a summer lark at the Walker Art Center and became a worldwidephenomenon, inside the art world and beyond. Currently underway in Jerusalem, it has future stops planned at sites ranging from the Minnesota State Fair to the Honolulu Art Museum and theMikwaukee Art Museum.
Meanwhile, another feline with a big role in art history is basking in the spotlight at the Ducal Palace in Venice, where Manet’s Olympia shares a wall with her predecessor and inspiration, Titian’s Venus of Urbino. The feline consort to Manet’s courtesan, sinister and suggestive, started a meme of its own back in the day (that continues to the present).
His descendants still turn up in contemporary art.
In David Humphrey’s show at Fredericks & Freiser last year, the rambunctious kitty was getting out of control. Or maybe the cat’s just learning to paint.
And in a work by Mattia Biagi at Anna Kustera, Olympia’s cat jumped out of the picture and sped around the gallery on a Roomba.
At Anton Kern, David Shrigley’s cats came with mixed messages.
If you want to throw a cat, or at least cat art, Barney’s offers an option, in the form of a Roy Lichtenstein laughing-kitty frisbee. Priced at $28, it’s part of a limited edition of summer-themed products created with the Art Production Fund.
Just don’t let a dog do the fetching.
Copyright 2014, ARTnews LLC, 48 West 38th Street, New York, N.Y. 10018. All rights reserved.
Words Originally Posted by ARTnews.com
Original post: http://www.artnews.com/2013/07/11/taking-cat-art-seriously/
Reposted by: Gabrielle Wooden
Gabrielle Wooden is a writer currently residing in Southern California. Currently she is a blogger for the Venice Art Crawl and is working on her first novel entitled Blue Barcelona at UCLA’S Extension Writers Program.
Joseph Goebbels at the opening of the ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition in Berlin, 1938 / © SZ Photo / Scherl / The Bridgeman Art Library
Based on the true story of the greatest treasure hunt in history, The Monuments Men is an action drama focusing on an unlikely World War II platoon, tasked by FDR with going into Germany to rescue artistic masterpieces from Nazi thieves and returning them to their rightful owners. It would be an impossible mission: with the art trapped behind enemy lines, and with the German army under orders to destroy everything as the Reich fell, how could these guys – seven museum directors, curators, and art historians, all more familiar with Michelangelo than the M-1 – possibly hope to succeed?
Detective Sergeant Jack Ion, Detective Inspector John Morrison and Chief Detective Inspector Wallace Virgo with the recovered Goya portrait at Birmingham New Street railway station, 22nd May 1965 / © Mirrorpix / The Bridgeman Art Library
But as the Monuments Men, as they were called, found themselves in a race against time to avoid the destruction of 1000 years of culture, they would risk their lives to protect and defend mankind’s greatest achievements. From director George Clooney, the film stars George Clooney, Matt Damon, Bill Murray, John Goodman, Jean Dujardin, Bob Balaban, Hugh Bonneville, and Cate Blanchett. The screenplay is by George Clooney & Grant Heslov, based on the book by Robert M. Edsel with Bret Witter. Produced by Grant Heslov and George Clooney.
Words Borrowed from RottenTomatoes.com
Movie Link: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_monuments_men/
Blogged: Gabrielle Wooden
Gabrielle Wooden is a writer living in So Cal. She is currently working on her first book, entitled Blue Barcelona.
Helllooooo fellow art fanatics and crawlers!
Do you feel your instagram is shrouded with selfies, inspirational workout quotes, baby pictures, women crush wednesdays, and pictures of IN-N-OUT?
Well, check out these artists to follow on instagram spice up your dashboard!!
(As reccomended by ARTnews!)
1. Toyin Odutola posts portraits of herself, her family, and her friends.
2. Ryan McGinness took advantage of the Instagram format to create a new body of work. His feed consists of “grams”: phrases or ideas culled from his sketchbooks and matched with an appropriate typeface. These are rendered in knockout type inside circles. At this writing he had posted 135; he’s going for 2,000.
3. Art and family in the feed of Laurie Simmons: images of daughter Lena Dunham, husband Carroll Dunham, and her own work from her 2001-4 “Instant Decorator” series.
4. The writing on the wall: José Parlá chronicles his recent project with JR in Cuba.
5. Hank Willis Thomas makes you wonder what the meaning of is is.
6. Faile in the studio (working on their New York City Ballet collaboration) and beyond.
7. The passions of Shinique Smith.
8. Body of Work: Daniel Arsham.
9. Olek, the artist whose medium is crochet.
10. Nikki S. Lee, whose medium is self-portraits.
11. Gary Baseman posts photos, paintings, drawings, and other pictures that can “have the viewer learn something personal about me during the course of my day.”
12. Face time with Kenny Scharf.
13. Using the app Draw Something (and another of her own design called Draw Art) Paige Dansinger uses her finger to recreate famous artworks.
Copyright 2014, ARTnews LLC, 48 West 38th Street, New York, N.Y. 10018. All rights reserved.
Post Originally posted by ARTnews.
Orignial Post: http://www.artnews.com/2013/01/17/artists-to-follow-on-instagram/
Reblogged by: Gabrielle
Gabrielle Wooden is a writer currently residing in Southern California. Currently she is a blogger for the Venice Art Crawl and is working on her first novel entitled Blue Barcelona at UCLA’S Extension Writers Program.
