Isle of Skye III

With Trevor Sutton on the Isle of Skye, Trotternish, August 2008

photograph by Carol Robertson

Untitled Sculpture - Art in Public Space

Someone placed this sculpture (concrete, 283 x 166 x 166 cm) in our street today. A beautiful example of a conceptual and minimal artwork.

If only more contemporary public artworks could be like that!

Richard Long – A Cloudless Walk II

Richard Long – A Cloudless Walk

Page in newspaper (Eindhovens Dagblad, 7 December 1996)

published on the occasion of the Travaux Publics project by Peninsula and Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 1996

42 x 58 cm

section of newspaper with artist page

price € 25

just a few copies available

an image and caption of this page was published in:

The space of the page – sequence, continuity & material, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, 1997 (publication on occasion of the exhibition of the same name at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, 1997-1998. Exhibition and publication edited by Simon Cutts, Erica Van Horn and John Janssen):

A Cloudless Walk – Richard Long, Eindhovens Dagblad, 7.12.1996, 418 x 577 mm, rear page in weekend selection of daily paper.

Part of the Travaux Publics programme by Peninsula and the Van Abbemuseum with interventions throughout the town of Eindhoven. An imaginative use of modern printing technology, the blue ink of the sky sparing the white clouds of the text. A bright start to the day for the burghers of Eindhoven – if only more pages could be like that!

Ian Hamilton Finlay – A Model of Order

Ian Hamilton Finlay – A Model of Order, Selected Letters on Poetry and Making

edited by Thomas A Clark

a book with selections from letters by Ian Hamilton Finlay, chosen and edited by Thomas A Clark and published in 2009 by WAX 366

designed by Colin Sackett

available from

WAX 366

David Bellingham

119 Wilton Street 2/1

Glasgow G20 6RD

and from the Ingleby Gallery

price £ 9.95

Thomas A Clark – Yellow and Blue, Orkney

Thomas A Clark – Yellow and Blue

19 September – 3 October 2009

exhibition at

Porteous Brae Gallery

Dundas Street

Stromness

Orkney, Scotland

there are also text installations by Thomas A Clark and Laurie Clark in Woodwick House in Evie, at the Braes o Ha'Breck archaeological excaviation in Wyre and other venues across Orkney. Hosted by Brae Projects, Orkney, with sponsorship and assistance from Aquateia, Pentarq, Reiach and Hall Architects, James Wilson Ltd. and Antonia Thomas.

October 2009 there will be a book launch at the Pier Arts Centre, Orkney, of a new book by Thomas A Clark: The Hundred Thousand Places

published by Carcanet Press

21,6 x 13,5 cm, 80 pages

price £ 9.95

Richard Long – Praemium Imperiale 2009

Richard Long is the 2009 prize-winner of the prestigious Praemium Imperiale, a global arts prize awarded annually by the Japan Art Association.

Each year there are five awards, in the categories painting & photography, sculpture, theatre & film, architecture and music. Richard Long was honoured in the category sculpture,

the Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto in the category painting and photography.

In earlier years artists who were honoured with this award were among others Ellsworth Kelly, Bruce Nauman, Anselm Kiefer, Norman Foster, Robert Ryman, Steve Reich and Jean-Luc Godard.

image

photograph by Sankei Shimbun (thanks GV)

invitation card exhibition Richard Long, Galerie Tschudi, Glarus, Switzerland, 2002 (photograph Going Along, Milwaukee Art Museum, 2001 by Jerry Sohn)

CDLA – U235 troisième

exhibition U235 troisième

22 September – 23 December 2009

Centre des Livres d'Artistes

1 Place Attane

87500 Saint-Yrieix-la-Perche

France

www.cdla.info

recent acquisitions for the collection, a.o. herman de vries, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Hamish Fulton, Jean La Gac, Jochen Gerz and Richard Long

Claudia Losi – STRIP MAPS, Milan

STRIP MAPS: Claudia Losi, Sguardo ed esperienza / Gaze and experience

curated by Francesca Pagliuca

5 October – 4 December 2009

special opening 3 October 10am – 7pm

Spazio Milano

UniCredit Banca

Piazza Cordusio

Milan

A solo exhibition by Claudia Losi, beginning Saturday, October 3, 2009, ushers in the new exhibition season at Spazio Milano, a multifunctional space within the UniCredit Bank branch in Piazza Cordusio, Milan. The venue was created in 2007 and is dedicated to the promotion of art, culture and engagement with the local community.

For the first time in the history of the venue, an artist has been invited to create a site-specific project involving the entire branch, with the object of transforming the ways in which the facility is ordinarily experienced.

The phrase strip maps is intended to evoke the full spectrum of 'descriptive' maps, recording data of radically different kinds – from the purely geographical (indicating concrete and tangible boundaries and routes) to more heterogeneous and contingent phenomena (places worth visiting, establishments serving specific purposes, etc.). The 'concrete' pathways associated with the everyday activities of the branch are then overlaid with emotional trajectories. This common thread runs through much of the artist's work, serving to draw us away from ordinary perceptions and to present unexpected elements of discontinuity.

