Killer to sleep with fishes in controversial art installation:
A convicted murderer is to be turned into a work of art should his final appeal against his sentence fail. Gene Hathorn (above), an inmate on death row convicted in 1985 of murdering his father, step-mother, and step-brother will be frozen, turned into fish food for hundreds of goldfish. Visitors to the exhibit will be asked to feed the occupants of a giant aquarium placed in a gallery . Copenhagen based artist Marco Everistti is continuing negotiations with American lawyers and an undisclosed company willing to help turn Hathorns remains into fish food.
Everistti, who is helping to fund Hathorn’s final appeal through the sale of drawings; made by the killer in jail; aims to raise awareness of state sanctioned execution in Western civilisation. The artists previous works have presented the audience with equally difficult questions and dilemas relating to their participation in the works. In 2000 he exhibited food blenders filled with water and goldfish (above) and invited visitors to switch the blenders on and in 2007 he held a dinner party where guests were served meatballs made with fat removed from his own body during a liposuction procedure.
Contemporary Art ETCs’ Sarah Wilson met Tracy Emin at the recent press launch of the artists first retrospective at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh.
If you have never heard of Tracey Emin where on earth have you been hiding.
Tracey Emin is one of the best known artists working in Britain today. Born in London in 1963, she is a central figure in the generation of Young British Artists (or YBAs) that emerged in the early 1990’s and has produced some of the most memorable, compelling and iconic works of the last 15 years. Her autobiographical, confessional art has tapped into the mainstream of public consciousness, and has contributed to an unprecedented surge of interest in contemporary art in Britain.
Emin studied at Maidstone College of Art and the Royal College of Art in London, and has had major exhibitions around the world. She became a member of the Royal Academy of Arts in 2007, and in the same year was selected to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale, the largest and most prestigious event in the art world calendar.
Unfortunately her notoriety means that practically everybody has heard of, or has formed an opinion about Tracey Emin and her work. A huge percentage of her work is biographical, we all know about her abortion, her rape and most of us have seen her slovenly made bed surrounded by used condoms, fag ends and dirty laundry – when it was entered as a contender for the Turner prize and exhibited at the Tate in 1999 tabloids ran competitions to recreate it using teenagers bedrooms stating the unoriginal “I could do that”.
Tracey spoke of her education, apart from passing her driving test every exam she ever sat was to further her knowledge of art. Although she destroyed most of her work after getting her degree it was not an act of defiance, it was merely because the college had nowhere to store it and she did not want them to destroy it for her.
Emin happily posed for photographs at the Press View and after a quick race through the exhibition there was a questions and answers in the room with her tapestries hanging in huge frames.
The exhibition is fascinating, it is a collection of 20 years work, there is a room with a wooden rollercoaster made in 2005 entitled “It’s not the way I want to die” and rooms containing huge tapestries of blankets. There is a huge collection of her mono-prints and some of her video work and neons. It takes up the entire ground floor of the gallery and is the first major UK retrospective exhibition of work by Tracey Emin. This exhibition brings together loans from private and public collections around the world.
We were introduced to Simon Groom the director of the gallery and Patrick Elliot, the curator. She talked about the logistics of hanging such a huge collection – it is an exhibition that has been 4 years in the planning (they were putting the finishing touched to it as we arrived), work had to be acquired from private collectors across the globe and shipped to Edinburgh. The gallery had supplied her with a model of the gallery space so she could work out the best overview of the layout – she kept the model and now stores buttons in it!
The tapestries had to be removed from the frames as they were too big to get through the main gallery doors but finally seeing them all together in one small room was brilliant. She talked about how (obviously) “all the work is about me” but explained that she was hoping to achieve a transferrance of ideas from her work – like with the tent – “when you crawl inside and look at everyone I ever slept with, you will come out thinking of everyone you ever slept with”.
She said that the course she did in philosophy was the best training she could have done for her art – as they are all about her ideas – I asked her about her plans for the meercats she made for the London plinth – she laughed and said that it was a bit of a joke really, she likes meercats and didnt expect her idea to be one of the final ones chosen she was glad it didnt win as she did not want to be remembered as the meercat woman and anyway, large sculptures scare her! And there was me believing the spiel that had accompanied the idea, that meercats are lookouts and would protect the city etc – she just likes meercats!
