The excitement mounts...
The winner of the Bluecoat Display Centre's first National Sculpture Prize, sponsored by Malthouse & Co Chartered Accountants, will be announced on Friday 5th September 2008.
Be there at 6pm in Bluecoat Display Centre 2, 54 Hanover Street, Liverpool, L1 4AF, to hear the winner of the £1000 cash prize and the Peoples Choice award.
The 6 artists shortlisted for the prize are:
Claire Burbridge, Olivia Ferrier, Peter Lewis, Naomi Matthews, Seamus Moran and Rebecca Wilson
This will be the last exhibition in the Hanover Street space, which will close at the end of September. Bluecoat Display Centre would like to thank everyone for their support over the last two years.
www.bluecoatdisplaycentre.com
We returned to the Bluecoat courtyard as it was getting dark to see the mini forest lit up. Its a lovely sight and relaxing too as there are benches and loudspeakers broadcasting the sounds of birds and water.
Pleased to hear that its stay has been extended to September 14th too, so if you're around town in the evening this an ideal place to stop and rest for a while. Its open to 10pm (6pm on Mondays)
Green Spot is an interactive environmental installation, a place where you can escape the urban hustle and bustle and spend time in the sanctuary of a mini forest.
Whether out in the open countryside or adding beauty to the urban environment, trees play a critical role in our everyday life.
For starters, trees can help tackle climate change, bring communities together, provide a home for wildlife and create healthier, cooler, happier and more attractive environments.
And that's not all. If you want to know more about what trees can do or if you just want to relax in the surroundings, visit Green Spot in the courtyard of the Bluecoat
http://www.greenspot08.org/
www.thebluecoat.org.uk
Gustav Klimt: Painting, Design & Modern Life in Vienna 1900. Tate Liverpool 30 May to 31 August 2008
Review by Stuart Ian Burns
I finally managed to see the Klimt exhibition at Tate Liverpool or as they rather poetically describe it, Gustav Klimt: Painting, Design & Modern Life in Vienna 1900 (a title I’ll be returning to shortly). I’d been putting it off despite rave reviews -- this has been the gallery’s most successful show, with according to the attendant in the cloak room, fifteen-hundred people a day going through its doors. I hate busy exhibition and museums because you notoriously end up seeing all human life but not the art, yet with this closing in a couple of weeks I knew I had to just grit my teeth. In the end, the show wasn’t too busy, mostly because visitors might have stayed away since Tate Liverpool doesn’t traditionally open on a Monday. Still there were a fair few people trudging across the exhibition’s darkly carpeted floors but for the most part they behaved themselves and I found, at least for the time I was there, a good atmosphere.
Tate Liverpool’s flagship Capital of Culture exhibition might not be the best Klimt exhibition you’ll ever see, simply because that will never exist. His theoretically most famous painting, The Kiss, something which would naturally be the crowning finale of this kind of retrospective, is too expensive and fragile these days to be moved from its usual home of the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere in Vienna (not to mention that museum’s reluctance to loan out its most famous tourist attraction). So despite being the first exhibition to concentrate on the painter in our nation’s history, it’s necessarily incomplete and I wonder how many visitors will have been aware of the reasons (and I’m sure I heard someone in the gift shop, the only place The Kiss is on display, wondering why that painting wasn’t in what they’d seen before).
With that in mind, Tate have repositioned the focus of the show to not simply present a history of a single painter's technique but also the context within which he was working, the music, architecture, fashion and attitude of Vienna circa 1900. In reality that means lots of furniture and models of buildings, dresses and photography. It’s fascinating stuff; the ambition of the Viennese Secession movement of which Klimt was a part was to create a kind of ‘whole art form’ in which no single media had precedent and all blended into one another, from the painting that hung in the house, through to the cutlery to the house itself. Wagner was the musical proponent -- in producing The Ring, he didn’t simply want to compose the score but also design the sets and costume and direct the actors.
Within the exhibition we find a desk in the shape of box with a section that pulls out to become a chair; cutlery which mirrors the detailing of the walls of the house in which they’re used, a tea set with handles that allow for coffee and milk to be poured comfortably and efficiently at the same time. It’s the reason that many of Klimt’s canvases are square, both portraits and landscapes, it’s because they fit better within the overall interior design of a room. I’m reminded of the scene in Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters when painter Max Von Sydow’s agent brings along some potential clients who want to buy his work. They want it by the yard so that it can fit best within the scheme, an idea Von Sydow’s none to pleased about because it insults his artistic integrity. Klimt on the other hand, understood market forces and created his work to fulfil them, at least initially.
This, then is not an exhibition to visit if you’re looking for wall to wall paintings by a particular artist, or for that matter to see an unbroken sequence of his work so that you can see how aspects of his style changed and developed. If there’s something I still came away not really understanding, it’s how he shifted from the earlier more pre-Raphaelitian courtly style through to the bolder, erotic images which he's perhaps most famous for. Clearly a decision was made by the curatorial team based on what was thought to be available which is fine but given the name on the poster I simply would have liked a clearer through line (though given that I was very tired when I finally dragged myself through the doors and could well have simply missed it amongst the labels and information boards).
