Please note that this blog has now moved to the following address:
http://www.michaelday.org.uk/blog
Thankyou.
Friday, November 09, 2007
Wednesday, June 06, 2007
The Sheffield Pavilion 2007
Here it is - the long awaited Sheffield Pavilion, printed out and ready to be distributed. The launch at the Venice Biennale is on Friday (Bar Margaret Duchamp, Campo Santa Margherita, Venice, Friday 8 June, from 8pm), and copies will also be distributed at Documenta in Kassel next week. I think copies will be on sale after that from the Cornerhouse Bookshop in Manchester, although I suspect Site in Sheffield will have a few too.
The HAG (Host Artists Group) project looks good, despite some over-eager cropping by the printers, and a slightly greenish cast to all the images. I guess you just have to take the rough with the smooth when the printing and layout are in someone else's hands. The work and the project look good, and the overall document is an excellent way of putting Sheffield's art scene on the international map.
Saturday, May 19, 2007
Happens to the best of us
I've had quite a lot on happening recently, and as such postings have been very few and far between. Notwithstanding apologies, I'd like to focus briefly on poor Anthony Gormley's latest piece, unveiled last week at the Hayward Gallery in London. The cube of fog is an extremely interesting sculptural proposition, although not as interesting as a very similar piece by Ann Veronica Janssens, which was unveiled a decade ago in 1997.
I'm not suggesting that anything naughty or plagiaristic has gone on here, more that the field of cultural production is so huge now, being populated by so many practitioners in widely differing cultural settings, that even the really big names end up producing work that is less unique than it first appears. That said, if I was a lawyer acting for Ms Janssens, I'd be keen to know what he was doing in June 1997 when Janssens' piece was shown at the Venice Biennale.
I'm not suggesting that anything naughty or plagiaristic has gone on here, more that the field of cultural production is so huge now, being populated by so many practitioners in widely differing cultural settings, that even the really big names end up producing work that is less unique than it first appears. That said, if I was a lawyer acting for Ms Janssens, I'd be keen to know what he was doing in June 1997 when Janssens' piece was shown at the Venice Biennale.
Monday, March 12, 2007
An update, for your convenience
I've been away for a while working on a project with Eddie Ladd, which was completed in February and premiered at the Linbury Studio, ROH2, Covent Garden. This came after a number of exciting equipment malfunctions, and the replacement of one piece of equipment less than 30 minutes before the opening night's performance. Eddie seemed happy with the results and the show did get a positive review, so it can't have been too bad.
Since then, my critical faculties have turned to jelly, so no reviews even though I have been seeing quite a lot of art. I have been struggling to refamiliarise myself with my practice: I made a short new video piece for the MA fundraiser club night at the DQ Bar in a couple of weeks, and I'm developing new work for an exhibition in Amsterdam later in the year, but my main focus is on moving house and preparing to begin a new job at the moment. Brush up your CVs, Glamorgan will be advertising for a L/SL in New Media very soon.
I've also begun the migration of the blog over to 'new' blogger, which means I have to completely rebuild my template. As a distraction from this drudgery, I've added my last.fm recently played list for your perusal, giving you a whole new way of judging me as a human.
Finally, short word about Jon Warren, who passed away last week. We worked together on a number of projects during my time at Newport, including my first ever public exhibition at Tredegar House. We also shared a house for a couple of years during that time. Although we had fallen out of touch a little in recent years, he played an important role in that part of my life, and made an impact on my development as an artist and as a person. He will be greatly missed.
More later, when the worst is over.
Since then, my critical faculties have turned to jelly, so no reviews even though I have been seeing quite a lot of art. I have been struggling to refamiliarise myself with my practice: I made a short new video piece for the MA fundraiser club night at the DQ Bar in a couple of weeks, and I'm developing new work for an exhibition in Amsterdam later in the year, but my main focus is on moving house and preparing to begin a new job at the moment. Brush up your CVs, Glamorgan will be advertising for a L/SL in New Media very soon.
I've also begun the migration of the blog over to 'new' blogger, which means I have to completely rebuild my template. As a distraction from this drudgery, I've added my last.fm recently played list for your perusal, giving you a whole new way of judging me as a human.
Finally, short word about Jon Warren, who passed away last week. We worked together on a number of projects during my time at Newport, including my first ever public exhibition at Tredegar House. We also shared a house for a couple of years during that time. Although we had fallen out of touch a little in recent years, he played an important role in that part of my life, and made an impact on my development as an artist and as a person. He will be greatly missed.
More later, when the worst is over.