What people seem to forget is that Tracey Emin is a Contemporary Artist, her installations are the result of lengthy trial and error and are representational of the “idea” – the bed was a response to a certain time in her life, just because it wasn’t painted by Van Gough does not mean it is not art.
Press responses have been pretty obvious, “celebrity is more important than real achievement, self revelation more gripping than anything created by talent and a considerable imagination” perhaps if journalists were not so lazy and looked at the art from a contemporary point of view then Tracey Emin would actually be given the credit she deserves.
In 1966, John Latham borrowed a copy of Clement Greenberg’s Art and Culture — a work held in the highest regard at the time — from the library of Saint Martin’s School of Art, where Latham was employed as a part-time lecturer. At a party Latham invited students to chew pages from the book, and then distilled the resulting pulp into a clear liquid. This process took several months, and Latham began to receive letters from the library demanding its return. Latham presented a vial of the fermented book-pulp to the library, but this was rejected and his teaching contract was not renewed. The vial and correspondence became an artwork of its own, displayed in a leather case; the piece is now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
A new modern art collection, to be known as ARTIST ROOMS, was announced today, created through one of the largest and most imaginative gifts of art ever made to museums in Britain. The gift has been made by Anthony d’Offay, with the assistance the Scottish and British Governments.
Anthony d’Offay will receive £26.5m for his donation of 725 works, 1 fifth of their estimated market value.
The paintings, photographs, drawings and sculptures by 32 artists, including Bruce Nauman, Gilbert and George, Damien Hirst, Joseph Beuys, Jeff Koons and Ed Ruscha will travel across galleries and museums in Britain.
The collection will be owned and managed by the National Galleries of Scotland and the Tate , who said the art would “transform the nation’s collections of contemporary art”.
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and the Scottish Government have each donated £10m to the cost of buying the works, which would fill the space of one and a half floors of Tate Modern.
Every body here at Contemporary Art ETC…. are delighted and grateful to Anthony d’Offay, Tate and the National Galleries for such a significant investment in our contemporary cultural landscape.
“Listen. We weren’t thinking about the financial side at all. We weren’t thinking about the business side at all. We were thinking about young people and education. We were thinking about reaching out to young people. We were thinking about how you can put together great works of art which can move and change people.” Anthony d’Offay 27th February 2008
Over the past eight years Berlin based British artist Tino Sehgal has been
“rethinking the notion of a product as a transformation of actions not as a
transformation of materials.” and has become known for making art without actually making any objects.
Direct experience is an essential component in the work and his working
methods involve organizing and instructing people (adults; often posing as
museum guards; teenagers or children) to use their body and/or voice to
construct “situations” that can be observed and experienced.
On the 1st of January 2007 the Twin Cities based collaborative art partnership Tectonic Industries and their family undertook their “One Year Project” to prepare, cook, eat and evaluate a meal each day as dictated by the book “365: No Repeats A Year of Deliciously Different Dinners“ by American celebrity cook Rachael Ray.
Despite personal disliking for a variety of foodstuffs and in one case an allergy to eggs, they fully committed to the project and published a daily blog giving an illuminating insight into the experience and the many challenges they faced including moving house, the birth of a new baby, cross country trips to exhibition openings and 5 variations of macaroni cheese 5 nights in a row.
Our sincere congratulations and thanks (as beneficiaries of the last 12 meals) goes to Tectonic Industries who completed the last recipe yesterday with Hamburger and Onion Stuffed Bread followed by Christmas Pasta.
Rumours are that “Another One Year Project” launches today with “Mustard Pork Chops” by a certain Ms N Lawson.
Christmas has been a recurrent theme in the work of California based artist Paul McCarthy. Works including; “Santa with Butt Plug” and “Santa Chocolate Shop” have examined and skewered the American idolised vision of Santa Claus.
Since the late 1960s, McCarthy has pushed the boundaries of taboo through the media of performance art, sculpture, and video. In his early performance works, the artist used his own body as material, testing his physical limits amidst a mess of American condiments like mayonnaise and ketchup. His attack on the values of the American way of life and on a society manipulated by the media continued into the 80s, when he began to produce mechanical sculptures that gradually replaced his own presence in the gallery. In the 90s, his ever expansive installations continued to break taboos in a theatrically drastic way, further exploring issues of violence and pornography, masturbation, birth, and death.
