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Only with the pigment drawings, where the technique has given me a known way in through many years of practice, do I have a consistent entrance. For the rest of it — the photo work, writing, watercolor drawings, artist’s books, the sculpture installations and the occasional performance — the entrance comes by discovery each time: a thought or unexpected insight, a misunderstanding, a coincidence, a mistake, a moment that separates out from previous ones."


Roni Horn, Air Burial, cast glass 2017-2018, Pola Museum of Art, Hakone 2021-2022, photo by Masaya Hudaka



"...the “what it looks like” bit only comes in after the exploration, in a sense. It evolves out of the exploration. To have that option kept open until the very end or close to the end is very high risk for me. But then again, in my work, things do come to an end. They don't they don't just keep going on. So my point is, there's nothing until there's something — and that's a high risk proposition."


Roni Horn, Gold Field (left) 99.99% pure gold foil (annealed) 1980/1994; and Bouquet of Emily (right) solid aluminum and cast white plastic, 1 of 6 parts, 2006-07, Pola Museum of Art, Hakone 2022, photo by Koroda Takeru


para 1: via The New York Times 2021 Roni Horn Shares a Timely Record of Solitude 

para 2: via The Talks 2021 Roni Horn: There's Nothing Until There's Something 

 

current exhibition: When you see your reflection in water, do you recognize the water in you? Pola Museum, Hakone Japan, 18 September 2021 – 30 March 2022

 

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Lawrence Weiner, courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac https://ropac.net/artists/88-lawrence-weiner/


Maybe, beyond a retrospective exhibition, the most enduring ways for an artist to be remembered are with printed exhibition catalogues / reviews and online videos. The most endearing way is, without a doubt, a personal experience.

Lawrence Weiner passed away this week: he was - for me - an icon of experimental, witty and quixotically empathetic art. I was fortunate enough to see his work - along with pieces by Matthew Higgs and John Baldessari - @ The Apartment in Vancouver CA. Here's the link to my interview back in 2008 with the gallery's director:

https://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/with-lee-plested-from-apartment/1280

 

The last words of this mini vale are epitomised by Lawrence Weiner himself.

 

Lawrence Weiner, As Long As It Lasts, 1992/2008, [photo, Lee Plested 2008] courtesy The Apartment

 

 

 

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"I prepare an impasto which contains pigments and chalk. I spread a thin layer of colour each day, almost at the same time [because of the consistency of light], for 15 days or more, depending on the thickness I want to get. In this time you can’t see the final colour, only at the end, when the pigments are dispersed on the surface through abrasion, you discover a totally different colour... the pigment dust’s final burst."


Ettore Spalletti, installation view, La beauté est là où l’œil se pose, Galerie LeLong, Paris 2013, photo courtesy of Galerie LeLong



"Yes, the colour, as it shifts, occupies the space and we enter. The frame that delimited the space is no longer there. Taking it away, the colour takes on the space and invades the space. And when this happens, it’s miraculous."

Ettore Spalletti, installation view (one gallery room) Un giorno cosi bianco, cosi bianco, Fondazione MAXXI, Rome 2014, photo courtesy of Fondazione MAXXI



para 1: via Apollo 2016 How do you capture a colour? Interview with Ettore Spalletti
para 2: via MAXXI Foundation 2014 press release Un Giorno Cosi Bianco, Cosi Bianco curated by Anna Mattirolo 

 

first posthumous exhibition of Ettore Spalletti: Il cielo in una stanza (The sky in a room), curated by Éric de Chassey, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome, 25 October 2021 - 27 February 2022

 

 

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“Pattern finding is the purpose of the mind and the construct of the universe. There are an infinite number of patterns, some of which are known; those still unknown hold the key to unresolved enigmas and paradoxes.”

Aerial view: Agnes Denes, Wheatfield - A confrontation, Battery Park Landfill, Downtown Manhattan 1982 Courtesy the artist


"...For the first time in human history, the whole earth is becoming one interdependent society with our interests, needs and problems intertwined and interfering. The threads of existence have become so tightly interwoven that one pull in any direction can distort the whole fabric, affecting millions of threads. A new type of analytical attitude is called for, a clear overview or summing up, in which essences carry pure meaning and all things can be considered once more simultaneously..."


