stills from hilltown demolition video

hearing something good

http://www.little-dragon.se/

is pure mental likes
can't get these Swedish love birds out of my head

projection ideas

trying projecting onto tracing paper with Dundee map on it....

I miss you so

VISION

"If you love your vision for community, you will destroy community. If you love your brother and sister around you, you will create community"

you know what I say to that Mr. Bonhoeffer?
PROFOUND

new!

I can't believe I've not made an entry since November.
Venice...
something to write about.
Dundee...
it's cold. my studio is so cold I'm getting ill sitting in it.























New Year, new job...
very exciting dream expanding job, taking me out of all my comfort zones.
taking me to China!
little exhibitions, experiments, screenprints
obsessed with maps again

making a few films with dancers again.
just waiting on getting camera fixed...

Leaving Venice? (November, final week of Venice Biennale)

Now it looms
the End

Venice as a place of illusions, tensions, ideals. Leaving and arriving.Water versus stone.

It is a city of perpetual conflict.
A constant desire to know, absorb, consume, rationalise, obtain and collect fights an impulse to create, meditate, offload, wander aimlessly, forget and give over to sensation.

No reflections. Meaninglessness brought about by repetition and fatigue. Profundity created by slowly realised associations, and an understanding that only comes with time.
Modernist designs weathered, slowly bending out of function, become objects of art, displayed in a city that constantly restores the ancient. A sense of failed utopia. Failure softened by nostalgia. Romance heightened by gloom and early dusk.

All this with the awareness of leaving so soon, returning to normality.
A last thought... my mind is wandering away on it's own
I wonder if we constantly maintain: appearances, buildings, artworks, to create the illusion of time never passing, of being ever present? What constitutes this importance? Is 'the moment' the only time we touch eternity?

over for now

paddling in the city

art overload

The longer I stay in this City, the more there is that I haven't seen it seems.
There is art pouring out of every available space, some of it still manages to be good. I went to the Giardini for the first time, where all the national pavilions are. It's like a big fun fair for contemporary art. Massive tour groups clamour at the buildings' doors to get a peek and a photo.

There were a few amazing pieces, like Fiona Tan's video installations, Simon Starling's elaborate film display machine, the Nordic and Danish pavilions' menacing houses, Steve McQueen's long slow film, the Australian performance videos and Yoko Ono's text works. Here are some photos from my epic marathon of art viewing.

Hello Venice

I've been busy. Scratching the surface of the Venetian façade.

Migropolis a searching, feeling revelation of the city's underside. Investigating lives, deaths, trade agreements, illegal immigration and movements of peoples across Africa, Asia, and through the "gateway to Europe"
It is an interesting and unoriginal observation that Venice is a city of false appearances. The palazzos facing the grand canal have their masks on, hiding structures, wooden beams, crumbling plaster. Piazzas and waterways are full of colour, byzantine, baroque, gothic, romantic, and gondolas idle around like the props of a city sized theatre.
I'm scared now, this is a city full of ghosts, but they are not the ones we all imagine, Casanova, Titian, Marco Polo, a hundred murdered Doges... they are ghosts, Senegalese, Bangladeshi, Albanian, of those whose boats capsized in the adriatic, and hung from prison roof beams at the prospect of deportation.

It's depressing so it's avoided, and theme park Venice captivates us again.

Lithuania, Iran and Scarpa

just popped into the Lithuanian pavilion today... wooooo
video tape madness :)
also got a bottle of procecco from the invigilator... what a life eh?!

this one is 'tube' by Zilvinas Kempinas.
trippy ol video

yesterday I done went to the Iranian exhibition on one of my hours off, it was really simple, but also really pure somehow... I loved the colours. some time I'm going to have to make an intelligent contribution to this blog... but right now just lapping up the art .. yeah .. ?
here's a photo of one of the Iranian paintings, by Sedaghat Jabbari:

















also.. went to the Scarpa museum at s. maria fermosa, which I unfortunately couldn't photograph. I'll see if I can nick one off the web ... here we go:





It was very delicate and peaceful... and brilliant in his use of water and the flooding canal.

venice love

lovely art

el fincho a la arsenale

löwen guarding the arsenale

face

show from Georgia (change in drawing orchestra by Koka Ramishvili)
great space and interesting video installation, really liked the sounds

one of my favourite works so far, Paul Ramirez Jonas (Luna De Papel) encourages the audience to participate by reading a section of the moon... reminds me of Steve McCaffery's action poems (see march 09 entry on INSTAL festival) there is a much better photograph here: photo

I really enjoyed the tongue in cheek signage to the UEA pavilion, I think it was really the main point of their show...

a spiffing bit of engineering at the arsenale

Tamara Grcic's installation at the arsenale. Really beautiful yesterday in the wintery sun.

