Monday Portrait: Death by Pixel

Sandrine Dulermo and Michael Labica shot the cover image and several interior shots, including this one for last weekend's FT How to Spend It. 

It is a troubling publication, but more so when it unintentionally elevates itself into the realms of Art.

This image is greatly aided in its print version by the degraded reproduction, but its power deserves acknowledgement: Repulsive and compulsively beautiful at the same time, a great image.

We curate via Google images and asked it to show us images of similar power. Computer says Cranach.

‘Adam & Eve’, Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1520

Grayson Perry & Minion Yellow

How does the collective unconscious work? 

Choices made by intuition which unexpectedly chime with other events, reassure that order of some kind, albeit mysterious, exists. Lesson of the day: trust your instincts!

Yellow is a tricky colour but when it's right, it's right. Grayson knows it, as the new scarf we designed together for Turner Contemporary shows, and so does Pantone as reported in The Guardian.

To be honest, we hadn't heard of Minion Yellow before today but we agree with with the sentiments of Leatrice Eiseman, the Executive Director of the Pantone Colour Institute: PANTONE Minion Yellow "is a colour that heightens awareness and creates clarity...the colour of hope, joy and optimism".

Perhaps minion and optimism are not words one would usually associate with one another but let's not quibble about the details, this is a blog.

This silk scarf has been created for Grayson Perry's exhibition Provincial Punk at Turner Contemporary  which opens in Margate on May 23.

Minions

Orbit No.1

We keep a list of artists and designers whose work holds a place in our studio's belief system. Sometimes they drift out of sight or mind for a while, but the list is made of those who reappear with reassuring regularity. Selected with 'pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey' precision, here is the first, Marcel Broodthaers.

At your supplier (Vinegar of Eagles) (Chez votre fournisseur [Le Vinaigre des Aigles]) 1968

in the Museum of Modern Art, New York

Comma and Exclamation Mark, 1970

The goose, the wing (L'oie, l'aile), 1970

 Les Portes, 1969

Monday Portrait: amuseum

I have a complicated relationship with magazines, but my defence mechanism failed on sight of this one. amuseum can explain itself better than I can, but it irresistibly resists classification.

Praise for amuseum aside, the cover by Kristian Hammerstad provoked a 5 minute research project into monkeys & art. 

The tumlbr page Monkeys in Art History has provided an excellent introduction to the subject.

Skeleton of a monkey sitting on the stump of a tree, c.1730-32, 

From: W. Cheselden, Osteographia, or the anatomy of the Bones, 1733.

Lajos Kassák: Animal-collage, 1923

And before I put this subject away for the day, I googled "monkey as Hamlet" and of course there are pages of images.......

 Ape with Skull, by Hugo Rheinhold, c. 1893 CE.

Y, The Last Man. Now I can stop.

Lunch Association

Every Wednesday, whoever is in the office, we all sit down for lunch together. Often we chat about our projects but today we started with Brodsky & Utkin and the relationship between revolution and fantasy, then we jumped into Étienne-Louis Boullée, then the Kabakovs..... we thought it would make a nice little trail of breadcrumbs leading to nowhere in particular......

Brodsky & Utkin, The Complete Works

A Monument of the Year 2000, 1990

This is when Boullée popped up,  a welcome lunch companion.

Cenotaph for Newton, Night version 2, 1784

Cenotaph for Newton, view, 1784

Boullée, Deuxieme projet pour la Bibliothèque du Roi (1785)

And then, the Kabakovs appeared- they can fly around our office as much as they like.

Photo Credit: Amei Wallach/Film Forum

The 'Albums', books of drawings and text created by Ilya in the 1970s when he was working as an unofficial artist in Moscow

The Flying Komarovs

Monday Portrait: Rose Wylie

Oh gosh, technical meltdown deleted this post so here it is again, in a somewhat condensed form. 

Rose Wylie's latest exhibition, Yellow Desert Paintings, opens at Union Gallery tomorrow.

We'll leave it to you to join the dots between Wylie and the other artists in this post.

