Sunday, 31 July 2011

Junya Ishigami’s

Junya Ishigami’s, in discussion, barbican, 50.00 duration

DM450070.WMA.ff
- architecture as air

THE.SUN.RISING

the sun rising by John Donnes

BUSY
old fool, unruly Sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains, call on us ?
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run ?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late school-boys and sour prentices,
Go tell court-huntsmen that the king will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices ;
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

Thy beams so reverend, and strong
Why shouldst thou think ?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long.
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Look, and to-morrow late tell me,
Whether both th' Indias of spice and mine
Be where thou left'st them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear, "All here in one bed lay."

She's all states, and all princes I ;
Nothing else is ;
Princes do but play us ; compared to this,
All honour's mimic, all wealth alchemy.
Thou, Sun, art half as happy as we,
In that the world's contracted thus ;
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that's done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere ;
This bed thy center is, these walls thy sphere.

When Joseph Beuys visited New York in the 1970s he renamed the twin towers of the World Trade Centre after the healing saints Cosmas and Damian, who, it is said, transplanted black limbs on to white patients and white limbs on to black. Beuys's postcard of the World Trade Centre, with the names Cosmas and Damian scribbled on the towers, sits among the other jokes, drawings and relics in this intimate encounter with the artist. It is a haunting instance of his ability to claim even the largest objects as Beuys sculptures, and to replace reality with his own, personal history of the world, as if everything he touched turned to felt.

Beuys gave Germany its imagination back. His drawings with their totemic figures, his ritualistic use of felt and fat, his monumental sculptures, such as Tramstop, assert the human need for myth and symbol. He showed how the worship of oaks was not Nazi but went back to Celtic prehistory. He valued tales of plurality, flow, democracy. Hence his fascination with Cosmas and Damian and their inter-racial surgery.

What does not always come across in Beuys's large sculptures is his humour. Bits and Pieces nicely leavens our sense of Beuys. There is a joyous poem-letter about his favourite foods, reminiscent of Günter Grass's novel The Flounder in its celebration of earthy pleasure. There are postcards made out of wood, and evidence of Beuys's fandom of the bank robber John Dillinger. Bits and Pieces is a loving archive of one of the 20th century's great artists, and we are lucky to have it.



He encountered the Surrealists themselves not long after and became an official member of the group. (Surrealism wasn’t just a style, it was a movement, a “revolution”, led by poet Andre Breton.)

Tanguy’s hauntingly strange images depict landscapes populated with unreal objects, but painted with a realism that makes them tangbile. Like Max Ernst. I find his paintings have a fascinating ability to pull you in and immerse you in that state where the rational and irrational meet and mix.

In some ways Tanguy was the purest of the Surrealist painters, adhering more consistently to the ideals of unconscious imagery as extolled in the Surrealist manifestos and periodicals (to which he contributed)

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This collection of metal objects has the appearance of mysterious pieces of scientific apparatus, much like the items which appear in the artist's drawings of the 1950s and 1960s. The metals used here are iron and copper. Beuys saw iron as a masculine metal, connected with the planet Mars, while copper was associated with Venus and femininity. Part of the work was shown in the 'Zeitgeist' exhibition in Berlin in 1982, where Beuys had referred to it as a 'workshop' in which ideas for setting the world to rights could be fashioned.

Wednesday, 22 June 2011

BABETTES.FEAST

food as ornament and tradition

CONSUMPTION. AWARENESS

".Instead of being scraped off the plate as garbage,they have been made into precisely what they are. Like museum specimens,they exude through their form both the miracle of life and the presence of mortality."
Natalija Subotincic, Incanate tendencies

Monday, 20 June 2011

BBC.TV.CENTER


http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9512000/9512418.stm

The BBC's Television Centre in White City, West London is up for sale, the very building in which the Today studio sits.

John Craven presented more than 3,000 episodes of Newsround from the building, and remembers it extremely fondly.

"It has had more impact on just ordinary people, viewers, than any amount of libraries or art galleries," he told Evan Davis.

The architecture of the building could be deceptive, however, according to Professor Jean Seaton, the official historian of the BBC.

"It was the first purpose build television building. Like all BBC buildings it is readable from the outside... and completely labyrinthine inside," she said.

"I don't think the public understand how lost you can get in Television Centre."

One of the most important things about the building was that the "suits" were in the the same building as the programmes were made, she said, although John Craven was not so sure.

"There was an old saying that Television Centre was built in a circle so the buck couldn't stop," he joked.




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Wednesday, 16 February 2011

GRASS.ROOTS.

pl.n. (used with a sing. or pl. verb)
  1. People or society at a local level rather than at the center of major political activity. Often used with the.
  2. The groundwork or source of something.


Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/grassroots-democracy#ixzz1E7OSGGYE