There’s an earlier painting, Fable, which looks like the work of a completely different artist -- sight unseen you might guess it was by Collier or one of the British late Victorians. His heart clearly wasn’t in it, but there’s something of leap from that to the Beethoven Frieze with its imagery that crosses a randy Charles Rennie Mackintosh with Maurice Sendak's picture book, Where the Wild Things Are. That’s probably why I like his work so -- other painters often keep the same style but then apply it to different subjects. Klimt kept much the same subject but changed the way he represented it. One constant is hair. He seemed to be obsessed with it. In his early paintings he diligently worked to make sure every strand appeared convincingly, in later paintings the shapes became more abstract but the tresses flowed.
About the only proper connection I can make is that as time went on, Klimt became something of a lathario and the eroticism of the imagery certainly increased in tandem with the number of models which hung around his studio. The finale of the exhibition is series of drawings of ladies in a variety of positions giving themselves and each other pleasure. Despite only being simple line drawings, they were enough to have the painter branded as the pornographer of Vienna (even though the majority only came to light after his death). Other works, such as The Three Ages, alone might mark him as something of a misogynist with their wiry representations and Judith II/Salome (reputed to have ordered the beheading of John The Baptist). But I don’t think anything could be further from the truth, he was an interesting chap but I think he was just interested in showing women, good, or bad, or very, very bad indeed.
What ultimately pulls the exhibition together is the audio guide. A couple of pounds hire provides you with an iPod Touch loaded with a tour, this tour in fact available to download from the Tate website. Often these guides don’t work, either because you have to lug around a cd player dangling around your neck or one of those tall black wands which often crackle and can’t be heard over the din of the other visitors. The Klimt guide almost puts the visitor inside an Andrew Graham Dixon documentary, mixing audio-only explanations of the exhibits with related photographs (showing some of the paintings in their original context), music and video interviews with curators at the gallery of origin or family owners. The text is finely balanced too, intelligent without being sonorous, knowledgeable as well as humorous.
I did like the design of the exhibition too. The walls have been painted submarine grey which has the effect of making the colours within the paintings even more luminous. An earlier work, Two Girls with Oleander, with its golden back drop looked like the artist was achieving in a paint what he’d later do in genuine metal. The whites of Portrait of Marie Henneberg’s dress and Salome’s skin pop out too. If nothing else I’ve come away with a renewed appreciation of just how luminous a painter Klimt was; like medieval artists he understood that it was possible to be subtle even with the boldest of colours and that in the darkened rooms and hallways were some of his paintings would ultimately hang, it’s those qualities which would make them unforgettable.
Along with the nudity and scary eyes.
A secret deal guaranteeing the purchase of two works of art by the Renaissance master Titian from the Duke of Sutherland has already been agreed, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.
How many of us, when rooting through the family holdings, have not wondered if we have a couple too many Titians, a bit of a Van Dyck surplus, or, if we're honest, perhaps a few more Poussins than we really need? So it is with Francis Ronald Egerton, seventh Duke of Sutherland, whose "prudent review of assets" has prompted him to offer a pair of Titians to the nation at a knockdown price.
The title of Philip Wilson Steer's painting, Seated Nude: The Black Hat, raises an interesting question, namely whether you can really be unclothed if you have a stack of feathers on your head. Nudity is a slippery term, as Steer's picture suggests. A century after it was painted, his work has the power to embarrass. The truth is that Steer's nude isn't: she is naked. The difference between the two is the subject of the opening chapter of Sir Kenneth Clark's book The Nude, now the inspiration for a show of 20th-century British paintings at the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art.
On 15 September Damien Hirst has a surprise in store for the art world and perhaps also for himself. At the New Bond Street Sotheby's he will mount an audacious two-day auction, entitled Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, of 223 artworks, made by himself and to be sold by himself. This is a money-spinning feat by a living artist on a scale never attempted by an auction house or an art gallery. For this reason alone there are mutters along Bond Street that Hirst's sale will be the moment that his bubble bursts.
Excellent! Somewhere to just relax with a drink or two and watch a bit of free entertainment or join in an activity or whatever after a day at the office.
It may take a while but I think eventually the Bluecoat may be the place to be after work.
So they've called it Hubbub and have organised various things to keep us amused on Wednesday to Saturday evenings 18-20.00
We went to the first event which included the excellent Bootworks Theatre Collective and their their one person auditorium, 'The Black Box'. (There's still time to see them at Metal's Edge Hill pavilion this evening, Friday, 18-20.00)
Drop in after work or before your night out, and you could happen upon quizzes, comedy, acoustic music, book groups, performances, poetry readings, artist film presentations, craft workshops, live art... You name it.
The idea is that Hubbub will take on a life of its own, and do its own thing. If you fancy getting involved you can contact the Hubbub coordinator Sam Beecham on 0151 702 5324, sam.b@thebluecoat.org.uk.
Meanwhile in the front courtyard there's a small temporary forest! Trees planted in cardboard boxes. That big metal thing is not a tree, its solar panels to power the lights which illuminate the trees at night. The amount of light depends on how much sun the panels have soaked up during the day so I wouldn't expect much in this British summer.
This installation goes on 3rd September 2008 to make for for Biennial related stuff, including the much loved caravan gallery, hurrah!
Hubbub at the Bluecoat
When Banksy offered one of his highly sought-after canvases to Labour to auction for Ken Livingstone's ill-fated re-election campaign, the party's high command was jubilant.
When Banksy offered one of his highly sought-after canvases to Labour to auction for Ken Livingstone's ill-fated re-election campaign, the party's high command was jubilant.
