Quote on clothes, fashion and the human mind from the English author, art historian, museum curator who acted as keeper of prints, drawings and paintings for the Victoria and Albert Museum and pioneering fashion historian: James Laver.
Tag Archives: Painting
On Kawara Reading One Million Years
On Kawara, a Japanese conceptual artist living in New York City, made since 1966 a long series of “date paintings” (the Today series), which consist entirely of the date on which the painting was executed in white lettering set against a solid background. Other series of works include the “I Went and I Met” series of postcards sent to his friends detailing aspects of his life. A second series of postcards, I Got Up At, rubber-stamped with the time he got up that morning, and a series of telegrams sent to various people bearing the message “I am still alive”.
In 1971 he started with his work called ‘A Million Years’. This ten volume piece was produced concurrently with a series which would later be seen as his defining work. ‘A Million Years’ was, just as its title states, a series of numbers counting back the last million years from 1969. It was later accompanied by ‘One Million Years (future)’ which counts forwards from 1980. In 1993 Kawara transformed One Million Years (Future) from a written to recorded state. The impetus for this metamorphosis was an exhibition for Dia Center for the Arts that ran from January 1, 1993, to December 31 of the same year. The below video made by New York art tours gives an impression of ‘One Million Years”
The exhibition was comprised of three parts, a selection of one thousand Today paintings, the ten volumes of One Million Years (Past) and the recording of One million Years (Future), in which a male and female voice continuously, year after year, count into the future. A segment of this recording was transformed into a CD. With the exhibition the viewer plays a more passive role, entering into the space where the recording plays continuously, whereas with the CD the amount of time is limited, 74 minutes, and contains a set number of years (1994 AD to 2613 AD), thus transforming the infinite time of the exhibition into the finite time of the CD. With the CD the viewer is able to manipulate the duration and chronology of the CD, thus entering into a far more active relation to the work. You can listen to a part of the work in the below Ubuweb podcast.
Photos: On Kawara | David Zwirner Gallery | Sources: Ubuweb, Wikipedia | Video: New York Art Tours Youtube channel
Jeff Koons: New Paintings
Jeff Koons was born in York, PA in 1955. He obtained a B.F.A at The Maryland Institute, College of Art, Baltimore, and also studied at the Art Institute of Chicago. Since his emergence in the 1980s Jeff Koons has blended the concerns and methods of Pop, Conceptual, and appropriation art with craft-making and popular culture to create his own unique iconography, often controversial and always engaging. His work explores contemporary obsessions with sex and desire; race and gender; and celebrity, media, commerce, and fame. A self-proclaimed “idea man,” Koons hires artisans and technicians to make the actual works. For him, the hand of the artist is not the important issue: “Art is really just communication of something and the more archetypal it is, the more communicative it is.”
New paintings by Jeff Koons will be shown in the Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills, U.s.a. The vernissage of this exhibition will be on November the 14th 2009 and the exhibition will run until January 9 ,2010.
Koons’ new paintings are ambitious in their breadth. They engage in a dialogue with cultural history that is at once visual, intellectual, biological, and philosophical, as well as with art history, from the Venus of Willendorf to Gustave Courbet and Salvador Dali. At first glance the works may seem abstract and gestural, but at the same time they are embedded in the traditions of figurative painting. The brush strokes, which are photo realistic in their application, are actually fake brush strokes in the style of Roy Lichtenstein but at the same time they support the totality of gesture and action in life itself. The visual quality of Cy Twombly’swork is a reference as is its embodiment of the existential issues of what it means to be an artist. The depth in these paintings is figurative depth; the painted dots create holograms, giving an illusion of depth of field that is similar to that which exists between the viewer’s plane and the figure in Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde. The dot overlay represents past technologies, like color television, to remind the viewer of change and mortality. Through his ongoing exploration of cultural history and sexuality, Koons draws attention to time past, present, and future.
Photos Jeff Koons | Gagosian Gallery