Kirk Smith: Arts/Culture/Design

Passion Without Words: The Cinema of Claire Denis

Thu, 10 Jul 2003 08:14:05 GMT

09 Jun 03 Issue

After spending much of her childhood in Africa, Paris-born film-maker Claire Denis assisted such giants of the international art cinema world as Dušan Makavejev, Costa-Gavras, Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch before directing her feature debut, Chocolat (1988), at the age of 40.

Since then, she has fashioned a remarkable body of work. Her powerfully emotional films are filled with literary references and the sorts of marginalised characters usually absent from mainstream cinema. In this special issue of Kinoeye, five Denis scholars examine a quartet of the writer-director's most evocative and controversial films, revealing the auteurist vision underlying the apparent diversity. [Kinoeye]

Famous Lost Work Rediscovered by Sotheby's

Tue, 08 Jul 2003 14:42:04 GMT

08 Jul 03

Annibale Carracci
The Montalto Madonna
The Holy Family with the infant Saint John the Baptist.

LONDON, ENGLAND. An important work, previously considered lost, by the great baroque painter Annibale Carracci (1560-1609) is to be offered in Sotheby's sale of Old Master Paintings on Thursday, July 10, 2003. One of the most famous paintings of its time, Carracci's Montalto Madonna was copied repeatedly by generations of artists in Rome both in painted and in engraved form. The painting was last entioned by the biographer Gian Pietro Bellori in 1672, after which the small copper disappeared without trace and has been considered lost ever since. Now, over 300 years later, the picture has resurfaced and, following months of research by Sotheby's experts, its entire history from the time it was painted to the present day has been reconstructed.

The Montalto Madonna gets its name from Cardinal Alessandro Peretti Montalto, who commissioned the work some time around 1598. Greatly admired by contemporaries, the painting was already famous in the 17th century. [ArtDaily.com]

Pills, Thrills and and Couture

Tue, 08 Jul 2003 12:54:07 GMT

08 Jul 03

Textile artist Susie Freeman and practising GP Dr Liz Lee, are an unlikely twosome for an artistic collaboration. More unusual is the work they create - clothes that seem fluffy and frivolous but actually draw attention to medical matters.

Susie Freeman and Liz Lee are old school friends and Susie explains how their collaboration developed: 'We chat like all women do. Liz was very interested in family planning, and wanted to raise awareness of contraceptive methods available.' Around the same time, a U.S. gallery which sold Susie's work, commissioned one of her textile garments decorated with pills. Susie hadn't made such a piece but the mistaken request sparked an idea - combine Susie's dramatic fabrics with Liz's medical objectives.

Their idea, which they called Inside Out, won them a Sci-Art Award in 1998 - a grants scheme sponsored by the Wellcome Trust encouraging collaborations between scientists and artists. This set them on the path of 'drawing attention to medical decisions that people make', enabling Susie and Liz 'to express the thought processes and emotions involved when patients make decisions about medical treatment.' ...

Susie Freeman's and Dr Liz Lee's work can be viewed at: Contemporary Applied Arts, 2 Percy Street, London W1P 9FA (enquiries call 020 7436 2344) and from 19 July - 27 August at Fact, Fantasy and Pharmacopoeia, MAC, Cannon Hill Park, Birmingham B12 9QH (enquiries: 0121 440 3838). [fashionUK]

Future City

Mon, 07 Jul 2003 14:40:40 GMT

by Fredric Jameson

May-Jun 2003 Issue

After the dilapidation of urban modernism, what kinds of city and what forms of architecture await us? The author of The Seeds of Time considers their flowers in the dizzying work of Rem Koolhaas, the mega-developments of the Pearl River Delta and the conceptualization of 'Junkspace'. Breaking back into history with a battering-ram of the postmodern? [New Left Review]

The Last Bolshevik

Mon, 07 Jul 2003 06:21:18 GMT

by Chris Marker

06 Jul 03

Le Tombeau d'Alexandre, 1993
[Alexander's Tomb/The Last Bolshevik]

The Last Bolshevik opens to an insightful and relevant excerpted passage from author and critical thinker George Steiner's book, In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture: 'It is not the literal past that rules us [save, possibly, in a biological sense]. It is images of the past.' Composed in the structure of montage (an homage to the characteristic editing and filmic language of pioneering Russian filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Alexander Dovzhenko, and Vsevolod Pudovkin), the film is a series of posthumous video letters (narrated by Michael Pennington) to film essayist Chris Marker's personal friend, mentor, and fellow filmmaker Alexander Ivanovich Medvedkin, examines the trajectory of Medvedkin's life and career from within the context of the evolution of the Soviet Union in the 20th century, and in the process, provides a broader, incisive meditation on the nature of reality, fiction, art, ideology, and history. [Strictly Film School]

Art Exhibition Opens at Rome’s Colloseum

Mon, 07 Jul 2003 05:56:07 GMT

07 Jul 03

ROME, ITALY. The exhibition 'Nike: The Game and The Victory', just opened at Rome’s Colloseum and runs until January 7, 2004. The collection brings together statues, busts, mosaics and pottery, some dating back as far as the sixth century B.C., from Italian cultural hotspots like Florence and Pompeii and farther-flung sites such as Paris and Berlin.

