Comments on: Art

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 19:54:46 +0000

right now i am watching f for fake , orson welles's exploration of reality as determined by cameras and trained observers. welles is a very accomplished storyteller; he has a great deal to say about art, art expertise, and forgery; the film may be helpful in discussing points raised here; it is less than 90 minutes long. those are the things which recommend it.

Posted by chromo

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 19:26:05 +0000

I suppose it's an interesting enough story. It would be a more interesting story if he made a shed/boat transformer and then spent some time paddling it around to various locations rather than the one-off voyage described.

I could concede that this is art, but it seems to me of a very trivial sort. The world is full of trivial art that is not (and does not need to be) recognized, placed in a museum, or awarded prizes. Mr. Starling was certainly enchanted by the sight of an oar on a shed, but the resulting piece seems to be interesting to the critical establishment primarily because it was the product of a particular artist.

Posted by Emily

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 01:07:44 +0000

that tate britain (not modern) page.

kate bush, one of the judges, on the same page:

... there’s a very important sort of ecological, political, and economic questioning going on in his work on one level. But on another level they’re always very beautiful poetic works but there’s also this wonderful absurd kind of circularity. For instance in this piece he found a shed, dismantled it, and turned it into a boat and then turned it back into exactly what it started life as. And you’d say how incredibly pointless! But it isn’t, it’s the imagination and the poetry of doing that absurdist job which at the same time then makes us aware of both of those objects. And he gives you lots of clues and information - not in a didactic way but I think in a very illuminating way - whenever I come to one of Simon Starling’s pieces I always learn something that I didn’t know before and for me that’s a very exciting facet of the work

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 00:29:15 +0000

here's simon starling's description of the project, from the tate modern web site:

“When you enter the [exhibition space] you come up against the back of a fairly decrepit-looking shed! Which I discovered in a kind of similar way, from the back, when I made a very speculative trip up the river Rhine on a bicycle - and the shed had a paddle on the side, an oar, and I discovered that the oar was for these boats - called ‘Weidling’s - a local design a little bit like a gondola.

And I started to piece together a project which involved dismantling this shed and reconfiguring it temporarily as a boat, a Weidling. So the shed was dismantled and then we used certain sections to build this 10-metre-long boat. Then we loaded the remains of the shed into the boat and made this journey down the Rhine to the museum where my exhibition was happening in Basel. We unloaded the boat, and then rebuilt the shed pretty much as it was 10km up the river.

So as you move around the shed you’ll discover a small door and if you step up into the shed you’ll start to see the cuts, the marks of the boat-building process. Also you’ll discover lying on the floor a pile of cotton caulking which was used to fill the boards to keep the water out, there’s also some steel brackets we used to keep the ribs in place.

And I suppose I deliberately make things myself, by hand, and tend to take the long way round. I mean so much of our contact with the way objects are manufactured is now so distant from us. Because things are manufactured in multiple countries by large corporations and you lose the sense of a connection with the things you’re kind of dealing with every day.”

most of the artists i know are found object types. they're wackos. but their stuff always comes with a cool story and that's what i think is what's interesting about what they're doing.

Posted by chromo