In “Santa Chocolate Shop” first shown in the 1997 Whitney Biennial, McCarthy achieves the ultimate dismantling of sentimental notions of childhood innocence. The installation includes a lopsided plywood house and a life-size video projection of Santa “making chocolate” into the mouth of a prone little helper while men in crotch less animal suits scurry around the workshop.
No stranger to food in his art, McCarthy produced 10 inch chocolate figurines based on his sculpture, Santa With Butt Plug, a 24 metre high inflatable public sculpture. He transformed the Maccarone gallery in New York’s West Village into Peter Paul Chocolates, a fully functioning chocolate factory, turning out 1,000 ‘Santa With Tree And Bell’ chocolate figurines each day.
Tim Noble and Sue Webster entered the London art scene in the mid-1990s, just as others of the so-called “Young British Artists” were attracting increasing attention.
The artists are united by their fascination with the mechanics of the media and advertising industries, and by the notion of the young British artist as celebrity. They employ a wide variety of visual styles, combining and confusing the spectacular and the mundane in a manner best described as consistently inconsistent.
Some of their most notable pieces are made from piles of rubbish collected from London streets. A light is projected against the pile, and the shadow on the wall creates an entirely different image, typically of the couple themselves: this is not at all apparent from looking directly at the sculpture itself.
The same technique is used in the current advertising campaign for the John Lewis department stores.
When Joan Eardley painted ‘Sleeping Nude’ in 1954 she was subjected to ‘Shock Horror’ headlines in the scottish tabloid press. One newspaper went so far as to print the artists home address inviting the public to make their feelings on the work known directly. The main result of the publication however was perhaps more disturbing, as several men turned up offering their services as models.
Born in Sussex in 1921, Eardleymoved to Glasgow in 1940, studying at Glasgow School of Art. Her paintings of children playing in rundown Glasgow tenements, and her landscapes painted in and around the fishing village of Catterline on the north-east coast of Scotland, are among the most celebrated works in Scottish art. Her career was cut tragically short in 1963, when she died of cancer at the age of 42.
The National Gallery of Scotland is currently presenting one of the largest Eardley exhibitions ever held, and it is also the first major exhibition of her work in nearly twenty years.
Swiss artist Roman Signer’s “action sculptures” involve setting up, carrying out, and recording “experiments” or events that bear aesthetic results. Following carefully planned and strictly executed and documented procedures, the artist enacts and records such acts as explosions, collisions, and the projection of objects through space. Video works like Stiefel mit Rakete (Boot with Rocket) are integral to Signer’s performances, capturing the original setup of materials that self-destruct in the process of creating an emotionally and visually compelling event. Signer gives a humorous twist to the concept of cause and effect and to the traditional scientific method of experimentation and discovery, taking on the self-evidence of scientific logic as an artistic challenge.
Exhibitions of Signers work are currently running at:
There can be few more challenging spaces for an artist to be commissioned to produce work for than the Turbine Hall entrance of the Tate modern Gallery in London.
From Rachel Whiteread’s Embankment to Bruce Nauman’s Raw Materials and Carson Holler’s Test Site (the slides) success has been variable.
The Tates 8th commissioned artist was the Columbian sculptor Doris Salcedo
When Salcedo’s Shibboleth was unveiled it wasn’t the meaning of the work that seemed to trouble and baffle the public and critics alike, interpretations ranging from a comment on the art world, humanities consciousness and racism and the divided world but how the 548ft (167metres) crack in the solid concrete turbine hall was created. The crack starts with a very fine and small hairline fissure and gradually widens into a 3ft crevasse. Suggestions ranged from a fake painted optical illusion to an actual crack in the floor which had been worsened to create the work. In the end the Guardian newspaper decided to investigate and interviewed a construction worker who was working on another project at the Tate. I’ll leave the description to the builder, only identified as Mr E:
‘They dug a dirty great trench about a yard deep and a yard wide and then they brought in lorry load after lorry load of cement and poured it in, using 10ft sections of what looked liked carved polystyrene moulding to form the sides. Then a whole bunch of people lay on their stomachs for about a week and finished it off with brushes.
When it was pointed out to Mr E that the trench was about racism he replied, ‘Its about racism, can’t see it myself, but it was a pretty good trench’
“I want the manifestation of my ideas to be life-sized, not only regarding their scale, but also in terms of their relevance to their situation or medium. Then they’re more like the ideas behind something. Art is just a manifestation, a Trojan Horse, for ideas.”
