Antony Caro 1924 - 2013

The Creators Project

A Point to note with the last post, it was part of The Creators Project, which is consistently brilliant and well worth a regular visit.

Four Tet

Really interesting short film with Four Tet, dealing with everything from creative process to emotion.

Sarah Sze

Represented by the amazing Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, Sarah Sze.....
".......utilises a myriad of everyday objects in her installations from cotton buds and tea bags to water bottles and ladders, light bulbs and electric fans. Presented as leftovers or traces of human behaviour, these items, released from their commonplace duty possess a certain vitality and ambition within the work. Her careful consideration of every shift in scale between the humble and the monumental, the throwaway and the precious, the incidental and the essential solicits a new experience of space, disorienting and reorienting the viewer at every turn." 

Todd Hido

Intriguing images by Todd Hido in his 'Homes at night' series. 

Vera & Kyte

 

 More stuff from LDF 2013 by Vera & Kyte. Obvious heavy Sottsass influence here and I like the products; the collection of stools?.... tables?... perches? But what grabbed my attention was the painted granite pieces. Something brilliant about the quality of line produced when the paint is applied. Because of the slightly rough surface the edges of the line become blurred and occasionally bleed on to the horizontal surfaces. Final honing on the granite could have happened after the painting, producing a clean line but Vera & Kyte's approach to these was that of artist rather than designer. They are not that pre-planned, (designed) so there is room for evolution, meaning they do not feel like a product, just interesting objects.

Rivane Neuenschwander

Rivane Neuenschwander deals with the big stuff, Space & Time. In particular trying to define or mark out succinct and appropriate boundaries, somehow trying to calibrate the space (whilst enhancing its totality.) Wonderful.

Goodd

My favourite thing at the London Design Festival this year by a mile was the simple Vita side table by uncontrollable Urge for Goodd (nice site too). Hard to tell from the images but this is so impeccably detailed, precise and poised.

Vincent Fournier

Mind boggling hyper real images from the incredible photographer, Vincent Fournier. Images of utter clarity and poise. (There is a great film here)

Westbrook House

Hold

I have been thinking about this plate rack/drainer for years, but it has finally entered the physical world.
Traditional racks are pretty useless, normally holding a few plates and little else, but this is stripped and adapted so anything can sit comfortably on it.
I also love the look of it as an object, it sits in a small, rare aesthetic window, where farmhouse kitchen and modular contemporary co-exist.
First batch should be upcoming very soon.

Ferris McGuinty

A new exhibition of work by Ferris McGuinty at The Poly in Falmouth. Like creatures that have evolved from eating the detritus washed up on the beach or machines made for capturing memories and moods.  Engaging and beautiful objects.

Credenza

Trevose Harbour House

Room divider for the recently opened Trevose Harbour House in St.Ives, separating the breakfast area from the snug. The owners have a healthy amount of mid century modern classics and I made this piece to fall in with the style. It all looks amazing, some of the views are stunning and the owners (Angela & Olivier) have put their heart and soul into Trevose, so its well worth a stay if you are in the area. They are also opening the terrace cafe soon.

EMF

Projecte de restauració del paratge de Tudela-Culip (Club Med) al Parc Natural del Cap de Creus from ielei on Vimeo.
The story goes, Old Club Med resort in Spain gets reclaimed to protected park status and has to be demolished. Cue landscape architects EMF to re-integrate the complex to nature.
It's quite interesting, leaving traces of DNA, but I wonder why the reaction was to leave this evidence and not do something completely new?  I guess reinstating the natural environment is unusual, and maybe EMF felt it was important to know that it happened, and this is why the work nods at the history of the site.

The Floating Church

Apologies, this is really doing the rounds on the web..... but.... it is an interesting image. The mad thing is that church is still in its exact original position, everything else has been excavated to make room for a 2 storey basement extension.

Oscar Tusquets Blanca

No flashing 'Les Miserables' advertising and overly bright strip lighting here, with Oscar Tusquets Blanca's effervescent and jubilant re-imaging of Toledo Metro station in Napoli. What an agreeable sight to start you commute to work.

Havelock Walk

Its Open Studios @ Havelock Walk this weekend. Art, architecture, design (and knowing that lot, probably a big fire in the evening!) 

Good luck with it guys.

Martin Boyce

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery (NYC) presents Martin Boyce.

"But this passageway has neither entrance or exit...." Haruki Murakami.

"Through a series of architectural interventions - free standing windows and hanging lanterns - Boyce transforms the space into an immersive and dream-like landscape."

Where shall I lead you today? .........I know, 1920's Americana, and the release of two gems from the period. The wonderfully named Imaginational Anthem Vol.6  and the lighter, fiddle and banjo of Charlie Poole and the Highlanders. If you want to escape to another place, these will definitely work.

Richard Bottwin

Richard Bottwin - "A sense of disorientation, implied weightlessness and the element of surprise are created by the reductive forms and subvert the modernist vocabulary of the simple constructions."

Kundera Chair

In my (humble) opinion, Kundera, by gud conspiracy is so much more successful, pleasing and well crafted than Konstantin Grcic's Medici Chair, which won the recent big Design Museum prize for 2013.
Rem Koolhaas OMA  is currently reinventing the Old Commonwealth Institute building for the upcoming Design Museum move, which is very exciting. But I really hope the curators pull their socks up regarding the stuff they are going to put in it, as this years awards are a joke.
Swiftly moving on, and back to Kundera, I really like the precision, its lean but healthy, the seat is slightly over-pitched (in a good way) and there is a real honest symbiosis between form and construction.