In addition to a selection of works never before displayed in Milan, the artist will also premiere a video produced by UniCredit Group along with a number of works that have been incorporated into the Group's collection in the past five years. Claudia Losi is closely linked to UniCredit & Art, which has purchased several of her most important works – including her entire Celacanti series, composed of large square sections of quilted fabric, embroidered by hand with the lightest of designs, as if to simulate a coverlet (created in 2006).

photograph
Claudia Losi – For Ryokan Project, 1999
balls of thread and silk embroidery, 7 pieces

Alan Charlton – Patrick de Brock Gallery II

Alan Charlton – single vertical and horizontal paintings

26 September – 12 October 2009

Patrick de Brock Gallery

Strandstraat 11

8300 Knokke

Belgium

tel +32 (0)50 621309

photographs Peter Foolen, 26 September 2009

Editions and Artists' Books Fair, NY invitation

Peter Foolen Editions is participant at the Editions and Artists' Books Fair 2009

5 – 8 November 2009

548 West 22nd Street Between 10th & 11th Avenue

New York

Cairn Gallery – Eiji Watanabe

On Sunday 4 October opens an exhibition of the Japanese artist

Eiji Watanabe (1961, Aichi, Japan) in the Cairn Gallery

Opening 2 – 5pm

By appointment until 1 November

Cairn

28 Viewforth Place

Fife KY10 2PZ

Scotland

tel +44 (0)1333 312285

clark@cairneditions.co.uk

Alan Charlton – Patrick de Brock Gallery

Lily van der Stokker – 2 drawings

2 drawings by Lily van der Stokker (studies for wall drawings and prints), 1992

29,7 x 21 cm, magic marker and pencil on paper

Lily van der Stokker – letter 1992

Lettter from Lily van der Stokker, 11 February 1992, concerning the publication of a print portfolio and her exhibition at Peninsula, Eindhoven (13 September – 10 October 1992)

Lily van der Stokker – Van Abbemuseum

Since 2005 the Van Abbemuseum is showing much attention to the work of Lily van der Stokker. In the space of the tower of the museum was her exhibition The Complaints Club (walldrawings) from 1 October 2005 till 25 October 2007. From 2006 there is a room in the museum decorated with wallpaper designed by Lily van der Stokker. She was asked to invite artists to make installations in this room, guests were from 2006 till May 2009: Andrea Zittel, Esther Tielemans, HW Werther and Rachel Harrison. The Plug In # 52 – Lily van der Stokker and guest: Jim Iserman opened on 16 May 2009 and is currently running.

The following text is an interview with Lily van der Stokker conducted by curator Christiane Berndes on 17 August 2006

CB: In 2005, the Van Abbemuseum acquired several video artworks by VALIE EXPORT, Joan Jonas, Martha Rosler, and Carolee Schneemann. They are all artists who, in the late sixties and early seventies, used video and film to create works from a typically female perspective or in which women’s social status is a central theme. While I was trying to figure out how to present them, I remembered our conversations on feminism. I also remembered that you were interested in art and decoration. You once told me about an exhibition in Cologne for which you made a wall drawing that was used as background for other artists’ works.

LvdS: That was the Punishment & Decoration exhibition at the Höhenthal und Bergen Gallery in Cologne in 1994. The exhibition was curated by Michael Corris and Robert Nickas. I had long conversations with them about the decorative element, which I very deliberately use in my wall drawings. In their exhibitions they played with the concepts of 'figure' and 'ground'(1). They used my wall drawings as the backdrop for works by Mike Scott, Imi Knoebel and Peter Halley. This whole idea was later taken up by people such as Erik Troncy, who used it in his exhibition Dramatically Different in Le Magasin in 1997. There they used a work of mine that consists of a plaid pattern as the background for a work by Allan McCollum.

CB: Despite the fact that your wall drawings were very prominent in the room, they were at the same time very open and welcoming towards the other works. That was why we asked you to make a design for wallpaper that we could use for the gallery where we are going to exhibit the work of EXPORT, Jonas, Rosler and Schneemann. You immediately replied enthusiastically, the outcome being plaid wallpaper that we have now acquired for the collection. To me, the wallpaper puts into question the white modernistic exhibition halls. It questions the relationship between the works of art themselves and the context in which they are exhibited. How did you perceive this commission? What was your biggest challenge?

LvdS: In my work I play with hierarchies like the relationship between art and the decorative element. Decoration is often considered inferior. But in this sense it is also supportive. Decoration needs to frame something, encircle it, but it also wants to help and show affection for it. This is an interesting function that I use a lot in my work. For me, decoration is an expression of the need to offer warmth and security. The use of my wall drawings as a background made them look like wallpaper and ended up highlighting the decorative element even more. All this sounds like a strategy I came up with, but it wasn’t to begin with. It was really just listening to my own intuition. I just couldn’t help it. My education as a visual artist gave me a love for monochrome paintings. Almost all my friends in New York are, by the way, also monochrome painters! The fact that I like to work with decoration has to do with a deeply felt yearning, something that keeps coming back and that I would like to explore further. Furthermore, decorativity has negative connotations in the art world. I want to change those negative connotations into positive ones. I want to get to work on it and immerse myself in it. I actually like the so-called meaninglessness of it. In it I see a huge reservoir of energy. In working with the female element, I don’t want to be against something, but for something. The decorative element also has to do with ‘nesting’ and with the female gender. In the early nineties I read the book This Sex Which Is Not One, by philosopher and psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray. She writes very poetically about the feminine. Not that I understood everything exactly, but her texts inspired me. Decoration is not only about wealth and abundance but also about fertility, nature and the reproductive organs. I want to take my kitschy longing for frivolous coverings to the extreme, I want to admit excess. That is why the Van Abbemuseum’s request to design wallpaper is so good for me. I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time.