Installation view: Agnes Denes, Absolutes and Intermediates: The Shed, New York 2019, photo Dan Bradica, courtesy The Shed

para 1 + 2: via http://www.agnesdenesstudio.com/writings.html

 
current land art: Expanding the Atlas, Nevada Museum of Art, Nevada 26 June 2021 - 02 January 2022

Agnes Denes: website

 

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Something different, just like a holiday! This logette is the first in a series on artists, who I admire in thought/word/deed (art), composed of 2 paragraphs - in their own words - and 2 of their works. Et voici: Anish Kapoor.

  

"An artist’s job is to go into the studio and say ‘I don’t know what to do, I’m lost.’ That it’s the impossibility, if you like, of any poetic substance. And then you go in there and in spite of that terrible feeling, which you have to live with, you do something and you think ah, maybe that can lead to its own content, not something already there...And I’m really interested in that as a process. Because it’s a process that leads you in directions you couldn’t imagine, directions you couldn’t rationally put there."

Installation view: Anish Kapoor Lisson Gallery 25 March - 9 May 2015 Courtesy the artist + Lisson Gallery
 

"I think I've had three or four moments in my work over the last twenty-five years that have been real discoveries. The pigment pieces felt to me as if they were a discovery about an object and what an object can be; how an object can be and not be. Then, of course, the void pieces. The idea that if I empty out all the content and just make something that is an empty form, I don't empty out the content at all. The content is there in a way that's more surprising than if I tried to make a content. So, therefore, the idea that subject matter is somehow not the same as content. Then, in a different sort of way, moving from matte surfaces to shiny surfaces. In terms of the fact that the traditional sublime is the matte surface, deep and absorbing, and that the shiny might be a modern sublime, which is fully reflective, absolutely present, and returns the gaze. This feels like a new way to think about the non-objective object."

 

Installation view: Anish Kapoor Lisson Gallery 25 March - 9 May 2015 Courtesy the artist + Lisson Gallery 


para 1: via Phaidon 2015/ Anish Kapoor An artist's job is to say I'm lost
para 2: via Tate Magazine 2007/ In conversation with Heidi Reitmaier
 

next exhibition: Lisson Gallery, London 14 September - 30 October 2021


Anish Kapoor: website

 

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Installation of My New Theater I: Tap Dancing (1997), Pat Hearn Gallery, New York, 1997. Photo: Courtesy the Estate of Colin de Land © Joan Jonas: Artists Rights Society, New York: DACS, London


I’ve just enrolled in a new free online non-credit course at edX - this time via University of Cambridge - called: Reconceiving Space: Installation + Performance Art. Presented by Abigail Docherty, the course  features Maria Abramovich, Joseph Beuys, Joan Jonas and Ai Weiwei.

It promises to be an experiential experiment with “space, language, ‘liveness’ and sound.” Undoubtedly, some different views along an ever-spiralling path: maybe I can quicken my pace through emulation and, who knows, a bit of tap dancing!


Interior view of My New Theater I: Tap Dancing (1997), Pat Hearn Gallery, New York, 1997. Photo: Courtesy the Estate of Colin de Land © Joan Jonas: Artists Rights Society, New York: DACS, London

 

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104 white quartz stones; each approximately 30cm x 25cm x 30cm; golden rectangle footprint +/- 300cm x 485cm; laredo 003, GWN7 ex-studio / back parking lot, Bunbury 2021; image by Paul MacGillivary

laredo 003 took place at a vacant TV studio’s back parking lot on 26 May 2021. I realised, only after I saw the photos, that this latest intervention was related to A Simple Box geometric floorwork [Une Valse Lente, Abstract Project, Paris 2018] which also used small white components spaced +/- precisely at intervals. In that case, for 2 weeks, the edges of one plane of a cube were defined by adhesive paper strips on smooth rubber. With laredo 003, the asymmetrical white quartz stones - patterned as squares in a rectangular format atop nubbly pavement - united for one hour to become a much more expansive intermediary between earth + sky, between concept + memory, between then + now.

 

Intervention images: laredo 003

Intervention statement: laredo 003

 

 

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two white powder-coated steel rods; each 200cm in length x 1.5cm diameter; footprint: 200cm x 45cm; southwest view; laredo 002, Back Beach Salt Baths: Indian Ocean / Bunbury 2021; image by Paul MacGillivary

Since my enticing preview of laredo 002 last September, this intervention happened (!) on 15 March 2021. Its documentation has just been completed.

 

Images: laredo 002

Intervention statement: laredo 002


laredo 002 took place at the abandoned 1930s Back Beach Salt Baths. The location may be remembered as "a great folly" by long-term residents of the regional town of Bunbury / Geographe Bay on the Indian Ocean, but - as a relative newcomer to the area - I revel in its potential as a magical site for temporary art.

 

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