It’s tempting to see the years 1912–25 and 1947–70 as the two golden ages of abstract art, and to feel that the present revival of abstraction is no more than a silver age. But the present is always deceptive: it was not evident to their contemporaries that Malevich, Mondrian, and Pollock were the towering giants they seem to us in retrospect. The fact is, there is a vast amount of good abstract art being made today, and the best of it is every bit as good as the best abstract art of the past. The golden age of abstraction is right now!
How do we make sense of all this activity in a type of art that was declared dead 40 years ago? I believe the most useful way to understand abstraction is not in terms of its formal evolution (which does not, in any case, fit the linear models beloved of theoreticians) but in terms of thematic content. The formal qualities of an abstract painting or sculpture are significant not in themselves but as part of the work’s expressive message. Artists work by reviving and transforming archetypes from the unconscious of modern culture. Therefore, the most useful questions to ask about contemporary abstract painting or sculpture are: What themes and forms does it retrieve from the tradition of modern art? How have they been changed? And how has the artist used them to express the social, political, and spiritual experience of our own time?
We might view abstract art as falling into six basic categories. Three respond to nature: cosmologies, landscapes, and anatomies. And three respond to culture: fabrics, architecture, and signs. These categories are not mutually exclusive. It often happens, for instance, that cosmological images include anatomical imagery or that images inspired by fabric patterns include drawn or written signs.
1. Cosmologies
Chris Martin’s Seven Pointed Star for Isaac Hayes, 2009, touches on cosmology and technology.
Cosmological imagery in modern art assumes three main forms: orbs, orbits, and constellations. The orbs and orbits in the work of pioneering abstract artists like Alexander Rodchenko and Liubov’ Popova reflected the Russian avant-garde’s obsession with space travel as an allegory of revolution: the cosmonaut left behind the corrupt old world to build a rational utopia in outer space.
2. Landscapes
Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate, 2004, in Chicago’s Millennium Park, reflects and distorts the surrounding landscape.
The huge popularity of Anish Kapoor’s monumental Cloud Gate may be due to the hallucinatory impression it gives of having brought the heavens down to Earth. At the same time, the sculpture’s mirrorlike skin, recalling Brancusi’s polished bronzes, places it in the avant-garde tradition of art that actively interacts with its viewers and its environment. In the setting of downtown Chicago, Kapoor’s silvered sculpture seems to absorb, concentrate, and reemit the essence of a great American metropolis.
3. Anatomies
However, the abstract anatomies of contemporary artists rarely correspond to the image of the human body as a whole. Instead, their work tends to hint at individual body parts, internal organs, or the “abject” substances excreted by the body.
4. Fabrics
Turning from natural to man-made models for abstraction, fabric has figured prominently as a source of inspiration. Throughout much of the 20th century, male abstract artists rejected comparisons between their paintings and decorative fabrics. In the 1970s, however, women artists, such as Miriam Schapiro and Joyce Kozloff, set out to revindicate decoration and to use it as the point of departure for a new, feminist mode of abstraction. The artists (both male and female) of the Pattern and Decoration movement often incorporated representational and architectural elements into their brilliantly colored compositions.
Valerie Jaudon, who emerged from the Pattern and Decoration movement,has remained highly abstract but alludes to the repeat patterns of fabric or wallpaper, as in Circa, 2012.
5. Architectures
Peter Halley’s paintings, which launched the Neo-Geo movement of the 1980s, focus obsessively on the motif of a rectangular cell, reminiscent of a house, a prison, a computer chip, or a piece of machinery. Resting on a narrow band of earth or flooring, the structure is plugged into its environment by conduits that run through the ground or take to the sky, connecting it into an invisible urban grid. Instead of a place of refuge, the cell becomes a symbol of the postmodern self: isolated, immobilized, and under surveillance. The pure optical quality of 1960s modernism gives way in Halley’s work to a purgatory of Day-Glo colors and motel-room textures: garish, menacing, and weirdly seductive. Another painter, Sarah Morris, uses tilted grids and pulsing colors to suggest the dazed confusion found in the mirrored facades of corporate modernism.
6. Signs
Signs have been an important element of modern art ever since 1911 and 1912, when Picasso and Braque put stenciled letters and scraps of newspaper into their Cubist pictures. But Jasper Johns’s flag, map, and number pictures of the 1950s and early 1960s initiated a revolutionary transformation in the character of sign painting. His stenciled letters and regular grids came to convey meaninglessness instead of meaning. They didn’t express emotion; they repressed it.
Ultimately, the evolution of abstract art—like the evolution of modern art more broadly—has been a series of responses to the experience of life in the 20th and 21st centuries. As Halley argues in a brilliant 1991 essay, abstraction before World War II was largely inspired by the utopian belief that rational technocracy (i.e., socialism) would create a better world. The technocratic ideal found its most powerful symbol not in the rosy-cheeked workers of Socialist Realism but in geometric abstraction. After the devastation of World War II and the revelation of the horrors of Stalinist Russia, geometry could no longer function as an image of utopia. Changing polarity, it became instead a symbol of alienation.
Much contemporary art—not to mention fiction, film, and television—reflects a Blade Runner vision of a world, in which the individual is rendered powerless by anonymous government agencies, giant corporations, and deafening mass culture. It’s useful to remember that this nightmare vision is itself a romantic stereotype, ignoring the positive aspects of postmodern society. In 2013, as in 1913, abstraction is how we think about the future.
Words Borrowed and Reblogged from ARTnews
http://www.artnews.com/2013/04/24/contemporary-abstraction/
Reblogged by: Gabrielle Wooden
Gabrielle Wooden is a writer residing in So Cal. She is torn between having cinnamon toast or a milkshake for breakfast.