Chris from C-Coy sent us this short film he shot in 2006 of Milton Glaser talking and sketching. Great stuff – makes you want to pick up a pencil and get busy.
Archived posts: Art
Designs on Delivery
This looks like a well tasty show: Designs on Delivery is an exhibition of posters from the General Post Office (GPO) from 1930 to 1960, courtesy of the British Postal Museum & Archive.
The show starts today at London College of Communication (LCC), featuring work from a range of top designers, including Tom Eckersley's stark warning about packing parcels carefully (below).
The image up top is Action Stations: Saving Is Everyone's War Job (1944) by FHK Henrion – check out more images from the show in this Guardian slide show.
It looks like a fantastic collection of work, and stands in stark contrast with the current stuff being churned out for the dire 'People's Post Office' campaign.
The show runs from today until 4 November at the Well Gallery at LCC, Elephant & Castle, London SE1 6SB – directions here.
Art Car Boot Fair at The Dock
Ah, so this is good – on Saturday the folks at the Art Car Boot Fair will be selling their wares at their 'Bootique' at The Dock, the 'emporium of creative talent' curated by Tom Dixon over at Portobello Dock.
"The Art Car Bootique will distill the Art Car Boot Fair’s winning combination of fine art art and high end frivolity into a ‘best of the boot fair’ event … all manner of artworks, artwares and services direct from artworld luminaries and emerging talents including Sir Peter Blake, Nick Reynolds, Ian Monroe, Pure Evil, Gavin Turk, Pretty Taxing, the House of Fairytales, Scrawl Collective and Stuart Semple. Fine art, street art, limited edition prints, cool sculptures, art for kids and live while-you-wait portrait painting plus lots of arty entertainments."
The bootique will be open on Saturday 26 from noon till 6pm (possibly from 10am – the site mentions both times). The Dock is open from 10am-6pm daily this week, until 8pm today, and until 4pm on Sunday.
Image top: Tyre Print, 2008, by Gavin Turk.
Richard Long at Tate Britain
We nipped along to Tate Britain (we're so having to hold ourselves back from inserting a definite article before that…) yesterday to check out the new Richard Long show, Heaven and Earth.
If you don't know his stuff, Long is part of the loose set of artists whose work gets grouped under the heading Land Art (check out Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty and James Turrell's Roden Crater as good examples from that gang; or pick up the Land and Environmental Art
book from Thames & Hudson).
book from Thames & Hudson).
Long's art revolves around taking walks. Short walks, long walks, and some giant walks – in Walking to a Lunar Eclipse he treks 366 miles in 8 days – heck he must go through a lot of socks. He then creates a variety of pieces out of his perambulations. Sometimes he creates site-specific installations during the walks, as with Dusty Boots Line (below): these are ephemeral pieces, which may last days, weeks, months or even years, but which can only really be experienced in their locations. Long does photograph the pieces though, often presenting those photographs framed, with carefully hand lettered titles – and thus creating new works.
He also creates beautiful text pieces (such as Heaven and Earth, top), combining poetry, typography, art and historical record. These vary in scale, and many of them are presented in the exhibition as full size text pieces made out of cut vinyl, often occupying a full wall.
Long also creates stunning sculptural pieces for exhibition, such as South Bank Circle (below), relocating materials found during his walks, and arranging them in stark geometrical forms. They're quite magnificent.
The show is brilliantly curated (largely thanks to Long's close involvement, writing the captions for the exhibition, and designing the guide too). The moment when you step from a room of photographs into a room of installed works is really brilliant.
It's also interesting to see an artist whose work is so closely allied to graphic design – a large part of his output is in the form of artists books, all beautifully designed and typeset. In fact, walking through the show is a bit like taking a walk through a sumptuous book…
The exhibition runs until 6 September, but don't dilly dally, get yourself along there as soon as you can.
Passive aggressive much?
KK Outlet is the Hoxton gallery and office of Amsterdam's KesselsKramer agency, and they've been in touch to tell us about their latest show, Passive Aggressive Notes.
The show features pieces from the Passive Aggressive Notes site, and should strike a chord with anyone who's ever shared a house and found a polite-but-actually-furious note sellotaped to the fridge.
The show runs until 21 June.
Art Car Boot Fair 2009
Grab a Turk! Nab a Blake! Spot an Emin!
The ever-wonderful Art Car Boot Fair is upon us again, on 14 June at the Truman Brewery – it's a ramshackle event, with a fine selection of artists and designers hawking their wares out of their car boots. There's also a smattering of burlesque, some customised rides, and lots of food and drink.
See you there.
Herb and Dorothy
We've just been sent this trailer for the award-winning new documentary Herb and Dorothy, which premieres in New York on June 5, and it looks just great.
The film is all about Herbert and Dorothy Vogel. Herb was a postal clerk, and Dorothy was a librarian, and despite their modest incomes, they built up an incredibly important contemporary art collection, living off Dorothy's salary and using Herb's to collect art. The only criteria was that the work should be affordable, and small enough to fit into their one-bedroom Manhattan apartment.
Over thirty years they collected more than 2,000 pieces, including works by Sol LeWitt, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Chuck Close, and a host of others. In 1992 they gifted their whole collection to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; despite the fact that thanks to their fine eyes, the collection was worth millions of dollars. How cool is that?
They still live in the same apartment, with 19 turtles, lots of fish, and one cat. They're still collecting.
Here's hoping the film makes the jump across to the UK some time soon.
House of Propellers
Just downstairs from We Made This, the good folks at Represent have just opened up their new gallery, House of Propellers, and have kicked things off with a tasty little show by illustrator Rupert Meats from Rude.
The show riffs on travel and location, with a particular London twist, and features a mix of originals and rather fine limited edition screenprints.
House of Propellers should be a space to watch, with upcoming shows from James Graham, Will Broome and Clare Shillard. Check out the HOP Facebook page for more information.
Monumental
This is a tasty little number. It's a screengrab of a daily timelapse, shot from the top of London's recently re-opened Monument.
The Monument View is an "ambient responsive outdoor installation" by Chris Meigh-Andrews, which shoots a continuous timelapse birds-eye view of the city. You can use the Explore button on the top right to search through a back-catalogue of the sequences.
Brilliant.
Swifty at No Vacancy
After we recently posted about Swifty, Ken Tan from the urban art online store Project Midas (based in Singapore) got in touch to tell us about the new exhibition of Swifty's work they're hosting at the No Vacancy gallery in Melbourne.
Ken revealed that the show will feature original work, as well as "a remix of the classic Vegemite brand, limited edition prints and t-shirts, plus a live painting of a Suzuki Swift car".
The show runs from 5 to 14 March 2009.