Sunday 13 September 2009

A short mention about an exhibition in Paris


elles@centrepompidou

women artists in the collections of the National Modern Art Museum

May 27-24 2010
11h00 - 21h00


EXHIBITION ITINERARY



The show is hung in chronological order by themes. It brings together a selection of over 500 works by more than 200 artists, from the beginning of the 20th century up to the present day.

Pioneer
Level 5. Abstract, primitive, functional, urban, mixed media, surreal, amazons, objective... Eight rooms display the works of these pioneers who were at the forefront of change in all the artistic media: Shirley Jaffe, Joan Mitchell, Sonia Delaunay, Natalia S. Gontcharova, Hannah Höch, Frida Kahlo, Judit Reigl, Suzanne Valadon, Diane Arbus, Dora Maar.

Free Fire
Opening level 4. Niki de Saint Phalle, Karen Knorr, Rosemarie Trocket, among others, represent those who played historic roles, feminists, critics, photographers and performers, with their personal visions of reality.

Body slogan
Level 4. Precocious and inventive in photography and video, women artists have lately transformed the art of drawing, revitalising the very notion of body. ORLAN, Atsuko Tanaka and Ana Mendieta worked on the representation of the body and its stereotypes, notably that of the life drawing genre, as well as ways of staging it in their early performances.

The Activist Body
Level 4. Women artists played a key role in redefining visual and theoretical categories, and explored and commented on ways of bridging the abstract and the figurative, the organic and the systematic, the conceptual and the sensual. Typical among these was Louise Bourgeois, Agnes Martin, Vera Molnar, Valérie Jouve, Hanne Darboven.

A room of One's Own
Level 4.Borrowing Virginia Wool's title of her book dealing with questions about the conditions of art production, this part of the exhibition is gathering the works of artists exploring the notion of private space, weaving new connections between mental projections and exhibition space. Here we find Dorothea Tanning, Tatiana Trouvé, Charlotte Perriand, Sophie Calle.

Wordworks
Level 4. From story-telling to listing, through autobiography, quotations, legends and the many facets of the artist's book, creative women like Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Natacha Lesueur, Cristina Iglesias, Eija-Liisa Ahtila explore the various uses of language in art. Concept Art, urban myths, appropriation and post-modernism all use words as a medium while video installations redefine the idea of story-telling.

Immaterials
Level 4. Matali Crasset, Alisa Andrasek, Tacita Dean, Louise Campbell, Isa Genzken, Nancy Wilson-Pajic, Geneviève Asse and more leave us with one of the most striking characteristics of contemporary art, namely its disembodiment. The title refers back to one of the Centre Pompidou's cult exhibitions, "Les immatériaux" (Immaterials).




Album covers






And talking about the 60's, I really like this post about psychedelic album covers in Hippy Couture blog.

Interesting book, I think



A book about collaborative creativity, shared intelligence and the co-operative ethic as allowed by the latest development of IT technologies.

As the back cover reads : " You are what you share, that is the ethic of the world being created by YouTube and MySpace, Wikipedia and Facebook. We-Think is a rallying call for the shared powe of the web to make society more open and egalitarian. We-Think reports on an unparelleled wave of collaborative creativity as people from California to China devise ways to work together that are more democratic, productive and creative."

In fact the author put drafts of the book online for others to comment and the final result has been shaped by many contributions all over the world.

I'm fascinated by the chapter where the author links the development of tools that are now widely used for online collaboration to ideas of the 1960s counterculture, like participation, decentralization...
Interesting in any case!

More about the book here, and you can get to the author's website here.

I also love the illustrations by Debbie Powell.

Saturday 12 September 2009

Questions without answers III and IV

How on earth can I be so fascinated by this collection of mini-erasers?
But above all, how on earth can a collection of mini-erasers coexist with a quote by Voltaire?












                                                                  
 Found at this flickr album: gomas de borrar

Tuesday 8 September 2009

Quote about the Internet?








"What we find in books is like the fire in our hearths. We fetch it from our neighbours, we kindle it at home, we communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all"



Voltaire
Lettres philosophiques, 1733

Make Art not War



I like the T-shirt Viggo Mortensen was wearing when he arrived in Venice for the film festival.




Artist: Shepard Fairey





And well, who am I kidding, I like Viggo himself too.

Illustration loves fashion: Cati Estrada

I love Cati Estrada's illustration style. Her flickr album is one of my favourites.




















Oops
I guess
that was
a spontaneous
blogging break