rude art

Rick & Rude ART

fun art by William Forsythe

sign at the arsenale

team gb's day out

enough art for today... Sunset over Venice

some venice days

tiny musical instruments at the museum in San Lazzaro degli Armeni Սուրբ Ղազարոս Կղզի

the grand canal from academia bridge
Jess and Fergus at San Lazzaro degli Armeni
Jess

some snapshots of venice

so I've lost me camera, so these are all taken on my shoddy wee phone camera

some of my favourite pieces at the arsenale:

(Chile) Ivan Navarro death row

(Chile) Ivan Navarro

Grazia Toderi orbite rosse

Spencer Finch moonlight and Huang Yong Ping Buddha's Hand

Spencer Finch big bang (mars black) and Haung Yong Ping Buddha's Hand

today

It's very cold here in Venice, we've closed the gallery windows because the icy air blasting through them makes us feel like our limbs have turned to stone.

The palazzo feels more like an interior now though, something contained, whereas before it felt, like the artist described, a bit like a landscape blown through a building. The icy wind somehow continued this, scraping the waxy leaves eerily across the floor and carrying the voices from the street into the rooms around us.

I can't sit here and freeze though.

A blind lady came into the exhibition today, she had dark glasses on to cover her milky eyes, and her sister walked close by her, leading her across the uneven stones. I have to admit this frightened me more than it should have, but Venice has been acting up lately, thick fog and creaking whispering voices drift down the canals at night. It would hardly surprise me if I caught a glimpse of a little red coat, disappearing into a dark passageway, luring me to my untimely demise.

Biennale

"No Reflections"
this week I've been finding it difficult to think about the work,
last week was easier, the wondering was still part of the job.

Martin Boyce's work requires time, a sense of abandonment heightened by the weird acoustics of the location, Venice's echo soundscape tricks you into thinking the voices you hear are actually there, in the room. But they are distant, below. Venetians walking to work, a gondolier singing to his fabulously wealthy customers, a German tour group fifty tapping feet on the bridges nearby. Every weekday at noon the school children's voices drift up to the exhibition, ghost children playing in a forgotten playground. There is a crimson sculpture here that reminds me of a little ghost child from a 1970's horror film who I'd rather forget walking home through the whispering city at night.

The water is rising in Venice. Soon the acqua alta will drench the ground floors of the city's shops and houses and the tourists will be forced to teeter along wooden walkways strewn across Piazza San Marco, a labyrinth within a labyrinth. The mists roll in from the Adriatic, drenching everything in a heaviness.
A long time ago the acqua alta flooded the 4th floor of a 15th century palazzo. Stepping-stones were placed across the main hallway so people could walk across from one room to another. Birds came to drink and bathe in the shimmering pools, and trees grew, downwards from the ceilings, reaching towards the water. Now the water has gone the stones are left as if suspended. The trees are dead, petrified like the trees supporting the city below, poking into the lagoon. No brilliantly coloured birds rest and flutter, the pools have dried up, and the nesting box built for them lies empty. The level of the water is marked in rust on the metal objects left behind, like the carvings on the walls in Venice, a testament to disaster, change, a sinking city.

frozen river

went to see Courtney Hunt's frozen river last night.
It's so great to see so many good films by women lately, like Red Road n that. yeah?
I thought the acting was good and camera work distracting at first then better. hmm yeah films? yeah?

updates

so it been a while again due to lack of degree (forced creativity) and lack of internet
however, it would be good to resume...

currently inspired by:

walk cycles by Eadweard Muybridge

how do you sell digital art?

Video/Idéa/Vison

An interesting excerpt from a book I'm reading at the moment:

The Indo-Europeans sought "insight" into the history of the world, we can even trace a particular word for "insight" or "knowledge" from one culture to another all over the Indo-European world. In Sanskrit it is vidya. The word is identical to the Greek word idéa, which was so important to Plato's philosophy. From Latin, we have the word video, but on Roman ground the word simly means "to see". For us "I see" can mean "I understand" and in cartoons, a light bulb can flash above Woody Woodpecker's head when he gets a bright idea. (Not until our own day did 'seeing' become synonymous with staring at the TV screen). In English we know the words 'wise' and 'wisdom' - in German 'wissen' (to know'. Norwegian has the word 'viten', which has the same root as the Indian word vidya, the Greek idéa and the Latin video.
All in all we can establish that sight was the most important of the senses for Indo-Europeans. The literature of Indians, Greeks, Persians and Teutons alike was charachterised by great cosmic visions (there is that word again: "vision" comes from the Latin word video). It was also characteristic for Indo-European culture to make pictures and sculptures of the gods and mythical events.

Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder, page 127