You are currently browsing the monthly archive for March 2011.
The Metropol Parasol in Seville nearing completion last week: ‘From some angles it is a wonderful thing, daring, inventive and impressively consistent.’ Photograph: Sergio Caro for the Observer
Oh my God, it’s an icon. How very last decade. Did the city of Seville not get the memo? Big, flashy buildings are out; hair shirts are in. Then again, building projects are slow things, especially when they have hugely ambitious and untried structural ideas. In 2004, when the Metropol Parasol project was launched, and Spain felt flusher than it does now, few were thinking it would open after the country was hit by one of the worst of the European Union’s many financial crises. As it is, like the grandiose new City of Culture of Galicia complex in Santiago de Compostela, it looks like a late work of bubble baroque.
It is undeniably arresting. Last week, as workers scrambled to finish the building and remove all the scaffolding in time for the official opening on 27 March, citizens were gawping at and debating the 30 metre-high cloud/mushrooms/parasols/waffle that had appeared in their ancient city. Two passersby, men in late middle age, expressed the poles of the argument, one saying that it was out of place, the other that the city should move with the times.
The Metropol Parasol actually is a device for revitalising the Plaza de la Encarnación, for years used as a parking lot and seen as a dead spot between more popular tourist destinations in the city. The Parasol contains a market, shops, and a podium for concerts and events. In its basement are the ruins of a Roman district, with mosaics and enough bits of wall to get a sense of what the houses were like. On the roof there is a restaurant, a viewing gallery, and a winding, undulating walkway – a sort of pedestrian rollercoaster – from which to appreciate the views gained by rising slightly above the general roofline of the city.
Rowan Moore
Guardian
Casa das Artes by Souto de Moura Arquitectos, photo: Luis Ferreira Alves
When I first entered a house by Portuguese architect Eduardo Souto de Moura, winner of the 2011 Pritzker Prize, I was not impressed. The sun was setting and a bitingly cold wind had just started, causing me to rush through a small white gate and an over-porportioned door into a rather small hallway. Here, wooden slab floors ran parallel to the horizontal lines that permeated the whole space, and, looking around, I gawked. What had appeared from the outside to be a generic small space was unraveling in front of me— room after room of white, hard, geometric walls that opened to larger and larger spaces. The house finally opened, through glass panes, into a seemingly infinite garden, and as I stepped out to appreciate the horizontal volume, I instantly became smitten with this work.
In Porto, Portugal, where Souto Moura—we usually drop the “de”—has lived, taught and worked for the last thirty years, the architect is quite a celebrity. The northern part of Portugal is where you can find most of his strongest body of work—his houses. With each single family dwelling, Souto Moura has refined a style that is rigorous, grounded and muscular; minimal—the influence of both Mies and Siza are felt—but detailed in the way the volume is inserted into the landscape and the space unfolds within.
Vera Sacchetti
Metropolis Mag
Braga Municipal Stadium by Souto de Moura Arquitectos, photo: Luis Ferreira Alves
A Roman sculpture of the empress Domitia, posing in the guise of the goddess Demeter, is among the antiquities going on display.
A young British entrepreneur who has amassed a spectacular collection of art and antiquities, ranging from Egyptian reliefs to masterpieces by Rubens and Picasso, is to display the works in a new multi-million-pound museum in the south of France.
Christian Levett, the 41-year-old son of an Essex bookmaker, is to throw open the doors of the Mougins Museum of Classical Art next month for visitors to admire approximately 700 works spanning 5,000 years that he has acquired over the past seven years.
The publicity-shy businessman, who would rather people focus on the collection than the collector, is driven by what he calls his “slightly compulsive need to collect”. Speaking to the Observer, he was critical of collectors who keep rare and significant works to themselves. “Naturally people can put art or antiquities in their homes. But something of unique importance, like the Crosby Garrett helmet [the Roman helmet found in Cumbria and sold to an unknown buyer], I believe the owner should at least make available to museums,” he said.