CB: Your wallpaper engages in a special relationship with the works of other artists in that gallery. We also asked you to develop an exhibition programme for this room. How are you going to go about it? Are there guidelines or rules you will follow?

LvdS: Art is exhibited according to certain rules. But why can’t you hang artworks one on top of the other or immediately next to each other like Ineke Werther did in the 1987 exhibition The Selection in the former Kruithuis Museum in Den Bosch? Why must a painting have lots of space around it? I have my doubts about the self-evidence of this and have tried to break through it in my work. Then we also have, for example, the work of American artist Jim Iserman. He both paints and makes furniture and he upholsters the furniture with beautiful soft fabrics in the same geometric pattern as the painting, so when you sit in front of the painting you are looking at a geometrical painting, while your behind is sitting on the same geometrical pattern. What I also find very interesting is to work with the concept of the ornament. Imagine a nude painting. It has become a cliché and something people hang above their couch. I could hang nude paintings over my wallpaper. You would have to ask yourself which of the two is more ‘decorative’.

CB: The first guest that you invited was Andrea Zittel.

Would you care to elaborate?

LvdS: Originally, the idea was to invite a female artist whose work is related to that of Lee Lozano, which can be found in the former old building of the museum. For me, that person was Andrea Zittel. I first saw her work in the early nineties at the Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York. She had an exhibition of clothing, but also floor coverings. One of the carpets consisted of rectangular shapes, partially on the floor and partially on the wall, with specially marked areas telling you where to sit and where to lie down. The shapes had an obvious relationship with the body and its movement through space. I met her in 1994, while we were installing our works in a group exhibition. She arrived with two small black suitcases,one for the daytime and one for at night. She wore black clothes; a skirt lined with fur that doubled as a coat or blanket. It was a kind of survival get-up. I found it fascinating; the needy body as an element determining the form. I would actually have liked to show a film of a floating island she designed and on which she lived for a month – another one of her survival projects – but she preferred to show the videos Sufficient Self (2004) and Small Liberties (2006). They are about her projects in the Californian Joshua Tree desert, where she lives and works as a pioneer in a settlement of her own design.

Note 1: Punishment and decoration: art in an age of militant superficiality, Artforum, April 1993, p.p. 78-83

interview from the website of the Van Abbemuseum, it took place on the occasion of the presentation: Lily van der Stokker – In the Embellishment, Videos from the 1960s and 1970s by VALIE EXPORT, Joan Jonas, Martha Rosler and Carolee Schneemann (Van Abbemuseum, 2006)

Lily van der Stokker is represented by Gering & López Gallery, New York and Galerie van Gelder, Amsterdam, for more info about the artist:

www.geringlopezgallery.com

www.galerievangelder.com

Lily van der Stokker – Prints

Lily van der Stokker – Prints

portfolio with 5 prints published by Peninsula in 1992 on the occasion of the exhibition of Lily van der Stokker in Peninsula, Eindhoven, 13 September – 10 October 1992

printed in silkscreen by 7 Zeven, Tilburg

36 x 46 cm

edition of 25 copies, each print signed and numbered

sold

Roger Ackling – Brought Back

Roger Ackling – Brought Back

19 September – 14 November 2009

The Pier Arts Centre

28-30 Victoria Street

Stromness, Orkney

KY16 3AA Scotland

www.pierartscentre.com

exhibition with works from 2006-2009, including a series of Orkney works from 2008

invitationcard with image: Orkney/Voewood, 2008, sunlight on wood with screws,

48 x 64 x 6,5 cm, © Annely Juda Fine Art, London

10 Views of Brockmans Mount

from Gerard Vermeulen, 16 september 2009

Hamish Fulton

10 VIEWS OF BROCKMANS MOUNT

A NATURALLY FORMED HILL

NEAR HYTHE KENT

ENGLAND

an artists' book by Hamish Fulton published by Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam in 1973.

a quite small publication (13,8 x 20,8 cm) printed 36 years ago, with photographs in soft black and white, but with the same quality and feeling as the quite colourful recent books of Fulton

Isle of Skye II

Isle of Skye, August 2009

Espira-de-Conflent – Pyrénées-Orientales, 1996

Peter Foolen – Espira-de-Conflent | Pyrénées-Orientales, 1996
following a mountain stream
a series of 21 photographs on foam, 10 x 14,8 cm

price unframed complete set, edition of 1 – € 600