BLOG-ART-PART 1 17 November 2009

Dear people of Bishi World,

I’ve been stuck n bed with the flu for the last couple of days. It totally sucks. I missed my dear friend Patrick Wolf at the Palladium and the Anglomania Fashion Show at Selfridges. I could have finally got to meet Nicola Roberts from Girls Aloud if Id gone.

Anyway…

I thought I’d put up some art I’ve really loved this year, since being bed bound makes for little action. Art reports tend to prattle on about record prices, markets and celebrity fans. It’s like bloody Hello magazine!! I couldn’t give a toss about any of that – probably because I can’t afford to buy any art. The only thing that interests me is the art itself!

The opening picture was from the Venice Biennale. It is by an Argentine called Thomas Saraceno and was in the main pavilion. I believe that astrological charts and star bursts may have been the inspiration behind this apparently elastic based sculpture. But you can quote me on that!

It covered all four corners of the central pavilion, and people could step in and out of the constellations at their leisure!

This is ‘Squeezebox Jukebox,’ by Ruth Ewan from Altermodern, earlier this year at the Tate Britain. Every day at there was a performance of a few folk songs, by 2 people playing on opposite ends. Yes- it really can play!

To quote the website of her gallery, Ancient & Modern;’
‘A Jukebox of People Trying to Change the World’ is her collection of compositions that loosely fall under the banner of ‘protest songs’: these include Hebrew folk songs, tunes by Robert Burns, Leadbelly, and Joan Baez; Crass’ ‘Bloody Revolutions’ (1980) and Louis Lingg and the Bombs’ ‘Madonna is a Corporate Whore’ (2008).

I would have loved to add my own protest songs to the list and performed some of my own, Sounds like we’re on the same page . I see Modern Pop as the folk music of our day just as much as our ancient folk pantheon. Both have themes of social relevance that echoe through our society today.

I’d love to work with her one day!!!!

This is an image from the latest exhibition by Jeff Koons at the Serpentine. I found out that Popeye was out of copyright out of this year and it is a reoccurring motif in a few of the paintings. Popeye was a symbol of the Great Depression; the cartoon reflected the hard ships and injustice of the time. In this time of global depression he is to quote the Serpentine; ‘ A character to rediscover and explore.’

I liked how the use of an image of something like Popeye, can seem meaningless and superficial, but holds the key to a deeper meaning, reflective of the state of our world. It was a contrast to a show that was otherwise brash, flash and stinking of cash.

This piece is from the current John Baldessari retrospective at the Tate Modern. Based in Los Angeles, he was a seminal forefather of conceptual art with his image and text paintings, He then shocked the art world by a mass cremation of all his artwork from 1953-1966.

This turning point marked his attention to photographic based work, sourced from photographic stills and found images to create his photo montage compositions.

One of my favourite pieces was an early video piece of Baldessari singing each of Sol Le Witt’s 35 conceptual statements to a different pop song. It was based on the model of the record; ‘Ella Fitzgerald sings Cole Porter’ Watch it here!

Anyway….I didn’t realise I had so much to write about here. There are a few things I’ve left out, possibly cause I need to reach for the lemsip.I hope you’ve enjoyed it. I’m sure serious critics would turn their noses up at this, but I really don’t care!

I’ll do a part two, I promise. I’ll be better, hopefully by then, sniff sniff! |Until then! Bishi xxxx