Mine

I won this today on eBay...

Non-place

I went to see the newly opened Gabriel Orozco exhibition at Tate Modern today, a newly opened show surveying the Mexican artist's two decades of work in sculpture, painting and photography. These two photos stuck with me in terms of their capturing of a space in between places, something of a major concern in my own work at the moment.

(Top: An Island Within an Island

Bottom: From One Roof to Another)

Gallery talk

Some point soon I'm hoping to make a trip to Southend-on-Sea to visit the Focal Point Gallery. Founded in 2009 with support from the Art Council, it's one of numerous similarly funded galleries that are popping up around the country that is putting on relevant, exciting exhibitions, bringing contemporary art to an audience outside of London in a genuinely positive way. Their current show Anti-Photography features a number of big names, from Walead Beshty to Wolfgang Tillmans and Ed Ruscha, reflecting on the nature of the photographic image. Along with the likes of Nottingham Contemporary, who hosted the recent British Art Show 7 and an exhibition of David Hockney's work, and the forthcoming Hepworth gallery in Wakefield, a mix of good architecture and a programme of compelling exhibitions are coming together to prove that perhaps the arts can thrive in spite of the cuts.

Architectural forms

The Atlas Group is a really interesting archival project worth checking out. Founded by Walid Raad, it is a fictional collective devoted to researching and documenting the contemporary history of Lebanon. These images form part of a series by the group to document buildings of architectural, political, technological or national significance in Beirut.

Art as book

Today I learnt the next term I will be working on a project that centres around publication as a means of artistic production, run by these people at Byam Shaw, so thought I'd post a few examples from the master of the artist book, Ed Ruscha. Not sure how this fits in with my current work on the photograph as an object on the wall, but we shall see.

Absorption

All photographs Jeff Wall, from top: Passerby; Untitled (Forest); Untitled (Night); The Burrow.

Le Mépris

Le Mépris - Jean-Luc Godard (1963)

French playwright Paul Javal is hired by American producer Jack Prokosch to save his ailing production of Homer's Odyssey, where filming - directed by Fritz Lang as himself - has been halted at Cinecittà studios in Rome. Upon accepting the job Javal's life starts to mirror that of the film's hero, with the pressures of commercial constraints (embodied by Prokosch) leading to him becoming slowly estranged from his wife Camille (Brigit Bardot). As well as an examination of the collapsing marriage of the lead characters, the film can be described as being essentially about cinema, with Godard critiquing the Hollywood model and employing numerous instances of reference and self-reference - Fritz Lang being cast as himself, Godard playing the part of Lang's assistant, Bardot reading a book on Fritz Lang, and of course the obvious mirroring of Ulysses' estrangement with his wife with Javal's estrangement with Camille. The opening shot in particular draws our attention to this explicitly, in which the mechanisms of cinema are laid bare and we see Godard's camera crew filming a tracking shot of Prokosch's assistant, the camera moving ever closer to the screen before directing itself directly at the viewer, thus implicating us as viewer or spectator in the film.

Eames

Inspired

Feeling generous?

If you are, these rather special, handmade in Italy Fracap mountain boots wouldn't go a miss. May have to go and lust after them in Oi Polloi seeing as I'm in Manchester for the weekend...