Ceal Floyer.
Ceal Floyer born in Pakistan, raised in London now living and working Berlin, is the 2007 winner of the Pries der Nationalgalerie Fur Junge Kunst (Nationalgalerie Prize for Young Art) awarded to
The other shortlisted Artists for the prize were Jeanne Faust, Damián Ortega and Tino Sehgal.
The jury’s decision reflects the diversity of artistic production in Germany, not only with regard to the different nationalities involved, but also in terms of the media and artistic strategies used.
The work of all four artists is currently on display in a joint exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum, Berlin from 14 September to 4 November 2007.
Liam Gillicks’ practice is informed by perceived models of communication and the spaces that this takes place, under the conditions of ‘late’ capitalism. His work takes in writing, installation, film, design and curating acknowledging no division between any of these processes. He sees the discussion surrounding his work and the potentials for human interaction within his specifically designed spaces as potentially more important than the specific objects He states, somewhat flippantly, that his work would maybe be better viewed with your back to it. He appropriates the forms of corporate office architecture combining this with a reinvigoration of 60’s minimalist aesthetics.
He gained recognition in the 90’s as a minor player in the YBA movement and is now widely recognised as part of the Relational Aesthetic movement, written about extensively by Nicolas Bourriaud and working closely with Phillippe Parrenno, Pierre Huyghe and Rikrit Tiravinija. He has exhibited widely and in 2002 was nominated for the Turner Prize eventually losing to Keith Tyson.
JRP/Ringier as part of their Proxemics series has recently published a collection of his critical writings on other artists.
Conceptual artist Michael Asher (1943) took this process one step further and took minimalism to its logical conclusion by removing the object or image altogether, creating an art that forced the viewer to analyze what wasn’t there, rather than what was. Presumably this is a difficult concept to accept when considering that an empty space couldn’t possibly hold any meaning. Or could it?
For example, when he temporarily removed a dividing wall in a Los Angeles gallery in 1973, he successfully achieved the task of creating more for the viewer to see and contemplate. Before the exhibit opened, when in place, the wall functioned to separate the office space from the exhibition space and prohibit visitors from observing the day-to-day operations of the gallery. Once removed for the exhibit, desks and chairs, books and papers, telephones, file cabinets and other administrative items located in the rear of the gallery were on display occupying the once seemingly empty space. By removing the wall, the gallery itself became the artwork.
This exhibit, or de-installation, related to the ideas behind many conceptual works of the time, questioned the increasingly materialistic nature of artworks and gallery system, which included the economic, historical, and institutional factors.
Throughout his career Michael Asher has continued to use art galleries and institutions such as museums as his medium. For each exhibition he chooses to alter the space by removing various elements, rearranging them, or otherwise changing their location. For a 1979 exhibit held at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, he removed large panels from the building’s facade and hung them on an interior wall within the museum. Although the subtle nature of the work made it difficult to immediately detect, the museum itself became the work.
In the mid-seventies American Artist Leon Golub destroyed nearly every work he produced nearly abandoned painting. In the late seventies, however, he produced more than a hundred portraits of public figures, among them political leaders, dictators, and religious figures. Leon Golub: Paintings, 1950-2000 includes several portraits of Nelson Rockefeller and Ho Chi Minh, along with images of Fidel Castro, Francisco Franco, Richard Nixon, and Henry Kissinger.
In the 1980s Golub turned his attention to terrorism in a variety of forms, from the subversive operations of governments to urban street violence. Killing fields, torture chambers, bars, and brothels became inspiration and subject for work that dealt with such themes as violent aggression, racial inequality, gender ambiguity, oppression, and exclusion. Among the work produced in this period are the series Mercenaries, Interrogation, Riot, and Horsing Around.
The International Klein Blue (IKB) is a deep blue hue first mixed by the French artist Yves Klein.
International Klein Blue was developed by French artist Yves Klein as part of his search for colors which best represented the concepts he wished to convey as an artist. Although Klein had worked with blue extensively in his earlier career, it was not until 1958 that he used it as the central component of a piece (the color effectively becoming the art). Klein embarked on a series of monochromatic works using IKB as the central theme. These included performance art where Klein painted models’ naked bodies and had them walk, roll and sprawl upon blank canvases as well as more conventional single-color canvases.
