on the Cairo Museum amulets and king Tut

The Cairo Museum is an extraordinary place, rooms full of cabinets that are full of stuff. Egyptian art has often been confined to a cliche, no less by myself, but when face to face with it my opinions quickly changed.
Tutankhamuns death mask is a masterpiece, the gold and inlay work looks modern, and so does much of the loot that was found with it. its over 3000 years old. 
he stares out from his glass box, much the same as the Mona Lisa does, and people gaze back at the mystery the same way.

the hundreds of thousands of small objects / amulets sparked my curiousity. some smaller than a finger nail, depicting everything that the egyptian culture could throw up. Baboons, suns, scarabs, cats, snakes, the gods, fish, etc... etc... you name it, it was there. all of it dug out of the preserve jar that is the sahara desert and sand.

the humble street-market and everyday nature of these tiny treasures made you feel close. where King Tut stares out from the cosmos, you can imagine the women, men and children on the street having one of these in their pocket or around their neck, or at home hanging from a door or placed on personal altar.

on Robert Smithson

 Smithson hated museums and galleries because of the cultural confinement they seemed to encourage, so it is no surprise he coined the term 'Land Art'.
he loved the displacement of properties, entropy, and the erosion and renewal of nature. its all related to time. artists tend to trap time, and freeze moments into an artwork, but Smithson thought artists were estranged from their own time and needed to expand away and into real time - where the forces of nature dictated things and not some constrained studio space.

He said, "The strata of the Earth is a jumbled museum. Embedded in the sediment is a text that contains limits and boundaries which evade the rational order, and social structures which confine art." 

Smithson matters because of Spiral Jetty if nothing else. It recalls history - it has always reminded me of the monkeys tail on the Plains of Nazca - and like this it is prone to weather, and shares a sense of whimsy.

on Gallery owners who hate Artists

the Artist / Gallery relationship is an ancient one, founded on a weird form of trust. involving yourself with a middle man to sell your wares became a necessary evil at some point because they had ways to sell your product. like most middle men they are the parasites that gorge on the force of someone elses juices.
A story emerged recently from a gallery called Retrospect - a medium sized fish in a small pond in a regional centre of Australia. I'm unfamiliar with the owner, but the artwork is normally of a graphic commercial nature - dogs, cows, surfing, etc... with no real edge to it. The kind of stuff Asian hotels chew up by the bucketful.
anyway here is the letter and photo that was posted on another site last week; no matter what you think of the Art, this is the worst act i've come across in many moons.. and a fine candidate for ARTHATEART!!

"I asked retrospect gallery Byron bay for my prints back today, this was the email I received from the director as a response (a photo of my prints destroyed). It has been a stressful on going battle to get my work back and be removed from her website..there are paintings that she took to Europe and left there over two years ago with no hope of return."

on James Turrell

i saw a James Turrell retrospective recently. i like Turrells quotes about light that are paraphrased from eastern mysticism, and his moustache is pretty impressive in a regal desert rancher kind of way. I went to the show open minded and unfamiliar with being present in one of his light abstracted spaces.
it was not such an impressive experience. it was mostly cold science fiction, empty of the warmth and beauty of light. one piece declared itself as producing a "sense of nothingness" within the viewer, like "being in a snow whiteout". it didn't do this, and i wondered if Turrell had ever been in a whiteout?
maybe he was just looking through his bespoke beard and mo?
the show tried to put Art on some elevated platform, something to be revered, like a temple or church and all it gave me was some good ideas for home lighting. maybe quietly that is Turrells intention?

on accidental art

this is a piece located on the ceiling of an elevator in an industrial plant. it has probably been in operation for 40 years or more. the marks were made by objects such as ladders, bits of metal, whatever. it is part of a job that was being done, somebody transporting something to or from a job. the marks were not made purposefully by hand.
i like it because it tells a story of time and peoples lives, and has a random energetic quality about it. it has a rhythm not unlike that of a strong wind stirring up a forest. yet it comes from an environment the complete opposite to that. it is anti-nature managing to become nature.

It reminds me of Anselm Kiefer- see below.

on accidental installation #9

the great thing about these two pieces is it looks as though somebody is in the shoes but they are invisible. go ahead, draw your own character into them - its easy! one could be a crack-head, the other a lost golfer. they are both melancholic ghosts traversing the subtle real back roads of dimension.
the story is open ended and quiet. one has stepped from the shadows, the other from a murky dam. who are they? 

second hand shoes occupy a strange place in the world - someone has been in them, they are rarely washed, they often stink of another life. only the poor or penny pinching buy shoes that are heavily worn, otherwise they end up in garbage dumps or get recycled in the 3rd world.

canvas and concrete, leather and mud. i like the aesthetics of these 2 installations. contrasting materials, similar tones.

on Cai Guo-Giang

i went and saw the Cai Guo-Giang show recently and was highly disappointed. in fact i hated it. not only were the animals poorly made, but the whole concept of the thing reeked of an obviousness that made me think it was Art for spectaculars sake and nothing else. a kind of cheap wow factor that was great if you took the kids - in fact it was in a weird way Art for kids, that would look more at home somewhere else - like Disneyland or a theme park. i wanted to jump in the pond that would've worked better if only one animal was drinking from it.
The wolf piece was marginally more successful but still irritated me due to its poor construction and bland ideas. this environmental art bandwagon can be interesting if its treated with more heart and less shoving down the throat. if it makes non-Art goers go along and see Art and make them aware of whats happening in the world then great, but please do it with a little more integrity, subtlety, and treat people with respect.
The other pieces were 2 trees that were taken from a housing development site - and saved! for people to go and see in a gallery for 15 bucks.  "i'd rather look at a 10x10cm Goya in an empty room", the person i was with said. Indeed - gimme some quiet Art...