Two sprinting bronze figures from the first century B.C. seem to hurtle down one of the Colosseum’s many gangways, while a few steps away a 1,800-year-old marble athlete prepares to send his discus spiralling into the air.

'These ancient masterpieces have never before been seen side by side,' Anna Grandi, one of the organisers, said.

'We wanted to remove these pieces from their museum context and thrust them into the festival atmosphere of the Colosseum, which seemed the perfect stage for a sporty art exhibition,' she added.

Friezes in the collection bear witness to the divine dimension the Ancient Greeks attributed to their sporting heroes, with depictions of Nike, the winged goddess of victory, crowning athletic champions. [ArtDaily.com]

One Nation Under a Groove

Sat, 05 Jul 2003 20:26:07 GMT

by Luc Sante

17 Jul 03 Issue

Boogaloo: The Quintessence of American Popular Music
by Arthur Kempton
Pantheon, 498 pp., $27.50

The boogaloo is, or was, one of the thousand dances the land was full of in the 1960s, enumerated in inventory songs such as James Brown's 'There Was a Time' and the Isley Brothers' 'Nobody But Me': the skate, the swim, the pony, the monkey, the camelwalk, the shing-a-ling. Arthur Kempton notes that it made its debut as the title of a million-selling but faintly remembered 1965 release by the Chicago duo Tom and Jerrio, a song that launched two major catch phrases of the era, 'sock it to me' and 'let it all hang out.' The boogaloo outlasted many of its competitor dances, or at least its name did, even making the transition into Spanglish as bugalú.

Somewhere along the line, perhaps around the time most people forgot its steps, the name metamorphosed into a sweeping term that could encompass almost all of African-American popular music, or at least everything that has arisen since World War II. The names of styles, which embody novelty, date more quickly than the substance they describe. 'Soul' now sounds antique; 'R&B' can be applied to the works of Wynonie Harris in the late 1940s, or to those of Mary J. Blige fifty years later, but not much in between. But because 'boogaloo' is a term transmitted more often orally than in writing, it has enjoyed an immunity to the flux of fashion. [The New York Review of Books]

The Nimrud Gold on Display in Baghdad... For a Few Hours

Sat, 05 Jul 2003 18:17:51 GMT

by Joanna Mackle

03 Jul 03

BAGHDAD, IRAQ. On Thursday 3 July the Assyrian gallery in the Iraq Museum, Baghdad, will be open to the public for a few hours and a small part of the gold treasure found in the tombs of the Assyrian queens at Nimrud will be on display. This treasure was evacuated to a vault of the Baghdad Central Bank for safekeeping during the recent war. The opening of this exhibition has provided the staff of the Iraq museum with an opportunity to tidy up the museum after the widespread damage caused by the thefts and looting which occurred during the war. However, this is only the beginning of what will be a very long process of conservation and reconstruction.

A British Museum curator Sarah Collins is now working in the Iraq Museum with the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). As part of the international conservation programme the British Museum has invited Iraqi colleagues to London during the summer for training in new techniques and a team of conservators drawing together expertise from around the world will be sent to Baghdad in the autumn. [The Art Newspaper]

Venice Biennale: Too Much That Was Good on Paper, Was Bad in Practice

Fri, 04 Jul 2003 06:55:51 GMT

by Louisa Buck

04 Jul 03

VENICE. It may have been subtitled 'The dictatorship of the viewer', but the sprawling behemoth that is now the Venice Biennale meant it was usually more the viewer who felt dictated-to by its vast excesses. Curator Francesco Bonami wanted his 'archipelago' of guest-curated shows (sporting such excruciating titles as 'The Structure of Survival'; 'Zones of Emergency' or 'Utopia Station') to communicate the fragmentedly multiple and contradictory nature of today's art, and the world it inhabits, but surely any contemporary art show worth its square meterage should do this anyway? Therefore what was supposed to signal democracy, open-endedness and all-inclusiveness appeared more like an event headed by a curator reluctant to shoulder such a herculean task on his own. [The Art Newspaper]