The secret of IKB’s remarkable visual impact comes from its heavy reliance on Ultramarine, as well as Klein’s often thick and textured application of paint to canvas.
IKB was developed by Klein and chemists to have the same color brightness and intensity as dry pigments, which it achieves by suspending dry pigment in a clear synthetic resin. This new medium was patented by Klein.
International Klein Blue is outside the gamut of computer displays, and can therefore not be accurately portrayed on this page.
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Gordon Matta-Clark was born in New York on June 22, 1943, to artists Roberto Matta and Anna Clark. Teeny Duchamp, Marcel’s wife, was Matta-Clark’s godmother. Matta-Clark’s childhood was spent in New York, Paris, and Chile. He studied architecture at Cornell University in 1963-68.
In 1969, Matta-Clark moved back to New York. Over the following two years, he explored the metamorphic possibilities of cooking, beginning by frying Polaroid photographs in oil with gold leaf. In the early 1970s, he helped organize 112 Greene Street, an exhibition space showing new art. He also collaborated on Food, a combined restaurant and performance piece; made Garbage Wall, a prototype shelter for the homeless; and was active in building SoHo as an artists’ community. He addressed popular culture in the 1973 Photoglyphs, hand-colored black-and-white photographs depicting New York’s burgeoning graffiti.
During the 1970s, Matta-Clark made the works for which he is best known: his “anarchitecture.” These were temporary works created by sawing and carving sections out of buildings, most of which were scheduled to be destroyed. He documented these projects in photography and film. Although he made interventions into a former iron foundry in Genoa, Italy, in 1973, his first large-scale project has been defined as Splitting (1974). To create this work, Matta-Clark sawed two parallel slices through a nondescript wood-frame house in Englewood, New Jersey, and removed the material between the two cuts. In addition, he cut out the corners of the house’s roof, which were subsequently shown at John Gibson Gallery in New York. He made similar gestures in some of his photographs, cutting the actual negatives rather than manipulating individual prints.
After his death on the 22nd of February 1987 Andy Warhol’s estate was decided by the courts to be worth, conservatively, over half a billion dollars: $509,979,278.00. The Warhol Foundation contested this figure in court and it was eventually reduced to $228 million. It was to the Foundation’s advantage to have a lower evaluation of Warhol’s paintings because it meant they would have to pay less in legal fees to the attorney for the estate who was on a percentage of 2.5% of the value of the estate. Also, The Foundation was legally obligated to award 5 percent of its assets for charitable grants and a lower valuation meant that they would have to pay out less money.
In order to back up their legal challenge for a lesser evaluation, the Foundation argued in court that Warhol was not as great an artist as some independent experts believed him to be. Art dealer Andre Emmerich testified for the Foundation that Warhol’s work was likely to fade into obscurity because the subjects of his paintings (Marilyn Monroe, Elvis etc…) would eventually be forgotten. The Foundation paid Emmerich $4,000 a day to testify plus $3,500 for preparatory work.
British art group Unit One was formed by Paul Nash in 1933 to promote modern art, architecture and design. The two major currents in modern art at the time were seen as being abstract art on the one hand and Surrealism on the other. Unit One embraced the full spectrum, Nash made both abstract and Surrealist work in the mid 1930s and played a major part in organising the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936 (British Surrealism).
The launch of the group was announced in a letter from Nash to The Times newspaper, in which he wrote that Unit One was ‘to stand for the expression of a truly contemporary spirit, for that thing which is recognised as peculiarly of today in painting, sculpture and architecture’. The first and only group exhibition was held in 1934 accompanied by a book Unit One, subtitled The Modern Movement in English Architecture, Painting and Sculpture.
The other artists associated with the group were Armstrong, Bigge, Burra, Hepworth, Moore, Nicholson, Wadsworth and the architects Welles Coates and Colin Lucas.
Doug Aitken’s complex multi media installations address the elaborate inter-relationships between man, media, industry and landscape and the nature and perception of time. The viewer’s experience of his installations is as much a process of discovery as the making of the pieces was for the artist. The narratives reveal themselves in intricate spirals in which the viewer is forced to actively engage, both physically by passing through the exhibition space to see the various projections and mentally as the multiple images prevent a single interpretation.
