“Who is Community? is a new commission by artist Bob and Roberta Smith and film director Tim Newton. The project will bring together a number of different elements, including reproductions of paintings made by Bob and Roberta Smith for Stratford Underground station and a film that tells the story of an extraordinary fictional meeting between Pierre de Coubertin, father of the modern Olympics, and the German theorist Hannah Arendt. Considering the context of Stratford as the main site of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, Who is Community? will explore themes of public space, social interaction and well-being, as well as the democratic values that Coubertin hoped to advance through sport, and the revival of the ancient Olympic games.

Who is Community? is the latest in a series of collaborations by Bob and Roberta Smith and Tim Newton. Both live along the Central line in Leytonstone, a community that was the subject of their collaborative film of 2011. Newton’s most recent short film Trimming Pablo (2011) is a fictionalised account of Picasso’s visit to the 1950 Sheffield Peace Congress, and features a cameo from Bob and Roberta Smith. Bob and Roberta Smith has worked in a variety of media including painting, performance, sculpture, film and installation. He is known for employing DIY methods – including painting on pieces of scrap wood – and a number of influences from punk to folk in order to personalise political sloganeering. Using humour as a tactic, his work often challenges respected authorities. In a number of earlier works, he made paintings that depicted fictional meetings between real-life characters, across time. Set in modern-day Stratford, the film Who is Community?, will employ a similar technique, imagining a romantic tryst between Pierre de Coubertin and Hannah Arendt.

Born into a family of secular German Jews in 1906, Hannah Arendt was a political theorist. She studied philosophy under Martin Heidegger and later befriended the philosopher Walter Benjamin, in Paris. After the Nazi occupation of France, Arendt fled Paris, and in 1941 settled in the United States. She is well known for her ideas on freedom as something that is constructed in the community, when its members bring their uniqueness to a shared space.

Pierre de Coubertin was a French aristocrat and founder of the International Olympic committee. Born in 1863, it is highly unlikely that he ever met Arendt. However, in imagining a meeting between the two thinkers, Bob and Roberta Smith and Tim Newton invite the idea that there may have been a synergy between their beliefs. Coubertin was interested in the educative potential of sport to create ‘moral and social strength’ and its ability to cut across class lines. In founding an international festival of sport, at a moment when the world was coming out of a series of international conflicts, including the Franco-Prussian War, he established a legacy that remains today: the maintenance of peace through athletic competition.

In the film Who is Community? Arendt and Coubertin meet at Loughton station on the Central line, and fall in love. The story is narrated from the perspective of the community of Stratford, and the courtship unfolds across a number of locations in the district, from the newly landscaped Fat Walk area of the Lea Valley to the café outside Leytonstone Underground station. Drawing upon the cinematic style of silent comedies, the film makes particular reference to the period of the early 1900s, for example in its focus on the art-deco architecture of Loughton Underground station platform, and in the turn-of-the-century costumes of the Olympic athletes – who live in Coubertin’s moustache! The film will be shown (from October 2012) on a specially designed structure in Stratford station, modelled after an original ticket kiosk that was installed at Hainault station in 1948 (pictured below). Known as passimeters, these kiosks were introduced to the Underground in the early 1920s.

Alongside the film, Who is Community? will include a number of large artworks on display in Stratford Underground station. Originally painted by Bob and Roberta Smith, they will include characters from the film and explore ideas brought to light in the project. Painted cut-out figures of Arendt and Coubertin will also appear at various venues around Stratford.”

Find out more about Art on the Underground’s Central line series

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The lovely PBS series Off Book sets its sights on artists that have chosen LEGO bricks as their medium, and the spectacular plastic works they create.

LEGO blocks are one of the most beloved toys in the world, playing a role in many a person’s childhood. But for some creators, LEGO has evolved from toy to art form. In this episode, we talk to three LEGO artists who have made beautiful mosaics, amazing stop-motion videos, thoughtful sculptures, and have turned these tiny building blocks into a true artistic medium.

LEGO bricks have been used by artists and designers to create some rather spectacular works, from abstract to architectural, and what used to be considered mere child’s play is now the preferred medium for square artists across the globe.

Image above (more here) from Andrew Lipson’s LEGO Page where you can find more Lego Escher models. Also, find out what happens When LEGO meets Fine Art and visit the wonderful Little Artists, Cake & Neave’s sculptures and photographs restaging icons of contemporary art in Lego.

