Keith Arnatt

"Notes From Jo"

While Arnatt started off as a painter, he turned to conceptual photography in the late 1960s with work that often had a pokerfaced humour. "Notes from Jo" (1990 – 94) record his wife’s Post-It note messages usually left in their kitchen. The work irreverently plays on the conceptual concerns of image and text through the irritations and communications of daily life. "They were everyday notes from his wife, but when artist Keith Arnatt pictured and enlarged them after her death they were transformed," writes Martin Parr.

"It’s what you could call a more sentimental approach to that human condition stuff that we all face. But as always the interesting issue is how does it work? In this case finding the left over moments from a life just finished and representing them as photographs. This is technically art giving things ‘honorific’ value and it stems from the concept of ‘moments of epiphany’.
A moment of epiphany is a sudden manifestation or an intuitive grasp of reality through something usually simple or everyday."

The Guardian

Notes From My Wife is a case in point. They are jottings and reminders written by his wife, Jo, in the early 90s. Soon after, she was struck down by a brain tumour and Arnatt nursed her until her death in 1996. He decided to collect the most poignant of the notes and photographed 18 of them. Taken out of context and blown up, they become surreal. This was Arnatt's strength as a photographer: he understood how the smallest detail or observation could be transformed by the act of isolation.
All his series of photographs were taken within striking distance of his home near Tintern in Wales (including The Visitors, 1974-6, of tourists at Tintern Abbey) or, like the notes, actually in the house. He found pleasure in everyday objects - notably in exploring his local rubbish tip. He went on to make simple still lives of cardboard boxes, abandoned paint tins and other objects he found there.

The Guardian part 3

ArtBabble: the YouTube of the arts.

From Richard Serra to origami, there's a new place to watch arts films on the web. Ruth Jamieson delves into ArtBabble's fascinating online collection.

Where the BBC's iPlayer made watching TV on your computer as natural as writing an email, ArtBabble.org is set to do the same for viewing arts films. Now, instead of catching up on EastEnders, you can broaden your mind with arts films from a handful of key galleries. The films, all of which can be commented on, shared and interacted with, take you behind the scenes of major art galleries, offer interviews with world-famous artists and transport you to lecture halls all over the globe.

It's quite genius really. Plus it beats rummaging around the Library only to realise someones already taken what would wanted.

But what makes the site exciting isn't just its breadth of content; it's the depth. Throughout the films on ArtBabble, "notes" appear on the right hand of the scene, attached to relevant points in the film. If another artist is referred to, a "note" links to their Wikipedia entry, if a news event crops up, there's a link to the newspaper report. So, in a half-hour talk about the Hello Kitty brand you're offered a link to the online home of Hello Kitty, Japanese tourism information and an introduction to Anime. In a film about the Louvre's restoration of Greek and Roman sculptures, you'll be given an introduction to mosaic, a primer on Greek mythology and suggestions for further viewing. You can even attach your own notes to a relevant frame of the film, rather than in a comments section below.

The Guardian part 2

How artist Jeremy Deller is bringing the Iraq war home to Americans.

'You're not looking at a car - you're looking at 35 dead people'

British artist Jeremy Deller opens a new project at the New Museum that encourages viewers to engage with the reality of war in a manner even more direct than what images can offer.

The centerpiece of the project, titled “It is what it is: Conversations about Iraq,” is the charred wreck of a car that was bombed in Baghdad — tangible, undeniable evidence of the ongoing violence. But while this alarming sight is meant to bring the reality of the war home, the larger goal of Deller’s exhibition is to provide a place for dialogue between visitors and various experts on the war. To that end, he has invited journalists, an army sergeant, academics, translators, and refugees from Iraq to take up residence in the gallery and be available for discussion with the public during the exhibition’s run from February 11 to March 22. After the show closes, Deller, with sponsorship by Creative Time, will board an RV with two of the experts and travel across the United States, towing the car on a platform and stopping at art institutions and community sites to invite non-art-world audiences to engage with the wreckage and spokespeople.

The Guardian

MPs plan to let artists take over empty shops to prevent ghost towns !

(This is a good article and you should give it a read.. It could be the difference between us creatives having a job and being able to continue what we love doing or working in Tesco's!)

Ministers are outline emergency measures today to prevent the recession creating ghost towns across Britain.
Hazel Blears, the communities secretary, and Andy Burnham, the culture secretary, will announce a £3m plan to make thousands of small grants of up to £1,000 to people who find creative reuse for vacant shops.
Planning rules will be relaxed to allow changes of use which go against local guidelines. For example, a disused clothes shop could become an art gallery or an empty Woolworths an NHS drop-in centre.
Temporary lease agreements will enable owners who want to retain a vacant property in the long term to make it available for community or creative use during the recession. Councils will be urged to take control of empty properties until the recession ends.
The measures come amid predictions that more than 70,000 retail outlets will close this year. Plymouth and Scarborough have 30 and 40 empty units in their respective town centres. In Northampton, almost one in six shops in the town centre stand empty, according to the Department for Communities. At the same time, artists' co-operatives and local councils have shown a desire to take over units which have become victims of the economic crisis.
"Empty shops can be eyesores or crime magnets," Blears said. "Our ideas for reviving town centres will give communities the knowhow to temporarily transform vacant premises into something innovative for the community - a social enterprise, a showroom for local artists or an information centre - and stop the high street being boarded up.
"Town centres are the heartbeat of every community and businesses are the foundation so it is vital they remain vibrant places for people to meet and shop throughout the downturn."
The initiative follows pressure from a government adviser on community cohesion, Ted Cantle, who believes the closure of chain stores is an opportunity to loosen the stranglehold of big retail chains on high streets. He called for vacant Woolworths stores to become farmers' markets.
It is also an attempt to accelerate a grassroots "slack space" movement, which has already seen 11 empty premises in a shopping centre in Margate taken over by artists and a pair of empty units in Torquay transformed into an NHS Stop Smoking Service shop and a young person's advice drop-in centre.

