Sunday 29 November 2009

Posters of the Avant Garde Book

I found a cool book in the library the other week called 'Jan Tschichold: Posters of the Avant Garde', it's FULL of posters, it's great! I love art books full of pictures :p! They are also very cool posters :) which is even better. I love this style, great structure, and simple yet lots going on too. Here are some of my faves from the book -

Jan Tschichold:

Max Burcharz - Tanz Festspiele (dance festival):

Jan Tschichold:

Theo Van Doesburg & Kurt Schwitters (I'd liked this image for ages):

I quickly took some photos of pages to remember them for inspiration, there were too many to scan in, so they aren't great quality but you get the idea, here are some more from the book that I liked:

Sunday 8 November 2009

'School Trip' to Liverpool Tate Art Gallery

A week or 2 ago, a few of us from D&AD went on a 'school trip' to Liverpool to visit the Tate Art Gallery.
More photos of us lot in Liverpool


Yayoi Kusama - The Passing Winter, 2005. It was interesting to see another installation by her as i'd previously seen her 'Ascension of Polkadots on the Trees' (previous post). We weren't allowed to take photos in the Tate but I found images by someone else - Marshall Astor. It looked kinda weird and cool but not that impressive...


*UNTIL* I peered inside the box!! AMAZING! The box had mirrors on the inside as well and it just reflects everything and when you look into it you see your face multiple times and from different angles, it's so weird and awesome. It's like being in an infinate 'inbetween' kinda liminal space, with many directions and routes to take, doorways to alternate universes? I was just stood staring into it for ages and ages!


Something else it reminded me of was the part in The Beatles Film - The Yellow Submarine, which shows Mr Nowhere Man located in..'nowhere' I guess.


Another piece which I saw there and found interesting was Salvador Dali - Lobster Telephone, 1936.


I stumbled upon a piece and instantly recognised the artist it was by - Daniel Spoerri, it was called Prose Poems. I discovered this artists work last year and was interested in it. His work felt familiar to me because I have photographed tables from above at chance compositions. I like that everyday kinda thing which we take for granted, but it is usually ephemeral and then lost and replaced everyday, so it's interesting to capture it in an image. "Spoerri fixed or 'snared' objects found in chance positions on table tops or in drawers. These were hung vertically on a wall, like conventional pictures, and were intended to create visual discomfort in the viewer. In this work, the remains of a meal are preserved on a wooden board that the artist used as a table while living in a small room in a Paris hotel."


I really liked some photographs by Helen Chadwick, I can't really find many online only one, but it was a series of photographs of her 'Ego Geometria Sum' holding objects with her image on the objects, Heres one photo, and then i found some images of just the objects, I think they have an eerie and surreal quality about them, really nice though.





Victor Grippo - Energy of a Potato - 1972. This was quite weird and cool. You could see the potato discoloured where the probes had gone into it's skin and then where the potato had 'bled' and dripped onto the plinth. It was a real potato. poor thing. Cruelty against potatoes. I'm not guilty of killing potatos... nah i never eat chips or crisps.. honest .... not!


This was also cool.. by Gilbert & George - Happy, 1980.


It was nice to see some very well known pieces there too which i'd seen before but not in real life, like Jeff Koons - Three Ball Total Equilibrium Tank, 1985, Marcel Duchamp - Fountain (replica), Antony Gormley - Three Ways: Mould, Hole and Passage, 1981, Mona Hatoum - Wheelchair, 1988, Bob and Roberta Smith - Make Art Not War, 1997, as well as some Cindy Sherman photographs 'Bus Riders', 1976.

I really enjoyed the Tate, I saw lots of things which I didn't expect to see there and found things to help with my Silence project :)

Saturday 7 November 2009

London Visit - Polka Dot trees in the breeze!

I've been meaning to do a post about this for ages but never got around to it... anyway I visited London at the end of August and here are a few pics I took walking along the South Bank to the Tate Modern.
I think i'd be quite happy if i was reincarnated as a carousel horse. Carousels are awesome, they are so colourful and exciting! I'm too much of a wimp for rollercoasters so going on a carousel is about as adventurous as I get in terms of rides! So much fun! But on this occasion I didn't have a go, too much of a rip off :/


Yayoi Kusama - Ascension of Polkadots on the Trees, 2009. I found this installation quite interesting, I later read more about the artist, she was born in 1929 and "all of her work shares an obsession with repetition, pattern, and accumulation".

Some weird hedge furnature installation kinda thing.

More furnature! But this time in the form of a sand sculpture :)


Tate Modern, I had never been before and I'd always thought the outside of the building looked so cool, it was formally Bankside power station. I really enjoyed approaching the building and seeing it up close and taking photos. Even though it looks quite different, it somehow reminds me of gigantic Egyptian pyramids and that type of thing. Inside the space is sooooo vast, it's amazing and kinda scary! Nowadays most space is cram packed, but on the lower levels of the Tate Modern there is a massive space, it has a very industrial feel, I felt like I was in a cargo bay on a spaceship or something! We got lost and by this time we didn't have much time to look around at the actual art work, only one floor, but it was cool enough just to see the building, I really enjoyed it.




Here's a few more photos I took there: http://www.flickr.com/photos/grinchy/sets/72157622631637969/