Liliana Ovalle

Some interesting suff from Liliana Ovalle. Particularly fond of the tables which are counter balanced with hand carved soap-stones, like glorified Stage-weights.

Thomas Kral

Good use of a trough by Thomas Kral with his Homework desk.

The best summer house?

Yauatcha

Amazing lighting in the basement dining room at Yauatcha. Restaurant lighting can be hit and miss, and is very difficult when subterranean, but Christian Liairge has done an brilliant job. It is simply like sitting under a leafy tree in the midday sun...all dappled, dreamy and beautiful. (And the food is incredible too.)

Conrad Shawcross - Ropemakers

Conrad Shawcross - Ropermakers.......Where deep philosophical content meets coloured craft, all brought together via the most brilliant wooden constructions. Oh Yes.

Beam Drop

I must have mentioned this before, probably loads, but hey, I don't care... I could never tire of Chris Burdens Cold-blooded Brute of a sculpture, 'Beam Drop'.

UbuWeb

UbuWeb is a total triumph.......get involved!

UbuWeb is a completely independent resource dedicated to all strains of the avant-garde, ethnopoetics, and outsider arts. 

All materials on UbuWeb are being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights belong to the author(s). 

UbuWeb is completely free.

It's amazing to me that UbuWeb, after fifteen years, is still going. Run with no money, Ubu has succeeded by breaking all the rules, by going about things the wrong way. UbuWeb can be construed as the Robin Hood of the avant-garde, but instead of taking from one and giving to the other, we feel that in the end, we're giving to all. UbuWeb is as much about the legal and social ramifications of its self-created distribution and archiving system as it is about the content hosted on the site. In a sense, the content takes care of itself; but keeping it up there has proved to be a trickier proposition. The socio-political maintenance of keeping free server space with unlimited bandwidth is a complicated dance, often interfered with by darts thrown at us by individuals calling foul-play on copyright infringement. Undeterred, we keep on: after fifteen years, we're still going strong. We're lab rats under a microscope: in exchange for the big-ticket bandwidth, we've consented to be objects of university research in the ideology and practice of radical distribution. 

But by the time you read this, UbuWeb may be gone. Cobbled together, operating on no money and an all-volunteer staff, UbuWeb has become the unlikely definitive source for all things avant-garde on the internet. Never meant to be a permanent archive, Ubu could vanish for any number of reasons: our ISP pulls the plug, our university support dries up, or we simply grow tired of it. Acquisition by a larger entity is impossible: nothing is for sale. We don't touch money. In fact, what we host has never made money. Instead, the site is filled with the detritus and ephemera of great artists—the music of Jean Dubuffet, the poetry of Dan Graham,Julian Schnabel’s country music, the punk rock of Martin Kippenberger, the diaries of John Lennon, the rants of Karen Finley, and pop songs by Joseph Beuys—all of which was originally put out in tiny editions and vanished quickly. 

However the web provides the perfect place to restage these works. With video, sound, and text remaining more faithful to the original experience than, say, painting or sculpture, Ubu proposes a different sort of revisionist art history, one based on the peripheries of artistic production rather than on the perceived, or market-based, center. Few people, for example, know that Richard Serra makes videos. Whilst visiting his recent retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, there was no sign of TELEVISION DELIVERS PEOPLE (1973) or BOOMERANG (1974), both being well-visited resources on UbuWeb. Similarly, Salvador Dalí’s obscure video,IMPRESSIONS DE LA HAUTE MONGOLIE—HOMMAGE Á RAYMOND ROUSSEL from the mid-70s can be viewed. Outside of UN CHIEN ANDALOU (1929), it’s the only other film he completed in his lifetime. While you won’t find reproductions of Dalí’s paintings on UbuWeb, you will find a 1967 recording of an advertisement he made for a bank.

(Image is a clip from 'Equation: X + X = O  (1936)')

Jardin de Cactus

Daphna Laurens

There is something quite engaging about this image from Daphna Laurens at Salone de Mobile, Milano. It does not look quite real, almost like a Thomas Demand reconstruction, or a dolls house.

McCullin

I have just seen the most amazing documentary about the photographer Don McCullin. It is hard to describe the intensity of the film which charts McCullins' career capturing war, famine and ultimately humanity in every conceivable form. It's incredibly moving and distressing but it is also so very important, all brilliantly knitted together with newsreel and moving image film.
McCullin is a marvellous photographer, and he became obsessed by conflict (and the adrenalin it produced), putting himself in situations which were frankly suicidal.  But he did this in order to tell the truth, to tell real stories from the front line, to render the pain and suffering in all its gore and desperation.
Implicitly trusted and published by (Sir) Harold Evans, then editor of The Times and bank rolled by a fiercely independent owner, the photographs would form the basis of accounts from Cyprus, Vietnam, Lebanon, Cambodia and Biafra . These images left people reeling back home, trying to digest their breakfast on a quiet sunday morning.
McCullin struggled with the situations, and is obviously mentally scarred, but he is a true artist in my view. He seems to have had no control over impulse to shoot these images, he just had to do it.
I was slightly concerned by Argo, the recent Oscar winner, and its depiction of conflict, now I just think it is downright awful and actually dangerous.
The world needs more people like Don McCullin, and more people with the integrity and foresight to fund and produce stuff that is truly important.
Remarkable, (and not to be missed).