Public Art proposals that never made it

I got a link for the Guardian the other week because it had some interesting articles in it.
The new archive of proposed public art projects..
I had a look at the website and it had ‘Henry Moore Foundation to showcase public art proposals that never made it’.

Archives include the alternative Diana, Princess of Wales, memorial sculpture and scores of other detailed proposals.

‘The trust's archive has never been seen by the public, but has now been acquired by the Henry Moore Foundation in Leeds - a charity set up and endowed by Moore, who was one of the most successful 20th century British artists in winning public art commissions. Curators are working through the boxes and cataloguing drawings, paintings, maquettes, photographs and correspondence.’
Stephen Feeke, curator of the Art In Public Places exhibition which the foundation will mount in Leeds next month, giving the public its first glimpse of the contents, said: "I found Julian's one of the most surprising discoveries in the archive, because he's not the sort of artist you would associate with this kind of commission at all."
"The archive covers a crucial period in British art, and maps the shift from monuments which may be quite contemporary in style but are made in very traditional materials like stone and bronze, to ideas which may not impact on their surroundings in any permanent way - such as Anya Gallaccio's proposal for beds of white flowers at King's Cross," he said.


I really enjoyed reading about these projects that were never completed.

• Leonardo da Vinci spent years on drawings and models for a giant bronze equestrian portrait of the Duke of Milan. He promised the duke's son it would be "the greatest statue in Italy", but never completed it.

• In 1931 Sir Edwin Lutyens designed a stupendous Roman Catholic cathedral for Liverpool in Byzantine style, twice the size of Giles Gilbert Scott's Anglican cathedral and dominating the city skyline. Instead Merseyside's Catholics had to wait for "Paddy's Wigwam", the 1967 concrete tent by Sir Frederick Gibberd.

• Albertopolis in London was planned as a memorial to Prince Albert, a parade of gardens and fountains linking the great museums of south Kensington: only the dank Victorian tunnel under Exhibition Road, originally leading all the way to the Albert Hall and once used as a shooting range, survives.

• The columns on Calton Hill in Edinburgh were to be part of a building of Parthenon grandeur, a monument to the Scots who died in the Napoleonic wars: the money ran out, and it remained a picturesque ruin.

• Marc and Isambard Kingdom Brunel's 1843 tunnel under the Thames, the first in the world, was planned as a dual carriageway for horse-drawn commercial traffic: the money ran out, the vital spiral ramps within 250-foot diameter shafts were never built, and it became an underwater street market with an unsavoury reputation, until it was changed to a rail tunnel in 1865.

Bob and Roberta Smith works

'The Forth Plinth'



This illuminated peace sign – powered by the sun and the wind – questions our ideas about history and monuments on the one hand, and art and war on the other. The work, which is a collaboration between renewable energy specialists, structuralengineers and an architect, seeks to rebrand Trafalgar Square as a beacon of our cultural future rather than a memorial to England’s military past. Bob & Roberta Smith believe in ‘the power of art to act as a social force as great and necessary to our lives as the police, the military and the judiciary’; their proposal is meant as a ‘gentle provocation to the overwhelming “Hogarthian” stature of Trafalgar Square as the centre of celebration of Britain’s military achievements over the French’.

I love the way their work is always so eco friendly.. who would of art could be so creative ! haha !
What strikes me the most is how this work could quite easily be moved from place to place... for instance one minute it could be stuck in an art gallery but it could also be put outside (where it should be) because after all it is powered by the sun and wind. I wonder if they had planned to lock it up in a gallery?

The key to Bob & Roberta Smith’s practice is sign painting. These works take the form of absurd, faux-political or revolutionary-in-spirit slogans. They are painted on reclaimed timber, old bits of board, paper or rather more traditional canvas. The sentiments expounded are often hard hitting, sometimes stating the obvious, sometimes highly opinionated, and mostly very funny.

Bob and Roberta Smith/ Bob with Tim Siddall

I've found this blogging business really difficult to get started and now that I’ve started I don't want the ball to stop!
Abit ago I was feeling like I hated everything on this course and wanted to drop out and because Garry is well, just Garry he told me to give this guy a looking over. He said from some of their comments he gets the feeling that they sometimes feel like I do.

I’ve just watched a video about Bob and Tim Siddal in Bob’s studio in East London …
The Tate Britain invited Bob and Roberta Smith to decorate their Christmas Tree. Smith decided to make a new tree out of recycled material collected from the gallery. Continuing the eco-theme, he invited his friend Tim Siddall from Electric Pedals to engineer a system for powering the Christmas lights - using a selection of second-hand bicycles.
Later, they asked enthusiastic bike-peddlers about their best and worst memories of Christmas.

Although the video was rather entertaining I was more drawn to the signs that he had in his studio. They said:

‘Woman are better artists than men’
‘Make your own electricity’
‘Make your own damn art’
‘Make your own food’
‘Make you own xmas’
‘I can’t be arsed’
‘I’m wasting my time’
‘I can’t’
‘Peace needs you’

I can see why I can relate to them because of the feelings they have shown in some of their art.. Sometimes it's just so hard to generate the thoughts in my head out of my body... somtimes there just isn't anything there.

Who ever thinks art is a stroll in the park needs a slap in the face.. I can't even think how many times people have said to me it must be a breeeeze !!