newsfromlondon201110

landmark is an object or feature of a landscape or town that is easily seen and recognized from a distance, esp. one that enables someone to establish their location, such as a clock tower, a sightseeing wheel, or simple a distinctive name.

A peak into visual poems

My blood is boiling; my body becomes submerged in moving landscapes. More than an eye massage, Eyeball Massage, the exhibition of works by the Swiss artist, Pipilotti Rist, at the Hayward Gallery, beholds the idea of collective movement by means of a thoughtful combination: walls created by insubstantial cloth; space full with luminescente visual installations and soundscapes. Looking at these constant flux of light streams in any different away produces a sensation of visual vertigo! If Lobe Of The Lung (2009), a 15’ 36’’ audio-video installation overlapping nature and civilisation projected we have to lie down for, in Administrating Eternity (2011), an audio-video installation, made especially for the Wayward Gallery, Rist takes the idea of comfort into another level: people meet, interact and watch videos together – «as we relax, images flit over and through a labyrinth of floating screens and across our own bodies»: a three-dimensional play where we, suddenly, find ourselves drifting along in the middle of a flock of sheep’s or lost in unexpected ways in microcosms and macrocosms. It was a ball where floating screens and objects blended in cultural provocations and social deviances.

newsfromlondon201110

"Eyeball Massage" by Pipilotti Rist at Hayward Gallery, from September 28th 2011 until January 8th 2012.

Woman, Espresso Machine

I would love to write a review on Elad Lassry's new work, exhibit at the White Cube Hoxton Square. Lassry's is known for the intricate «investigation into the nature of perception and the present-day image» plaster down on film and photography. But it was to much on the conceptual bit that I totally missed the art works. The pictures were asking to many visual questions, which the artist has invited us to ask, such as: «How does an object, or texture, react to light? How does an object control the confined space of a picture? How do we perceive surface and substance, flatness and depth? [...] What faculties, [...] do we make use of when we try to decipher these pictures?» that I lost my thought way of into what would be the best to buy: if a wooden painted frame in black; white; or a plain naked wooden frame for a picture, by Mårten Lange, that I have recently acquired.

Elad Lassry
Woman, Espresso Machine
2011
C-print, aluminium frame
Edition of 5
14 1/2 x 11 1/2 x 1 1/2 in. (36.5 x 29 x 4 cm)
Photo: Fredrik Nilsen

Dancers

As well as any other artist living at the turn of the century, what Degas wanted, like so many, was to have privileged access to an universe of models and from their immortalise then in paintings and drawings. However, what Degas ended up doing was to create a work where reality and fantasy blur as he' capture dances not only in motion, but also hurling themselves into impossible to sustain ballet positions. Degas and the Ballet: picturing movement brought by the Royal Academy of Arts combines Edgar Degas’s studies, drawings, paintings and sculptures from the body in movement – the ballet dancers – with Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey photographic studies of the human and animal figures in action. It helps us to understand the idea of movement at the end of the XIX century beginning of the XX century. The exhibition reflects a successive growing stage in ways of reading the turn of the century society vision, industrial developments and human-physical struggles - a conservative lay-out, as the RAA has already accustomed us. But for a society already in a very deep dive of ultrasonic speed and virtual connections, the're was something missing in the exhibition to make it more readable under contemporaneous eyes. The incredible aesthetic beauty of Degas’ pastels on paper and oils on canvas, with the choreographed actions, are inextricably linked to the fast pace of life at the threshold between the XIX and XX centuries. By the beginning of the 1910s the situation was changing dramatically: ballet dancers were no longer viewed as abused figures in society; the versatility of the photographic medium got better results, than traditional supports, such as paintings or drawings, in capturing the timeless conditions of being alive; film transformed modern society through a perception of perceived movement; while Degas’ work remained suspended in time. Cinema as already been substituted by virtual worlds and avatars. Away to far from the photography era.

«In the richest of his late pastels Degas seemed more concerned with evocation than description. Descended from one of his photographs, this spectacular work (...) remind us that ballet performances were inextricably linked with music. Rhythms, colour harmonies and elusive texture here belong to an innovative pictorial language.»

LEFT: Edgar Degas, Dancers, c. 1899. Pastel on tracing paper laid down on board. 588 x 463 mm. Princeton University Art Museum. Bequest of Henry K. Dick, Class of 1909. Image Bruce M. White

TOP RIGHT: Edgar Degas, Dancer Adjusting her Shoulder Strap, c. 1895-6. Modern print from gelatin dry plate negative. 180 x 130 mm. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Image © Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

At the Royal British Legion

At the Royal British Legion
LONDON: At the Royal British Legion seven old people are gathered celebrating who knows what with no reason at all. All of them, with more than seventy years old, sing together old tradition songs from Wales, Ireland, Scotland and England while pouring down pints of beer and glasses of wine. A jolly good afternoon on the sound of The Wild Colonial Boy, an Irish-Australian ballad, «… At the early age of sixteen years, / he left his native home / And to Australia's sunny shore, / he was inclined to roam / He robbed the rich, he helped the poor, / he shot James MacEvoy / A terror to Australia was / the wild colonial boy ...» and other provoking songs.
- It is nice to meet nice people around here! said one of ladies.
The bartender, every so often, comes and asks – Another round?
Wine and beer flow free over the counter into our well care stomachs. Next weekend there is an anniversary (the eighty's someone years old) and the London Regatta. It will be the same all over again and I do have to decide which one I will be attending. It might happen that I do attend both. One in the morning! The other, in the afternoon! God Save the Queen!

newsfromlondon201110

Red and Green parallel lines inside the Old Police Station, in Deptford.

(after newsfromfunchal200610)