Conceptual art should be allowed to speak for itself
| Good luck with getting any gallery to agree with that. The NS ponders Doris’s crack.
Category: {sculpture}
Sculpture
Sex at the Barbican
Still from Blowjob by Andy Warhol (1963).
Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now opens today at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, and runs until 27 January 2008.
Seduced explores the representation of sex in art through the ages. Featuring over 300 works spanning 2000 years, it brings together Roman sculptures, Indian manuscripts, Japanese prints, Chinese watercolours, Renaissance and Baroque paintings and 19th century photography with modern and contemporary art.
Seduced presents the work of around 70 artists including Nobuyoshi Araki, Francis Bacon, Jeff Koons, Robert Mapplethorpe, Pablo Picasso, Rembrandt van Rijn and Andy Warhol among others. Stimulating the mind and the senses, provocative and compelling, Seduced provides the historical and cultural framework to explore the boundaries of acceptability in art. Seduced is curated by Marina Wallace, Martin Kemp and Joanne Bernstein.
• Barbican gallery selection
• Guardian gallery selection
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Male Gaze
Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth
Art for crack addicts.
Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall is so vast and empty it’s quite a challenge for an artist to do anything interesting with it. One option is to try and fill the space which is what Anish Kapoor did with his enormous Marsyas, the first of the Turbine works I saw there in 2002.
Colombian artist Doris Salcedo has caused a stir this week by unveiling her own offering which seems to ruin the concrete floor with a succession of cracks that run the length of the building. I say “seem” because it looks from photos like she’s installed a series of large concrete slabs over the original floor (she won’t say how it’s been made), something that the structure of the cracks in close-up would seem to confirm. The rationale for this—that the work is “addressing a long legacy of racism and colonialism that underlies the modern world”—isn’t remotely obvious, a perennial problem with contemporary art; a crack in the floor can mean any number of things, after all, and it’s difficult to see how an unbriefed visitor would arrive at that conclusion. However, I’d still like to see this in situ even if it doesn’t match the splendour of Olafur Eliasson’s Weather Project from 2003.
Shibboleth can be seen from October 9th 2007–April 6th 2008.
Update: Builders and an architect ponder the mystery of the crack’s creation.
• Shibboleth at Tate Modern
• A video at The Guardian
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Olafur Eliasson’s Serpentine Pavilion
• Cloud Gate by Anish Kapoor
Custom creatures
If Polly Morgan’s animal corpse art seems macabre, it looks positively mundane next to Serina Brewer’s creations. Her Custom Creatures include many multi-headed inventions like the cat thing shown here. She also does a fine line in carcass art, pickled pets and jewellery made from various extremities, should you be searching for those elusive alligator feet earrings.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Polly Morgan, fine art taxidermist
• Cryptozoology
• Insect Lab
• The art of Jessica Joslin
• The Museum of Fantastic Specimens
Polly Morgan, fine art taxidermist
Still Life After Death (fox) (2006).
Rest a Little in the Lap of Life (2005).
Polly Morgan‘s work is on display at The Exquisite Corpse exhibition, Trinity Church, Marylebone Road, London, until October 19th. (No exhibition website.)
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Cryptozoology
• Insect Lab
• The art of Jessica Joslin
• The Museum of Fantastic Specimens