A stands for Art

This is the silliest “art” picture I’ve come across all week and I thought I’d share it with you. It’s Bruce Nauman’s Five Marching Men (1985) currently installed in the Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof (CLICK). For those of you looking for something to do in London on May bank holiday Monday, don’t click the title link! It takes you to the BBC’s choice of things to do. With the exception of the new Galleries of Modern London in the Museum of London – free – they are wildly overpriced, which makes me wonder if the BBC isn’t being paid to advertise them. Instead, visit your favourite art gallery or museum online and look for the most interesting freebies. There are lots. You might also care to take a stroll round the old metropolis spotting elles in Elephant Parade London 2010 (CLICK for a map).

Today The Wallace Collection in London opened the first major exhibition of bronze sculptures in Britain for over thirty years: Beauty and Power: Renaissance and Baroque Bronzes from the Peter Marino Collection. Above are three of the sculptures on display. Admission is free. What are you waiting for? This is a must. Click the title link for details.

Yesterday newbie Home Secretary Theresa May announced that the National Identity Card scheme will be abolished within 100 days, when the 15,000 cards already issued at £30 a throw will become invalid. She said “We didn’t believe ID cards would work”. Homer Simpson, alias Elizabeth Henderson, commented “Aw shucks; they worked for me!”

Maybe art, maybe some art, maybe this art, maybe some of this art, serves turning the absence opaque, that is, making it at once palpable and impenetrable, so we cannot go back, so we are stuck in the appreciation of this strange, utopic now, and any attempt to overcome it, to look for the actual empty space, meets the opacity of an object, an image, a substitute, substitute not of a reality, but of what ceased to be, of the void that hence remains beyond us, happily or unhappily, hard to say, replaced by the fundamentally meager and helplessly sublime moment of a hesitant, aesthetic, experience, too private to be credible, too credible to be intimate, and yet ours, because we want it to be, because we claim it as such, because we know we inherited it from the silence that came before.

The picture – entitled (…) – is by Marek Wykowski. (Found by Gocha)

The statue of RAF hero Sir Keith Park was removed from the Fourth Plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square a few weeks ago (CLICK). Today Mayor Bouncy Boris unveiled its replacement, Yinka Shonibare’s Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle, which Bouncy described as “stunning”. It might be if it fell off the plinth and landed on somebody’s head. Apart from that eventuality, what’s stunning about a boring old ship in a bottle? These things went out of fashion years ago.

On Monday 24 May the Wildlife Artist of the Year 2010 & Three Generations Exhibition opens at the Mall Galleries in London and continues until Saturday 29 May, admission free. This magnificent painting of African wildlife Stormy Skies by David Shepherd CBE FRSA gives you a taste of what to expect. Three generations of the Shepherd family will be exhibiting plus the best artists who entered the Wildlife Artist of the Year 2010 competition. All profits support David Shepherd Wildlife Foundation projects.

Okay, folks, it’s car boot sale time again. Watch out for the above examples of early 20th Century tripe nicked from the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris last night. Thumbnails from left to right:
La femme a l’eventail by Amedeo Modigliani
Le pigeon aux petits pois by Pablo Picasso
La pastorale by Henri Matisse
L’olivier pres de l’Estaque by Georges Braque
Nature morte aux chandeliers by Fernand Leger.
The haul is estimated to be worth around 500m of those euro thingies (£431m; $618m). To see larger graphics COPY each title and artist’s name above (the complete line) and PASTE them into Google image search.

This Baroque masterpiece Domenichino’s Saint John the Evangelist (1620s) has gone on display at the National Gallery in London. Bought by a foreign buyer in December 2009, its export was blocked to allow time to raise £9.2m to keep it in the UK. An anonymous buyer came up with the readies and will allow the painting to be regularly displayed here. Well worth a gander.

Yesterday London Mayor Bouncy Boris unveiled the “new Routemaster” double-decker bus, handsomely designed by UK family firm the Wright Group. It certainly looks the bees knees, but at £8m a bus can Londoners afford it? And will members of the public enjoy falling of it as much as they did the old Routemaster? Oh, those were the days. Hop off, hit the ground running and hope for the best. Wheeeeeeee splat! Health and safety? What health and safety?

11 min, 16 mm film, B/W, no sound
Camera: Bill Rowley
Edit: Elaine Summers
Dir: Elaine Summers
Prod: Hans Breder, Iowa University

There are two things about this short fragment I love.
The first is the choreography of joy. The slow-motion allows us to better appreciate the flow of the common movement, the combining of the bodies, the contrast between them and everything that happens around them.
But there is something else. The dance becomes obvious at the end, when the movement continues beyond what we expected. Yet there is one earlier moment, one step of the girl coming from “our” side, which makes that clear. At a very precise point, she deviates from the way she has been running, her body bends like a bow and then moves sideways. That is when the simple vectors of meeting become something else – something more complex, less obvious. The bodies, now, create a space for our meeting to go beyond the embrace.