A Bewley’s Coffee Cup
August 15, 2013 § Leave a comment
I was staying with German friends in Kerry when Claudio told me that he collected espresso cups, and had quite a sizeable collection of them. He wondered if there might be an Irish one to add. I was most dubious about the idea, and said that although Illy Cafe had been in my valley for a decade at a drive of some 20 kilometers away, I thought it unlikely. That morning we went to a cafe on Valentia Island and to my surprise I was given an espresso in a fully Irish espresso cup. It wasn’t new and evincing nostalgia, but probably one from the original Bewley’s Cafe on Grafton Street in the bloom of cafe society, and probably the only place of its kind in Dublin. I was so enchanted with the coincidence that I asked the waitress if I could buy it for Claudio’s collection. She in turn was so delighted that such a collection might exist at all, that she washed and dried the cup and gave it to me.
Used Art Dealer
August 4, 2013 § Leave a comment
I notice that Steptoe Brother or Del-Boy of the art scene is shelling-off some of his ill-considered wares at a Christie’s auction in October, at the time of course of the Frieze Art Fair. Apparently, there’s no room for it at the respectable auction house, so it’s being held in a Post Office warehouse. And there’s no reserve prices, so you could pick up your very own David Batchelor for a fiver, or some other sub-Culbert piece as illustrated in the clipping above. Of course, there’ll always be a Chapman or two in such yard sales, with increasing regularity. This shameless piece of David Batchelor is incidentally called ‘Brick Lane’. Where does he come from?
Ian Finlay at Arnolfini
August 3, 2013 § Leave a comment
At last someone has managed to put on a Finlay show that might do the work some justice. There has been so much dithering around, so much lack of insight into a full exhibition, that you wonder if it will ever take place. In lieu there are a succession of smaller offerings of mostly printed work from private holdings. I saw one was held in some sort of taxi shed in Pimlico earlier this year : then there’s this, and I see another on the horizon in Portland Oregon, from the collection of Stephen Scobie, I presume. There is nothing amiss with a show based on publication, in fact it is a seminal cause, and Finlay’s work is a triumph of that. But not as an excuse for a more complete airing of all the work in all its facets. Nonetheless, this display at Arnolfini in Bristol which runs until early September, looks magnificent in its arrangement, fresh, light and aerated, the opposite of a mordant attempt at the end of last year in one of the bigger emporiums. I just wish they would give up on other artists’ responses to work being shown! What a bad idea, and how confusing. For instance, what is that little gridded thing in the middle of the floor that I spent ages trying to reconcile with Finlay, thinking it must be a maquette for a photograph for a postcard (maybe one to be called Swastika Compass! ) – then I thought it was the inlay for a table by Graeme Murray that he may have left with Ian Finlay. Eventually I realized it was some other persons work entirely!
But well done Axel Wieder for this show. I should have known, as pro qm in Berlin from whence you come is one of the great bookshops.
The Dreaded P Word
March 30, 2013 § Leave a comment
For a long time I’ve thought that journalists were running the show, having created the fiction of the popularity of the visual arts, only to be believed by the so-called curators. It is however coming full circle, and things may return to a normal and healthy obscurity. There are so many really bad exhibitions about, viz. The Light Show at the Hayward Gallery.What has happened to the intervening years since the quasi-theoretical GRAV and Kinetics? You are never going to find out here. But all that’s for another entry.
I just wanted to chew over a piece by journalist Stuart Jeffries attempting to deal with assistants to ‘well-known’ artists, entitled Behind Every Great Artist. It’s a bastion of the overworked and over-edified p word…
working in a restaurant and as a builder while establishing a sculpture practice…I sometimes regret that I have let go of my own practice…I get interested in his practice…He’s thrived too as Gormley’s practice has… to learn what he could before setting up his own practice… Wentworth’s later practice as a sculptor…At the same time there are so many bad editorial strategies ( don’t I mean curatorial?) available.
Jake and Dinos Chapman’s AK45 show is like much of what they do, an unintentional cartoon of its (them)self, and contains Gormley’s worst ever work. Artists being invited to make playing cards or chess pieces are such dumb ideas, but they seem to exist in every generation.But to take the biscuit, how about My View : Personal Reflections By Today’s Leading Artists, now doubt coming from Tate Publishing, who really haven’t got a clue. With so many curators, that enterprise is spiraling inwards, but I suppose you’ve got to do something with all those unused Ph.D’s
August 24, 2012 § Leave a comment
At long last, after all these years, Hans Ulrich Obrist has come to the same conclusions that we did at workfortheeyetodo in about 1993-4, that the ‘c’ word is beyond redemption. At the time we issued a lapel button-badge, merely stating that whatever we did was uncurated. Now he writes in a piece entitled Life brought to art in the Financial Times of August 18th:
Fly-in, fly-out curating almost always produces superficial results:it’s a practice that goes hand in hand with the fashion for applying the word ‘curating’ to everything that involves simply making a choice- radio playlists, hotel decor, even the food stalls in New York’s High Line Park. Making art is not the matter of a moment, and nor is making an exhibition: curating follows art.
When will he make a similar assault on the ‘p’ word, the even more spurious notion of practice that artists are always talking about ?
Irish gnocchi
August 20, 2012 § Leave a comment
A bowl of Irish gnocchi to celebrate a return to this column after several months absence. At times I feel that Irish potatoes can only be mixed with flour and made into gnocchi as a way of preventing them from dissolving in boiling water. They don’t like ‘wet’ potatoes in Ireland, only the ones that ‘explode in your face’.
A jacket & a pair of trousers by Eric Gill
May 19, 2012 § Leave a comment
The dust jacket of the 1946 resetting of Eric Gill’s essay was printed on the inside of another discarded jacket from the Works of William J. Locke Autograph Edition Volume XXXIII, also from The Bodley Head. Times of utility and re-use. It is remarkable that on the sleeve note Gill says ‘This book is written for people in general and not specifically for those people called artists…It is about art in general and the things every man needs… My appeal is to common sense.’ Is that what ‘ The Most Precious Ornament’ of another volume of Gill’s writing is about too!
Ad Reinhardt : Black Paintings 1951-1967
May 1, 2012 § Leave a comment
Book Description: Marlborough Gallery New York, 1970. Soft cover. Book Condition: Fine. No Jacket. 1st Edition. March 1970. New York: Marlborough Gallery.28pp 300 x 210mm Stiff pictorial wraps. A gorgeous copy of this scarce and profusely illustrated exhibition catalog published on the occasion of the exhibition “Ad Reinhard: Black Paintings 1951 to 1967” . A wonderful book, of working shots in the studio on Broadway facing W 4th St, together with remarkably fine reproductions of two paintings.Containing a Chronology by Ad Reinhardt.’The Quest for Art is Art’ by Harvard H Arnason, and the incisive essay ‘The Black Paintings’ by Barbara Rose. Not least wonderful in this exemplary catalogue are the matt black endpapers. A fine copy, with slight scuffing to the spine edge and back cover. Bookseller Inventory # LABL123
Captain Pugwash
April 28, 2012 § Leave a comment
‘Scale is one of the tools at the artists’ disposal’ Lord Anish Kapoor
workfortheeyetodotoo 