Chinese Daughter (One of Seven) 2013

Rose Wylie photographed by Henry Browne for the Guardian

Pink Table Cloth (Long Shot) (Film Notes) 2013

Philip Guston. Roma (Fountain), 1971

Nancy Spero, Cigarette Ad

Helen Marten, Installation View, Oreo St, 2014

Why I Am So Angry

Bob and Roberta Smith's exhibiton, Why I Am So Angry, is on at Handel Street Projects through May 9 ,

Come and support Bob’s campaign in Surrey Heath against Michael Gove, who paved the governments disregard for the arts continued by Nicky Morgan, the Education Secretary, with her shocking statement that choosing art subjects held back children's career opportunities.

Nature Study Museum

Behind St. George-in-the-East in Shadwell sits a small, patient building. What appears at first to be an abandoned Victorian cottage is in fact an old mortuary chapel. The chapel was converted into the first Nature Study Museum for children in London at the turn of the century as an offshoot of the Whitechapel Museum. Numerous attempts to revive its fortunes have been unsuccessful.

The sign for Nature Study Museum is barely visible above the door. The humble nature of the building questions contemporary assumptions about the term 'museum'. 

Stevie Smith / Zoë Wanamaker

Stevie, a play by Hugh Whitemore celebrating 

the life of the great poet Stevie Smith, with 

Zoë Wanamaker in the title role, opened last 
night at the Hampstead Theatre. 

Here are two portraits of Smith 
by Jane Bown.

Of Zoë Wanamaker's performance 
Lyn Gardner wrote: She is so perfectly 
cast in Hugh Whitemore's play about the 
life and work of the poet Stevie Smith 
that you don't feel so much that 
she's acting as simply channelling 
the mid-20th century poet and novelist. 
She transforms an evening that could 
be reticent, maybe even a little coy, 
into something more ferocious and 
dangerous. Sadder too. Like the man 
in Smith's most famous poem, Not Waving 
but Drowning, who swims too far out 
to sea so those on the shore misinterpret 
his wave for help as gaiety, Wanamaker's 
Stevie is constantly signalling her distress 
behind a larky demeanour. 

History is Now- Sad, Mad, & Dangerous

The Hayward Gallery asked seven artists to curate a room with a perspective on the recent past. Their response forms the current exhibition, History is Now. Richard Wentworth focused on the Cold War era, the sentiment of which is manifested most strikingly in the six tonne Bloodhound missile he installed in front of the gallery's facade. It is an installation of dazzling orchestral complexity-  a cacophony of historic events silenced by Wentworth's army of art.

The other artists: Hannah Sarkey, the Wilson sisters, Roger Hiorn, John Akomfrah and Simon Fujiwara, have concentrated on topics from Mad Cow Disease to "the troubles" in Northern Ireland. 

The exhibition will run until April 26th, visit the Southbank Centre website for tickets.

Monday Portraits: 'Great Men' by Marlene Dumas

Marlene Dumas's series Great Men consists of sixteen ink portraits of men who were persecuted because they were suspected of being gay. You can see some of the portraits at Tate Modern in Dumas's retrospective Marlene Dumas: The Image as Burden until May 10th.

Bureau de Change for Made.com

Made.com have opened a new showroom in Soho designed by London firm Bureau de Change. Architects/designers 
Billy Mavropoulos and Katerina Dionysopoulou have produced a remarkable space which plays on the contrast between the retailer's ephemeral virtual foundation and the solidity offered by a physical store. One way this contrast is addressed is in the interspersal of projections of Made's products among the showroom's actual pieces of furniture (below).

The pair have also expanded on the idea of the showroom as counterbalancing the innate intangibility of online retail by dedicating one wall to framed postcards behind which customers can access swatches of materials from Made's products. The showroom therefore allows Made.com to capitalise on all the benefits of online retailing while still offering its customers a tangible, tactile shopping experience. In this aspect Dionysopoulou and Mavropoulos can be understood as presenting an innovative design solution to a decidedly modern retail issue.

Monday Portrait: Noam Chomsky, 'Is the Man Who is Tall Happy?'

Michel Gondry's 2013 film 'Is the Man Who is Tall Happy?' uses Gondry's distinctive animation style to compliment and clarify recordings of his conversations with Noam Chomsky.

Adam Curtis's 'Bitter Lake'

Adam Curtis's extraordinary new film Bitter Lake re-examines the narrative of the war in Afghanistan. The film includes this exchange between a British art teacher and her class of Afghan students.

Bitter Lake is available to watch on BBC Iplayer until the 25th February.