THE CULTURAL JACKDAW

Damien Hirst

I was lucky enough to go to the private view of the new Damien Hirst exhibition at the Tate Modern on Tuesday evening, it's his largest retrospective in the UK and will be on at the Tate for five months.

Unsurprisingly for someone like Hirst it's had mixed reviews. But love or hate him there's no denying his importance and influence on contemporary art. On a personal level one thing his work does achieve is that it gets fully planted in your head, it's the kind of art that stays with you for a long time.

Walking around the exhibition also made me realise how many iconic pieces he has created and the amount of controversy that has accompanied some of those over the years.

I've always thought that as long as people are talking about your work then it's playing an important role in culture. Hirst has definitely provoked debate throughout his career and I respect him for that.

As Oscar Wilde once said:"Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital."

Here's a few photos I took on the night:

 

Jeff Bridges

The dude is a legend and his blog is one of my favourites.

Good mix of art / writing / thoughts.

I love his tone; gentle, humble. human and heartfelt.

 

Standing For Something

The most ground-breaking cultural movements of the last 100 years have all stood for something.

Pioneers, misfits and leaders use manifestos to inspire action and explain their vision and worldview.

This amazing book collects the manifestos from the movements that have changed our world; from communism to dadaism. It's an important cultural legacy all bound in the pages of one book.

'The Manifesto is remarkable for its imaginative power . . . it is the first great modernist work of art.'

Marshall Berman

And here is the fascinating manifesto for the Internet called A Declaration of the Independece of Cyberspace by John Perry Barlow, written in 1996.

Me, Me, Me

Interesting art project that explores our growing obsession with beauty and the things that define people's personal identity in the modern world.

"Love Me explores the insidious power of the global beauty industry and our collective insecurity, vanity and fear of ageing."

Time Obsessed

The Clock by Christian Marclay is a montage of film clips that runs for 24 hours and is made up of time references for every minute of the day.

It's a collage of thousands of movie clips that makes a perpetual artwork.

"This is extraordinary, it's artwork about time, where you sit and think about time, and are reminded about time, all of the time." (Will Gompertz).

I think it's such a fascinating piece because it reflects one of the key modern truths about our society:

We are time obsessed.

Alain de Botton, as always, makes a brilliantly insightful comment on the modern tyranny of time:

"Modern capitalism guards time preciously because it knows it to be one of the raw ingredients of production and financial accumulation. Just as valuable in its own way as oil or a labour-force. As a result time has become oppresive."

William Morris

Austin Osman Spare

Spare was one of Alan Moore's (writer of Watchmen, From Hell, V for Vendetta) favourite artists.

"Not only was he an incredible artist but he was, in my opinion, the greatest English magician of the twentieth century. I think that magic offers the artist a new way of looking at their consciousness and a new way of looking at where they get their ideas from".

"He was a visionary, somebody like William Blake, who was not distinguishing between his art and his spirituality, who felt like the world inside him was as valid and important as the world outside him, if not more so."

First Time @ Frieze

Went to the London Frieze Art Fair a couple of weeks ago.

I found it interesting in places.

More fascinating was seeing the art crowd in all their monied splendour.

It also reminded me how much I enjoy experiencing art in galleries.

These were my two favourite paintings:

 

Bill Viola

Took Beki to see the Bill Viola exhibition at St. Olave's College in Tower Bridge a few weeks ago and wow, what an exhibition.

It's called Love/death: The Tristan Project and you come away feeling uplifted and dreamy.

The exhibition consists of a number of digital films that cover love and death themes and you lose yourself in the intensity and the detail of each one. I've never looked at pieces of film like this before.

They were breathtakingly beautiful.

Listen to a lecture Bill Viola made at the Tate Modern here.

"all works of art though visible, represent invisible things".

Bill Viola

The Baltic

Went up to Newcastle at the weekend to see friends and visited the Baltic Art Gallery.

It's an engaging space, an old mill, set on the banks of the Tyne river.

The showcase exhibition was Spencer Tunick.

On the 17th July 2005 Tunick photographed 1700 people who were willing to bare all for art.

The artist has been doing this stuff for 12 years and he documents everything that goes on at the shoot with photography and video. It's interesting to watch the mass of naked people get into the right positions and looking at all the different body shapes just re-affirms how bloody different all of our bodies are. This art makes you focus on the details of the people and then step back and survey the whole as an image.