Wednesday, November 08, 2006
In London Again
After a sleepy train journey from Cardiff, and a spectacular frosty walk in the sun across Hyde Park, I spent an enjoyable Saturday touring the galleries of London, beginning with Tate Modern's new installation of Carsten Höller's work. The installation consists of a number of umbilical structures which are actually artist-designed slides, offering a speedy descent from the very top of the turbine hall to the bottom in a small number of short, bumpy seconds. I had a go at the highest of these, and found it to be noisy, uncomfortable, slightly stressful and a little painful at the end. The acceleration was huge, and my flapping cheeks reminded me of movies of NASA test pilots as I was ejected into a mass of waiting spectators, with their cameras at the ready to capture my undignified disorientation.
Others in the party took on the Level 4 slide, which was by all accounts the most severe of them all, with speeds reportedly reaching 35mph. This was quite a physical, elbow-bruising experience for many, but as I waited a the bottom for the participants to plummet out into stasis, I couldn't help wondering where the art was in all this fun. There are many persuasive arguments for a participatory art of experience, and even I don't think that art has to be serious all the time. That said, I think that there is a big difference between this and the work of, say, Rirkrit Tiravanija, which foregrounds the relations between participants. While I enjoyed the experience, I am still struggling to extract meaning from it.
From the Tate, via an excellent and very cheap lunch in a cafe behind Southwark tube, to White Cube to see Gabriel Oruzco's latest. This graphite-drawn whale skeleton reminded me of sonar waves, but aside from the superlative quality of the hanging, left me cold. The paintings on the ground floor were constructed mathematically using the 'knights move' in Chess, and while interesting from a systems design perspective, had very little warmth and didn't give me much to hang on to, despite the medieval resonances of the gold leaf and egg tempera. I couldn't help thinking of John F Simon's Every Icon, perhaps the superlative 'combinations' piece in existence. Nothing matches its utter brutality.
Interestingly, I had a wander around the back of the new White Cube building, and met a huge rat on my explorations. When peeking at the goods entrance, it was revealed that the heavy-looking stones that comprise the facade were actually made of rendered fibreboard.
We also visited Anish Kapoor's exhibition at the Lisson, and Runa Islam's Conditional Probability at the Serpentine, but I am too tired to write about these properly except to say that neither really blew my socks off. Parts of the Anish Kapoor were interestingly visceral, but much of the work relies on distortions of the viewer's image, a strategy that feels to me to be a bit tired and lacking in originality, regardless of how seductively it might be carried out.
Others in the party took on the Level 4 slide, which was by all accounts the most severe of them all, with speeds reportedly reaching 35mph. This was quite a physical, elbow-bruising experience for many, but as I waited a the bottom for the participants to plummet out into stasis, I couldn't help wondering where the art was in all this fun. There are many persuasive arguments for a participatory art of experience, and even I don't think that art has to be serious all the time. That said, I think that there is a big difference between this and the work of, say, Rirkrit Tiravanija, which foregrounds the relations between participants. While I enjoyed the experience, I am still struggling to extract meaning from it.
From the Tate, via an excellent and very cheap lunch in a cafe behind Southwark tube, to White Cube to see Gabriel Oruzco's latest. This graphite-drawn whale skeleton reminded me of sonar waves, but aside from the superlative quality of the hanging, left me cold. The paintings on the ground floor were constructed mathematically using the 'knights move' in Chess, and while interesting from a systems design perspective, had very little warmth and didn't give me much to hang on to, despite the medieval resonances of the gold leaf and egg tempera. I couldn't help thinking of John F Simon's Every Icon, perhaps the superlative 'combinations' piece in existence. Nothing matches its utter brutality. 
Interestingly, I had a wander around the back of the new White Cube building, and met a huge rat on my explorations. When peeking at the goods entrance, it was revealed that the heavy-looking stones that comprise the facade were actually made of rendered fibreboard.We also visited Anish Kapoor's exhibition at the Lisson, and Runa Islam's Conditional Probability at the Serpentine, but I am too tired to write about these properly except to say that neither really blew my socks off. Parts of the Anish Kapoor were interestingly visceral, but much of the work relies on distortions of the viewer's image, a strategy that feels to me to be a bit tired and lacking in originality, regardless of how seductively it might be carried out.
Thursday, November 02, 2006
Shanghai'd
I arrived home today after a long meeting to discover an email that started like this:
Hooray, I thought, a show. Wait, Shanghai? That's China, isn't it. Fantastic! No, wait. Hmmm. Hang on. Precisely three days after I have added an irrepressible.info feed to this very blog, a competition has selected my work for an exhibition in a country with one of the worst human rights records in the world. This is, to say the least, the last thing I expected when I entered the piece into a Netherlands-based competition. The email continues:
It appears, then, if the opening was last week, that my work has already been shown, making me unable to withdraw the work. Great.
