Week 4- Anish Kapoor

Week 4- Anish Kapoor

Celebrated for his gigantic, stainless steel 'Cloud Gate' sculpture in Chicago’s Millennium Park, Anish Kapoor is changing the cultural environment with his public works.

1.Research Kapoor's work in order to discuss the ideas behind 3 quite different works from countries outside New Zealand.

Cloud Gate

The 110-ton Cloud Gate sculpture is forged of a seamless series of highly-polished stainless steel "plates" that create an elliptically-arched, highly-reflective work with Chicago's skyline and Millennium Park itself as a dramatic backdrop. Visitors fully experience the majestic nature of the work by literally walking through and around, as it was designed for public interaction. Inspired by liquid mercury, the sculpture is among the largest in the world, measuring 66-feet-long by 33-feet high. The plaza upon which Cloud Gale sits was made possible by a gift from the SBC Corporation.

Svayambhu (meaning self-generated or auto generated)

This is another one of kapoors sculpture that is creating itself. Svayambh takes the form of a train track, covered with ruby-red wax. The track runs the entire length of several adjoining galleries. A 30-tonne red wax engine traverses the track at a snail's pace, squeezing itself through doorways, forming its own shape.

Tall Tree and the Eye

There is nothing heavy or imposing about it, but there is something quite improbable. You cannot tell how it has been put up and that is part of its mystery and dignity.

The steel structure, an arrangement of 76 shiny spheres which bubble up to the level of the surrounding Palladian buildings, is inspired by the words of the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke.

2.Discuss the large scale site specific work that has been installed on a private site in New Zealand.

The sculpture is fabricated in a custom deep red PVC-coated polyester fabric by Ferrari Textiles supported by two identical matching red structural steel ellipses that weigh 42,750kg each. The fabric alone weighs 7,200kg. The sculpture, which passes through a carefully cut hillside, provides a kaleidoscopic view of the beautiful Kaipara Harbor at the vertical ellipse end and the hand contoured rolling valleys and hills of “The Farm” from the horizontal ellipse.

3. Where is the Kapoor's work in New Zealand? What are its form and materials? What are the ideas behind the work?

The Farm,” a 400ha (1,000 acre) private estate outdoor art gallery in Kaipara Bay, north of Auckland, New Zealand. Kapoor’s first outdoor sculpture in fabric, “The Farm” (the sculpture is named after its site), is designed to withstand the high winds that blow inland from the Tasman Sea off the northwest coast of New Zealand’s North Island.

www.anishkapoor.com/www.anishkapoor.com/www.anishkapoor.com/

www.anishkapoor.com/

The Walters Prize

This week we will be visiting the Auckland Art Gallery to view, research and write about the artists selected for the Walters Prize 2010. Discuss the work in the gallery with your tutors and other students and answer the following questions.

1. What is the background to the Walters Prize?

The Walters Prize is a biennial award for New Zealand artists who have made an outstanding contribution to the visual arts in the previous two years. Honouring the life and artistic legacy of Gordon Walters (1919 – 1995), the award was founded by the Auckland Art Gallery in 2002. The prize includes NZ$50,000 and an all expense paid trip to New York to exhibit at Saatchi & Saatchi’s world headquarters.

2. List the 4 selected artists for 2010 and briefly describe their work.

Saskia Leek

Yellow is the putty of the world 2009

Her paintings that respond directly to the look and the mood of sun-faded prints and Paint By Numbers pastels, and is treated in the exhibition Yellow is the Putty of the World more clearly as a subject in itself. Saskia painting has long honoured the appeals of popular images.

Fiona Connor

Something Transparent (please go round the back) 2009, mixed media

Fiona Connor’s intriguing sculptural proposition Something Transparent makes the most of the unsettling potential of the double-take. Positioning multiple reproductions of the glass façade and public entrance to the gallery in situ one behind the next, Connor’s work is both visually captivating and compelling conceptually.