Dalya Alberge
Guardian
Here’s a turnabout: Brandeis University, which set off a storm two years ago when trustees tried to sell art from the Rose Art Museum’s collection, now plans to renovate the museum, rather than destroy it.
Things are not so dire as they once seemed…
The university has posted a press release, dated Mar. 10, on its website, but the fact just came to my attention. The renovations are scheduled to take this place in the original building this summer, in preparation for the museum’s 50th anniversary next fall. The art will start coming down in April, although the newer wing will remain open, with a new access point, through mid-June.
Judith H. Dobrzynski
Real Clear Arts
Robert Wilson & Hans Peter Kuhn of H.G.
‘Here,” said Robert Wilson, making his way through an underground labyrinth of caverns, arches and alcoves, “I want a pile of yellow sulphur.” In the darkness, people around him took careful note. “And here,” continued the American guru of the avant garde nonchalantly, “I want hundreds of golden arrows flying through the air, suspended in mid-flight . . .”
The year was 1995, and the setting was the cavernous Clink Street Vaults on London’s Bankside. I had gone behind the scenes, and was getting my first glimpse into the shadowy workings of an art production outfit known as Artangel. Although the company had been in existence for a few years, its ambitious new commission – HG, a vast installation by the legendarily demanding Wilson, based extremely loosely on The Time Machine by HG Wells – was on an altogether more monumental scale.
Following Wilson, the Artangel crew (producers Michael Morris and James Lingwood, plus an army of support staff) were unblinkingly jotting down even the most outlandish request. They then spent the ensuing months transforming this subterranean expanse into an immersive dreamscape of dripping lightbulbs, glittering sphinxes, mummified corpses and ruined temples…
For the past 20 years, Artangel has been playing a crucial, if backroom, role – as curator, facilitator, fundraiser, administrator, babysitter and celestial guardian – to some of Britain and the world’s most radical, daring and provocative artists. Even before HG, the company had already made a splash in 1993, as the unseen hand behind Rachel Whiteread’s House, a concrete cast of the insides of an entire terraced house in London.
John O’Mahony
Guardian
The Venice Biennale is months away — it opens on June 4 — but the other day there was some somewhat startling news about it: Not only is Saudi Arabia putting forward its inaugural entry, but also it has chosen two women artists to represent the Kingdom. This in a country where women mostly may not drive, among other constrictions.
The artist Shadia Alem and writer Raja Alem — sisters, shown [above] — are creating an installation called The Black Arch. Here´s the description:
It is very much about a meeting point of the two artists; of two visions of the world; from darkness to light, and of two cities – Mecca and Venice. The work is a stage, set to project the artists’ collective memory of Black – the monumental absence of colour. The first part of the installation relates to the physical representation of Black, referring to their past. The narrative is fuelled by the inspirational tales told by their aunts and grandmothers, and are anchored in Mecca, where the sisters grew up in the 1970s. As a counter point, the second part of the installation is a mirror image, an illumination, reflecting the present. These are the aesthetic parameters of the work. The Black Arch is also about a journey, about transition; inspired by Marco Polo and fellow thirteenth-century traveller Ibn Battuta – both examples of how cultures were bridged together through travel. The artists explain their intention: “to bring my city of Mecca to Venice, through objects brought from there: a Black Arch; a cubic city, and a handful of Muzdalifah pebbles.”, and to focus on the similarities between the two cosmopolitan cities and their inspirational powers.
Judith H. Dobrzynski
Real Clear Arts
In 1969 Anselm Kiefer, then a 24-year-old art student in Karlsruhe, travelled round various locations in France, Switzerland and Italy where he was photographed giving the “sieg heil” (Hitlergruß) salute outside prominent buildings. His exhibiting of a selection of the images, under the title Occupations (Bezetzung), for his degree show provoked anxious incomprehension among his tutors and, later, anger among the public and critics. The taboo-breaking work has now entered the art-historical canon and Kiefer has been credited with an early “naming” of the evil that so many of his countrymen had chosen to forget, but more than 40 years after it was produced, Occupations remains one of the most polarising artworks to have emerged from postwar Germany.