A little googling reveals that Davide Quadrio and his Biz-Art enterprise have a strong base in Shanghai, and have collaborated with a large number of international institutions and agencies in the past, including the Mondriaan Foundation, which is where I suspect the link between them and the Netherlands competition comes from. A quote attributed to David in the Shanghai Star reads:
I'm not certain that I agree with him or with the sentiment of the article. Art is always political at some level, as it will always reflect the climate within which it was made. An engaged art will always hold a political position, perhaps several positions simultaneously, empowering the reader or viewer to occupy these viewpoints in turn. I would perhaps agree more with the reverse of what David is saying: that politics should not have too close a connection with culture, ie that political control should not be exercised on artistic free speech.
My disagreement is not with David (although I might question his decision to base himself in China), or with the artists or audience that might come to see the work in this exhibition. My disagreement is with the human rights policy of the government in the country where the work is being shown. Would my withholding the work create a positive change in that policy? I am unable at this stage to discern to what
extent the Mondriaan Foundation or the oneminutes.org competition have engaged directly with Davide and Biz-Art to stage this exhibition or whether they had to deal with the Chinese government itself.
I am left asking myself the simple question: is this ok? Or am I a sucker for buying into the pursuit of an international art profile, ignoring the potential ethical cost? By showing work there, am I supporting a repressive regime or helping to further free speech against that repression?
Dear One Minute maker,
Congratulations !!!!
Your One Minute is in this exhibition!
A selection of One Minutes videos from 12 different countries
shown in Shanghai BizArt Art Center China within the framework
of Fringe festival.
Hooray, I thought, a show. Wait, Shanghai? That's China, isn't it. Fantastic! No, wait. Hmmm. Hang on. Precisely three days after I have added an irrepressible.info feed to this very blog, a competition has selected my work for an exhibition in a country with one of the worst human rights records in the world. This is, to say the least, the last thing I expected when I entered the piece into a Netherlands-based competition. The email continues:
The opening last Saturday 28th October 2006 was very well
attended.
BizArt is an independent gallery/exhibition space.
The Italian director of the gallery is Davide Quadrio.
It appears, then, if the opening was last week, that my work has already been shown, making me unable to withdraw the work. Great.
A little googling reveals that Davide Quadrio and his Biz-Art enterprise have a strong base in Shanghai, and have collaborated with a large number of international institutions and agencies in the past, including the Mondriaan Foundation, which is where I suspect the link between them and the Netherlands competition comes from. A quote attributed to David in the Shanghai Star reads:
"Open culture doesn't simply mean hosting some cultural activities."This sounds very noble, as does the information on the rest of the website describing Biz-Art's support of young artists with residency schemes and exchanges. However, his quote in the Shanghai Star article continues
"In addition, culture should not have too close a connection to politics."The article goes on:
His thoughts were echoed by Gu who believed that the prerequisite for developing a culture was contrary to that of political development. A social base needed to be set up to provide the possibilities for free combination between different cultures.
I'm not certain that I agree with him or with the sentiment of the article. Art is always political at some level, as it will always reflect the climate within which it was made. An engaged art will always hold a political position, perhaps several positions simultaneously, empowering the reader or viewer to occupy these viewpoints in turn. I would perhaps agree more with the reverse of what David is saying: that politics should not have too close a connection with culture, ie that political control should not be exercised on artistic free speech.
My disagreement is not with David (although I might question his decision to base himself in China), or with the artists or audience that might come to see the work in this exhibition. My disagreement is with the human rights policy of the government in the country where the work is being shown. Would my withholding the work create a positive change in that policy? I am unable at this stage to discern to what
extent the Mondriaan Foundation or the oneminutes.org competition have engaged directly with Davide and Biz-Art to stage this exhibition or whether they had to deal with the Chinese government itself.
I am left asking myself the simple question: is this ok? Or am I a sucker for buying into the pursuit of an international art profile, ignoring the potential ethical cost? By showing work there, am I supporting a repressive regime or helping to further free speech against that repression?
Thursday, October 19, 2006
On Kawara Style
Things have been rather hectic since I completed the Stafell C project with Eddie Ladd. Immediately afterwards, I did a live performance with Neil Webb in Amsterdam, and then almost immediately after that, the teaching year began in earnest. I'm hoping to get some more time over the next few weeks to make some updates to this blog, but until then, in true On Kawara style, rest assured that I am still alive.
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