Six Thousand Posters for Giants and Dwarfs: Closing Event - Slideshow and Talk by yours truly

The Spiral from Hazel France on Vimeo.

Mark Leckey on his top 10 most influential films

http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/mark_leckey/
"I have a theory that Titanic is actually a science fiction film... The character played by Leonardo DiCaprio is a time traveller from 1998; while all of the other actors are very stiff and Edwardian, he just plays himself, a contemporary Californian. The ship is like the industrial age sailing through history. It’s a film made almost entirely with digital technology and I think technology is one of the big ideas in the film – how the real can now be manipulated and moulded into whatever we desire."

WHAM BAM LECTURE LECTURE

On the 15th of March 2012, my Information Delivery Service associates and I presented our first public on Information Speculation at Inspace, Edinburgh.

Recording of the event was permitted.

Visit: www.theinformationdeliveryservice.co.uk

Information Delivery Service - They're the ones!

http://www.informationdeliveryservice.co.uk/

IDS : WHAM-BAM-LECTURE-LECTURE

The Information Delivery Service proudly presents:


WHAM-BAM-LECTURE-LECTURE
Information Speculation

15th March 2012, 8-9.30pm
Inspace, 1 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB


The Information Delivery Service proudly announces its first public lecture on the topic of Information Speculation.

Attempts are being made by each one of us to make some sense of the constant stream of social, audio, spatial, visual, local and global information in which we find ourselves precariously spinning. Each of us attempts to do so equipped with approximately 1.4kg of electrolysed grey matter. At this moment in time no method has yet been employed by the human race to absorb and funnel this data to a satisfactory level. 

The IDS is dedicated to developing it's own idiosyncratic concepts of communication and information, knowledge and expertise. They aim to then dissolve these structures and wallow somewhere in between imagination and anxiety and take pleasure in the inevitable impossibility of information delivery.

Please join us for a one-hour performative lecture on the subject of information itself.

Refreshments will be provided over conversation following the main event.

Visiting Artist Talks: Mark Titchner

On February 3rd 2012, Mark Titchner says:

Which bits of being in the studio are 'art'? Mixing paint or sending emails? Both.

Throwing something in I don't know much about to stop the work getting boring.

Presenting work helps clarify fuzzy jumbles.

Also some things everyone knows but isn't supposed to talk about:
Galleries are like Gangs
&
Anyone who can afford to buy art has too much money.

Chris Burden, stills from Full Financial Disclosure, 1977.

David Lynch - Weather Report

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0RrQWFWqu8&list=UUil41MR1GHfC3tari4bmuvw&feature=plcp
addictive.

Limbo

On Sunday we went to hear Simon Faithfull talk about his work, in particular his drawing projects, at DNA Galerie. 

http://limbo.simonfaithfull.org

He makes these drawings on a palm pilot or iphone and then sends them out to everyone on an ever expanding mailing list.

It was interesting to hear the gallerists thoughts on Simon's work and his wanting to argue that they they weren't drawings as they weren't on paper, and that they couldn't be owned or sold.

Gaining Stereo Vision

"Space was very contracted and compacted. So if I looked at a tree, the leaves or the branches would appear to overlap one in front of another. But I didn't actually see the pockets of space between the actual branches. So the world was actually smaller and more contracted before my vision changed."

Susan Barry, Neurobiologist

Full interview with Susan Barry here, who gained 3D vision at the age of 48.

Losing Stereo Vision

Thanks again to Katy

An Interview

Yet another interview with Tom McCarthy... here

You know when you read something and it feels like someone stole your brain?

"When something happens like that, do you feel that your mind is ordering the events and creating the coincidence, or do you think that there’s actually a power in the universe that’s somehow communicating to you? I mean, I know the latter choice is a step toward insanity, but the excitement about those moments is that you feel for a moment that the universe is essentially helping you, speaking to you. Even though you know that, rationally, that’s crazy, it’s impossible to let go of that feeling."


"I’m writing about a flock of crows, and as I was writing about it, a bunch of crows appeared outside the window of my studio. I know it’s obviously a meaningless coincidence, but at such moments I get a very primitive feeling that what I’m writing is manifesting itself in the world. I let myself feel that for the day, even though I don’t really believe it."

Jeffrey Eugenides
From an interview with Tacita Dean.

Full interview here.