Late last year in New York, an exhibition of Kiefer’s work featured some of the 1969 images alongside more typical later work such as huge glass cases displaying tableaux made up of cotton dresses, palms, bushes, an aeroplane fuselage and burned books, as well as large paintings of the German landscape made with ash, lead, snakeskin and other organic materials. “When I moved to my new studio in Paris a few years ago I had the space and opportunity to look at old work, often for the first time since it was made,” he explains. “I found all these negatives from 1969 that I’d never even developed. So I developed some of them and put them in a big container for the New York show. It seemed a long time ago when I made them, but even after all these years some people did not like them at all.”
The show attracted a small demonstration, but Kiefer says he is “used to hard reactions. When I first thought of the work I didn’t know anyone else who was doing anything similar, but I had always thought that I had been born an artist and so what I did was art. I was very confident. If I hadn’t been I wouldn’t have been able to do any of this. Even by the time of the Venice biennale in 1980, when I was supposedly established, not a single critic was for me. Everyone was against my work. Of course, they later turned in my favour, but I needed a high degree of confidence to continue.”
Nicholas Wroe
Guardian
A member of the competition jury that in 1999 selected the US architect Peter Eisenman to design a monumental cultural complex in Santiago de Compostela, northwest Spain, has called the decision “an expensive mistake. Probably one of the largest in the history of architecture.” The sprawling City of Culture, which includes a planned international art centre and a museum among its six buildings, is €292m over budget and eight years late, according to our sister paper Il Giornale dell’Arte.
Wilfried Wang, the professor in architecture at the University of Texas, in Austin, said: “I was the sole voice on the competition jury voting against the Eisenman design. Any other competition design is also likely to have gone over budget, but it would have been completed by now.”
The 150,000 sq. m cultural complex, which is built into the side of Mount Gaiás, was originally due to be completed in 2002 at an estimated cost of €108m. The budget then increased to €400m, with the Galician regional government the sole funder. “If Eisenman’s scheme were ever to be completed, it would probably cost some €1.2bn,” said Wang. “Had my colleagues been as honest as I was, and as critical, we could have saved the Galician and Spanish taxpayers some €800m.” But another member of the jury, Kurt Forster, said the plan was grand and farsighted.
Gareth Harris and Roberta Bosco
The Art Newspaper
Black over white … Yohji Yamamoto’s designs are on display at the V&A in London. Photograph: Suzanne Plunkett/Reuters
It must be one of his many qualities that Yohji Yamamoto is the kind of fashion designer who appeals to people, like me, who are not dedicated followers of fashion. One reason for that could be that he avoids the characteristics of catwalk culture or couture that put us off: too expressive, too ostentatious. You sense that he makes clothing for real people rather than divas. Classic Yohji clothes are relaxed and durable, so that the wearer looks stylish but not preening. And it’s not just his clothes that appeal, it’s him: his demeanour, his focus, his talent. I confess that I have never bought a shred of his clothing, and yet he is one of the designers, of any discipline, that I most admire.
Justin McGuirk
Guardian
This picture forms part of a small but invigorating exhibition at the National Gallery, An American Experiment: George Bellows and the Ashcan Painters. It is the first in a running series of displays, organised with the Terra Foundation of American Art and intended “to present the British public with the finest works of American painting, and to introduce that public to areas of American art still insufficiently appreciated here”.
The work of George Bellows certainly falls into both categories. He was one of the finest American painters of the early 20th century, but his work has been little exhibited in this country: in fact, none of the seven paintings shown in An American Experiment has been displayed in Britain before.
Bellows was arguably the most talented member of a group of painters who came to be known as the Ashcan School. They were inspired by the teachings of Robert Henri, who had himself been inspired by the vigorously anti-academic form of urban realism practised in France by Manet, Monet and Degas.
Where those painters had captured the reality of the modern European metropolis, with Paris as its epitome, Henri encouraged his disciples to embrace the raucous vitality of New York and its seethingly multitudinous, immigrant population.
Andrew Graham-Dixon
Telegraph