- Weburbanist – Fantastic Plastic: 20 Essential Works of LEGO Art

More at Brickartist.com – The Art of the Brick.

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“TRASH” is a 2011 documentary film by independent filmmaker Michael J. Sirois about the artist Sampson Wilcox. The film’s style attempts to contrast two separate aspects of the artist, with two separate environments, aesthetic styles and contents. One aspect is that of the artist’s psyche and mental environement, whereas the other is that of his physical workspace environment. The film utilizes a technique of a somewhat psychoanalytic experimental documentation of the artist.

Sampson Wilcox was born in Portland, Maine, U.S.A. in 1987. He is an artist influenced by the discipline of Psychogeography. His art relies heavily on the act of walking to gather information and material.

More info about the artist Sampson Wilcox.

More info about the music by Jenova 7 here.

Situationist International: “THE GREAT FANZINI” by Sampson Wilcox & Michael J. Sirois

Situationist International performance in Worcester, MA. Situationism, a performance style, performed by artist Sampson Wilcox and captured by filmmaker Michael J. Sirois.

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Being big fans of the show, we’re happy to hear that art detective and leading art dealer Philip Mould continues his hunt for lost art treasures at the BBC.

Is there a chance you have an unknown Rembrandt or a forged Leonardo? The race is now on to discover unattributed treasures or counterfeits currently languishing in the dimly lit corridors of Britain. After securing high viewing figures for a programme of fine art in the first series, ‘Fake or Fortune?’ has been re-commissioned by BBC1 to set this crack art sleuthing duo on the trail of material to provide the perfect ‘Whodunnit’ art crime scene for next year.

Last year the BBC1 programme instigated the discovery of a painting by Winslow Homer, found near a rubbish tip, and later estimated at a quarter of a million dollars. The programme also investigated 17th century Dutch painting from the Courtauld collection that turned out to be a fake, a lost Monet, and a putative Rembrandt seized by the Nazis.

Filming in 2012 starts in January and runs through till March so time is definitely of the essence. Inclusion in the programme provides a unique opportunity to subject a work to the intense academic knowledge and scrutiny of Philip Mould, the gallery’s in-house art historian Dr Bendor Grosvenor as well as a team of outsourced forensic experts.

This is an unmissable opportunity for anybody probing into the provenance of a picture; an investigation of this quality would normally cost thousands of pounds to run. Philip Mould and Fiona Bruce are on the lookout NOW – the time is ripe to wipe away those cobwebs and reveal the lurking promise of a masterpiece in your attic. If you have a painting that you think Philip and Fiona should look at, please email philip @ philipmould.com.

Philip Mould Ltd is a leading specialist dealer in British art and Old Master Paintings – and the world’s leading authority on British Portraiture. Based in Dover Street in the heart of London’s fashionable art market, the gallery offers a large selection of fine paintings for sale, from Tudor and Jacobean panel pictures to 18th century landscapes, as well as works by Old Masters such as Titian and Van Dyck, and antique portrait miniatures. Exhibitions are regularly held in the gallery, which feature loans from national and international institutions as well as works owned by Philip Mould Ltd.

“Fake of Fortune” - Homepage for the show.

You can also follow Philip Mould on Twitter.

“Meisterwerk oder Fälschung”, the german version of “Fake of Fortune” is up on Youtube by the way. The original version is here.

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From the moment David Hockney began to suspect that the Old Masters had created many of their paintings with the help of lenses—in effect tracing their subjects— he insisted he was not saying they cheated.

“Optical devices certainly don’t paint pictures,” Hockney said. “Let me say now that the use of them diminishes no great artist.”

Yet as he studied prints of five centuries’ worth of paintings on a “Great Wall” in his Los Angeles studio, there was an unmistakable gotcha to his mission. He knew that many art historians would be horrified at what he was suggesting.

Did Vermeer use a lens to help him capture the intricate patterns in the folds of a tablecloth? Or Caravaggio, to re-create a curving, foreshortened lute? Even Rembrandt fell under Hockney’s gaze. He could not have been looking through a lens while creating his haunting self-portraits. “But,” Hockney said, “he might have for the helmets and armor.”
Read on at Koop Films.