Gravity/Infinity

I felt really happy. We passed through a small cloud. The cloud seen from inside like this, was gritty, liked spilled earth or dust flakes in a stairwell. Eventually the sun would set for ever — burn out, pop, extinguish — and the universe would run down like a Fisher Price toy whose spring has unwound to its very end. Then there’d be no more music, no more loops. Or maybe, before that, we’d just run out of fuel. For now, though, the clouds tilted and the weightlessness set in once more as we banked, turning, heading back, again.

Remainder by Tom McCarthy

Some interesting listening.

It's been a while since I've listened to anything on Radiolab but there's some fascinating stuff on there.

Some Tuesday afternoon listening I really reccomend.

Secrets of Success: ideas of what "genius" really means.
http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab-blog/2010/jul/26/secrets-of-success/

Words: Insights into how words relate to thought, and do you have thoughts if you don't have language?
http://www.radiolab.org/2010/aug/09/

Picture unrelated but I got rather excited when I stumbled across it on some blog or other as I was in this exact spot last week. From fashion photographer Robin Jonsson at the Neues Palais, Sansouci Park in Potsdam, just outside Berlin.

No doubt a few of my own photos from Berlin to follow...

Torsten Lauschman

Had been thinking about Torsten Lauschman's work since the beginning of term and this new project as I really enjoyed his exhibition at GOMA in 2008 which was a dark space with various photos, sculptures and projections.
Coincidentally he was here at ECA yesterday giving a talk about his work, showing examples and how he made his works. He made and interesting point about projections, and using them as "intelligent light" rather than conventional rectangular images.

The Black Cube: Mirislow Balka

Miroslaw Balka : "How It Is"
Currently in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern

Link: Miroslaw Balka: How It Is

Link: About the Exhibition

Link: Miroslaw Balka In Conversation

Mark Leckey

In October, Mark Leckey came to ECA to give his talk/lecture/performance: Mark Leckey in the Long tail.

You can read about it here: Mark Leckey in the Long tail

This talk was very important for all of us I think. About the internet. And how it's the future. But as the above article says, "I think Leckey takes too much pleasure in the world of objects to go the whole way." I think this is true as well for all of us.

It's funny how a couple of hours of your life can possibly change everything, but then you'll never know if they actually changed anything at all.

Oh, and the other week, we found Mark Leckey's chalk board.


People who may explain better than me : Claire and Faith

The End of the Line: Attitudes in Drawing + Monika Grzymala talk

On Saturday evening I went to see artist Monika Grzymala "in conversation with" Brian Dillon at the Fruitmarket Gallery.

I found a lot of what she was saying was really interesting. For example, she trained in stone carving and restoration and in her early work she was making very labour intensive stone sculptures depicting scenes from her childhood etc. which would take weeks and weeks to make. She would display them in galleries, two or three of these sculptures in a room, but the work was really about the connection and the tension between the pieces. So her tutor asked her one day, do you really need the figures? And she realised that she didn't. So she stopped making stone carvings and focused on this "nothing" in between them, and this is what she has be working with ever since.

I also liked that when she takes her work down from an exhibition, she keeps the "clumps" of tape in her studio as works themselves, or she gives them away to friends.

Garrett Phelan: Roving Roding Woodcock on Reconnaissance

As for the rest of the exhibition, The End of the Line: Attitudes in Drawing, I was slightly disappointed. Some of it I really loved , eg. Garat Phelan's "Battle for Birds" installation, and Monika Grzymala's tape piece that spanned both floors of the gallery.

But for a "contemporary drawing" exhibition, there not a lot else very exciting going on. There were quite a number of photorealistic drawings from a few of the artists, and I'm just not into that. I mean, once you have got over the "wow it looks so realistic, it must have taken ages" then I just don't find them that interesting. Just show us the photo you drew it from, it's less tiring to look at. If you have a photo, why do we need the drawing if you're just going to copy it? Plus it's way to easy for photorealistic drawings and paintings just to look plain cheesy.

So anyway, I will most likely go see this exhibition again at some point and maybe I'll change my mind. I just think for an exhibition about "Attitudes in Drawing" the majority of the drawings just weren't all that ground breaking or varied.

John Baldessari

Choosing (A Game for Two Players): Green Beans, 1971. John Baldessari

"When choosing which ideas to follow, go with the ones that would be the most fun. We need to always find pleasure in making the art so that it never comes to feel like work, which lets us continue without a sense of drudgery."

Some interesting points made in this interview.

http://www.friezeartfair.com/podcasts/details/john_baldessari_in_conversation_with_matthew_higgs

Got me looking at more of Baldessari's work . I love a lot of his older photographic work. It the kind of thing I look at, and then get annoyed that I didn't think of it first. Simple ideas are the best ideas.