Dan Arps

Explaining things 2008, mixed media

He has made careful formal gestures with materials as banal as breakfast cereal and sheets of newspaper - things a long way from the everyday idea of art. At the same time, he has made gestural paintings and elaborate objects.

Alex Monteith

Passing Manoeuvre with two motorcycles and 584 vehicles for two-channel video installation 2008

Alex Monteith has taken advantage of contemporary technology to update the kinds of image-making experiments undertaken by structuralist filmmakers in the 1960s, deriving a formal composition from the action of vehicles.

3. Who are the jury members for 2010?

Joy Bywater, Rhana Devenport, Leonhard Emmerling and Kate Montgomery.

4. Who is the judge for 2010 and what is his position in the art world?

The former-director of London's Tate Modern, Vicente Todoli will judge the Walters Prize 2010 and announce the award winner on 8 October.Todolí was artistic director for The Valencia Institute for Modern Art (IVAM), Spain, and before it opened he was their Chief curator. Throughout his distinguished career he organised and curated internationally renowned exhibitions of work by contemporary artists, making him the perfect choice to be this years judge.

5. Who would you nominate for this years Walter's Prize, and why? Substantiate

you answer by outlining the strengths of the artists work. How does this relate

to your interests in art? What aspect of their work is successful in your opinion,
in terms of ideas, materials and/or installation of the work?

http://nzcontemporary.com/contemporary-art-prizes/the-walters-prize/

Hussein Chalayan is an artist and designer, working in film, dress and installation art. Research Chalayan’s work, and then consider these questions in some thoughtful reflective writing.

1. Chalayan’s works in clothing, like Afterwords (2000) andBurka (1996) , are often challenging to both the viewer and the wearer. What are your personal responses to these works? Are Afterwords and Burka fashion, or are they art? What is the difference?

Not all clothing is fashion, so what makes fashion fashion?

I think what makes fashion fashion, is when you get someone such as celebrities/models who has a strong influence on others, put them in a piece of clothing made by recognized designers, and pop the image of them wearing those clothes out in the media. that would probably be considered as fashion.

Hussein Chalayan, Burka, 1996

Hussein Chalayan, Afterwords, 2000

2. Chalayan has strong links to industry. Pieces like TheLevel Tunnel (2006) and Repose (2006) are made in collaboration with, and paid for by, commercial business; in these cases, a vodka company and a crystal manufacturer. How does this impact on the nature of Chalayan’s work? Does the meaning of art change when it is used to sell products? Is it still art?

I don't think the meaning of art changes. It is still Hussein Chalayan’s work. Just because it is paid for by a commercial company doesn’t make it less of an art piece. I don’t think art changes when selling products.

3. Chalayan’s film Absent Presence screened at the 2005 Venice Biennale. It features the process of caring for worn clothes, and retrieving and analysing the traces of the wearer, in the form of DNA. This work has been influenced by many different art movements; can you think of some, and in what ways they might have inspired Chalayan’s approach?

Hussein Chalayan, still from Absent Presence, 2005 (motion picture)

4. Many of Chalayan’s pieces are physically designed and constructed by someone else; for example, sculptor Lone Sigurdsson made some works from Chalayan’s Echoform(1999) and Before Minus Now (2000) fashion ranges. In fashion design this is standard practice, but in art it remains unexpected. Work by artists such as Jackson Pollock hold their value in the fact that he personally made the painting. Contrastingly, Andy Warhol’s pop art was largely produced in a New York collective called The Factory, and many of his silk-screened works were produced by assistants. Contemporarily, Damien Hirst doesn’t personally build his vitrines or preserve the sharks himself. So when and why is it important that the artist personally made the piece?

I think sometimes artist ideas can be to big of a project to handle on their own,sometimes they need someones help who has the right experience to assist them in their project, so the artist plan can be properly executed. however i think most of the work has to be done by the artist themselves because it is their work.