David Hockney’s Secret Knowledge

Part 2 – There is another version here.

David Hockney, The Lost Secrets of the Old Masters: camera lucida obscura

This is a very interesting interview with David Hockney, where he explains and demonstrates the use of camera obscuras and camera lucidas in the artwork of the Old Masters chronicled in his book Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters.
Part 2 – Part 3

David Hockney – Pleasures of the eye

The other parts are here.

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Brooklyn based artist Mark Lombardi created graphic artwork portraying the opaque global network of financial and political elites, including their ties to international terrorism. His masterpiece – “BCCI” – was investigated by the FBI after the attacks of September 11th, 2001. By that time, however, the artist was dead from an apparent suicide one year earlier, just as his career was reaching new heights. The upcoming documentary by Mareike Wegener “Mark Lombardi: Death-Defying Acts of Art and Conspiracy” investigates an artist whose works transformed contemporary power structures into visual art and whose death left many questions regarding this system’s intentions and breadth.

- Review at Artnews.com

About the director:
Mareike Wegener was born in 1983 in Borken, Germany, and studied film at the Cologne Academy of Media Arts. In 2008, she gained a diploma with distinction for her full-length documentary film Al Hansen — The Matchstick Traveller. During her studies, she won a scholarship in 2007 to New School, New York. There she studied documentary media studies, under Oscar award-winner Cynthia Wade, among others. Since 2008, Wegener has worked as a freelance author, director and film editor. Her project Mark Lombardi — Kunst und Konspiration was awarded the Gerd-Ruge scholarship in 2009. Since 2011, Mareike Wegener has also been studying philosophy at the European Graduate School in Switzerland.

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This documentary by Chris Hunt from 1991 is a very interesting and informative survey of Lichtenstein’s work, structured around interviews of various art critics along with continuous commentary by Lichtenstein himself. Lichtenstein analyzes several of his most famous pieces and explains his artistic processes and development in detail. There is also fascinating footage of Lichtenstein working in his studio.

Info:
In 1963 Roy Lichtenstein defended Pop art against its critics, contending that “there are certain things that are usable, forceful, and vital about commercial art.” By choosing comic-book illustrations as a theme, and using simulated Benday dots to suggest cheap printing, Lichtenstein acknowledged (and perhaps questioned) the role of this popular form of entertainment in daily life. There is also an element of humor in creating fine art out of what has customarily been considered “low,” a playfulness that is equally evident in the onomatopoeic caption and bellicose expression of the dog in Grrrrrrrrrrr!! (1965)

Lichtenstein cultivated imagery from the history of art while continuing to use the conventions of comics and advertisements. In Preparedness (1968) he used the Benday-dot technique to make a wall-size painting (10 feet high by 18 feet wide) that suggests the work of Fernand Léger and the WPA artists of the 1930s, who painted monumental murals, readable at a distance, on themes of workers and everyday life. Lichtenstein followed this practice to an ironic and somewhat subversive end. Painted during a year when public opinion on the Vietnam War shifted dramatically, Lichtenstein’s massive depiction of machinery and soldiers probes the conventions of selling the promises of the military-industrial complex, while quietly alluding to the naive optimism underlying a call to arms.

Lichtenstein often focused on the way his traditional and mass-media sources resolve the dilemmas of representing three dimensions on a flat picture plane, incorporating their solutions into his own work with witty exaggeration. Preparedness plays the fragmented Cubist collage space of Léger against comic-strip modes of suggesting form and the surface quality of objects. Lichtenstein’s inclusion of an airplane window in the third panel of the painting foreshadows his engagement with modes of conveying the illusion of reflective glass, which he went on to explore in a series of paintings of mirrors. Interior with Mirrored Wall (1991) is a later development of this exploration. In a series of works depicting banal domestic environments inspired by furniture ads he found in telephone books, Lichtenstein continued his previous investigations of illusionistic representational devices, here by including the eponymous mirrored wall and the gleaming, polished grand piano. His references to high-art sources included his own work, which is shown framed on the wall. The floor covering also implicitly acknowledges Henri Matisse’s use of decorative patterns.

- Text by Jennifer Blessing

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The Central Asian artist Lekim Ibragimov recently completed a mega-painting debuting in July that brings the ambition of the famous collection of folk tales, “One Thousand and One Nights,” to canvas. Consisting of 1000 individual paintings of angels spanning 216 feet, the large-scale work has recently been submitted to the Guinness World Records Committee as “the world’s largest painting consisting of 1,000 pieces.” Proceeds from the project will be donated to children with disabilities.

Ibragimov was born in Kazakhstan and is currently based out of neighboring Uzbekistan. As an accomplished painter and member of the Russian Academy of Arts, Ibragimov has always been fascinated by Asian literature and the compelling history of the silk road. In 2010, he began work on what he calls his “visual epos,” creating a nearly 50-foot sketch of what would eventually come to be his 1,001 art project. After 2 1/2 years, he was able to finally put the finishing touches on this 48,500 pound artwork.

Ibragimov’s paintings will be touring the world this year and will be exhibited in a number of UNESCO World Heritage sites. You can check out the potentially record-breaking piece in Prague from July 9th through the 21st.

One thousand angels and one painting (1001 Art project)

Working on 1001 art project

More at the 1,001 art project.

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Project Homophobia is a short film about gay bullying and self-acceptance by Austrian filmmaker Gregor Schmidinger. An adolescent boy, who serves the Austrian Military Forces, experiences homosexual feelings towards one of his comrades. It’s their last night at the Austrian-Hungarian border, socially isolated and armed with loaded weapons.

Homophobia means being afraid of homosexuality. But what if you would be afraid of your own homosexual feelings? What if you could not handle them? The short film Homophobia explores these questions. We invite all of you to follow the project through its production stages, participating along the way.

::: CAST :::

Michael Glantschnig
Josef Mohamed
Günther Sturmlechner
Harald Bodingbauer

::: CREW :::

PRODUCERS
Gregor Schmidinger
Julian Wiehl

EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS
Alois Ecker
Heldentaten Werbeagentur
provo Marketing

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY
Nino Leitner, AAC

WRITTEN, DIRECTED AND EDITED BY
Gregor Schmidinger

ASSISTANT DIRECTOR
Katharina Dietl

UNIT PRODUCTION MANAGER
Arne Nostitz-Rieneck

LINE PRODUCER
Andreas Kepplinger

PRODUCTION ASSISTANTS
Sonja Chan
Sebastian Kitzmüller

1ST ASSISTANT CAMERA
Alois Kozar Jr.

GAFFER
Alex Püringer

ELECTRICIANS
Markus Harthum
Alex Haspel
Maria Otter
Michael Prandstaetter

SOUND MIXER AND SOUND DESIGNER
Jakob Wolf

BOOM OPERATOR
HHerbert Verdino

ART DIRECTOR
Christoph Ablinger

MAKE-UP ARTIST
Uschi Braun

COLORIST
Matthias Tomasi

PRESS AND SOCIAL MEDIA
Manuel Dünfründt
Mike Buonaiuto

ACCOUNTANT
Jürgen Fellhofer

GRAPHIC DESIGNER
Lukas Fliszar

STILL PHOTOGRAPHERS
Gerhard Gruber
Andreas Kepplinger

ARTISTIC ADVISORS
Marianne Jungmaier
David Winterberg

TRANSLATOR
Steve Wilder

CATERER
Hedwig Gußner
Isabel Bräuer
Anita Reisinger

projecthomophobia.com

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Beautiful mix of animation by Kangmin Kim. While animation is usually a time-consuming craft, some people push it further than others. The mixed-media project (stop motion, cut out and paint on glass) was made in the CalArts experimental animation program, and while the storytelling leaves something to be desired, the careful attention to visual detail is entrancing.
More on the homepage over here. Interview at Hyphen Magazine.

VISIT

Senior project. A stop motion animation combined with cut out and paint on glass. Watch the making of the set

38-39˚c

38-39˚c gives us the blueprint of a relationship between a father and son inside the dream the protagonist experiences while under the spell of the elevated temperatures of a bathhouse. Thick sheets of paper in exquisite arrangement represent the two men who are linked by their identical birthmarks, yet cannot seem to look at each other. —- Maureen Selwood

Click here to view the making of.

The Trace of Emotion

Director: Kangmin Kim
Music: Minkyu Kim
Year: 2008
clay animation

More on Vimeo.

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