Dreamthinkspeak presents: In the beginning was the end

An installation, performance which involves enormous parts of the museum space, took place in Somerset House. The audiance is guided for a while, then is left in the future. The image in front of our eyes is unusual. There are rooms everywhere, upstairs, downstairs, basement. Everywhere displayed different installations, different people. We can also meet robots which are called petbot. They understand human languages. Some rooms create shocking, claustrophobic experience with well built worlds very similar we sometimes face with in our modern society especially in business fields. The audience becomes part of this society formed by the actors of Dreamthinkspeak. We meet a multinational company with its agressive marketing trying to explain in long stories why people need their services. However when we step inside in their office, we can find frustrated workers sitting in front of their monitors and arguing with their manager. After a while, to resolve the problem a woman gets naked and goes out, leaving her clothes behind. Probably representing that there is life without multinational companies created pressure-surrounded material wellbeing. After it all the other people from the office get naked and walk away in a long corridor between visitors. They go upstairs where the visitors are not allowed to go. However when they look up, they can notice that these all naked, beautiful, young people are around the staircases and smiling back to the viewers. The view is like a renaissance painting. A paradise, heaven, suggesting, that happiness begins with the end of nonsense, robotic work.

The Bigger Splash

This exhibition took part in Tate Modern. The topic is to observe the artist during their creation.
The process of creation became part of the institutional art. The viewer can witness this process by walking around and looking at videos, pictures, installations. But also they can look at each piece as a separate artwork. The museum has the authority to uplift an everyday movement, an everyday object to a level of artwork.

Light Show South bank Centre, Hayward Galleries

A group of artists created installations by playing with light and shadow. Some of them are really surprising. It`s thought provoking to see how the light can create different dimensions, different spaces. Sometimes even the lack of light opens a new space toward infinity. The viewer can experience a real adventure. There are many different, separated spaces for some of the installations. Every step leads to a completely new world. The viewer is involved by participating, enbodying the space. Also they can experience their relation with the installations.

Man Ray

 Duchamp introduced Man Ray to Dada at Cafe Certa, Paris while he was posing as Rrose Selavy.
Tristan Tzara tells about Dada:
"Dada can`t live in New York. All New York is Dada and will not tolerate a rival."
It was a powerful movement which changed the world. Is an energy witch needs more exploration to understand what really is.

Duchamp, Rauschenberg, Cunningham, Cage, Johns: The Bride Stripped Bare in front of Her Bachelors

Print on silk and cardboard
Solvent transfer on silk
Lithograph printed on plexiglass panel

Rauschenberg`s piece: Express - oil and silkscreen on canvas

He created this artwork in respons of Duchamp`s rejected piece: Nude descending a staircase.
The pice presents horses, dancers of Cunningham and other pictures where the movement takes the main importance, the movement can be associated with Duchamp`s Node.

The exhibition is unique, creating a multidisciplinary scenario where there are present painting, print, sculpture, installation, music, dance by real live performers. Rauschenberg created Minutiae, an installation for the group of dancers, performers of Cunningham. He explained, that in between the installations the performers were represented as material.  The exhibition highlights Duchamp`s main goal, to blur the boundaries between art and life. However this exhibition blurs the boundaries between the different art fields, between artist and object, artist and his artwork as well.

An installation is much more powerful then the traditional ways of creating art like painting, sculpture. While the traditional methods` outcome can hold an extraordinary aesthetic value, is also frozen in time.The installation happens in the present moment, even if is a minimalist installation.

Death: A self-portrait (The Richard Harris Collection)

A free exhibition which should not be missed! 300 treasures gives complex and contradictory attitudes toward death. Ideas related to death: Contemplating Death, The Dance of Death, Violent Death, Eros and Thanatos, Commemoration giving different perspectives about Death.

I have got 2 favorites:
Calevera Mondongo collective (Argentina) which is a collage and is so complex and colourful.

The second favorite is a George Grosz collage: "Faces of Death". Final truth about death - its uncanny facelessness. Transposing skulls onto "found" photographic portraits, also poking fun at the conventions of art and advertising.

Seduced by art

One of the most beautiful and enormous photo exhibitions. There are so much to learn.
Setting the scene: Jeff Wall, the destroyed room evokes the destructive frenzy of Delacroix`s painting: The death of Sardanapaulus. Tom Hunter also creates a picture about Coltelli, the central figure of painting.
Marin Parr - Signs of the Times
Thomas Gainsborough Mr. and Mrs Andrews
The figure of human body, human bodies photographed on a way like paintings.
Madonna and child -Tableaux - elevated subject and historical art might raise the status of their "mechanical" medium. e.g. Thomas Struth`s photo about people looking at exhibition at National Gallery. Reconstruction of "mother and child" Alen Chadwick one Flash (Christ child is a female)

William Klein and Daido Moriyama

Klein treated the past as sacred. Revisits odl images through new technologies, digital print techniques. Big walls full of pictures, street-photography from everyday moments happening in different cities. New York, Paris, Moscow, Rome, Tokyo etc. (gelatin silver print) different times 1954-1984-1995 forming a unity, a timeless, placeless big city where people are in continuous movement, action.
Moriyama states:
"My approach is very simple - there is no artistry, I just shoot freely". That`s what I want to do. Moriyama is a key photographer in avant-guarde magazine Provoke.
Series of pictures about one subject: platform, meshed world, photo theatre, the tales of Tono Monogatari, Memory, found objects, urban detrins

"Everyone has desires. Desires are real. Photography is those desires."

Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes

Just taking notes about the main points of this book to keep in eye in the future this so important and interesting topic.
Studium - extent body of information, application to a thing, taste for someone, commitment without special acuity. Political, historical, cultural figures, faces, gestures, actions, the settings.

Punctum - disturbs the studium
"in photography the punctum is an accident which pricks me."
"what the photograph thinks of itself"
(pictorialism)

Camera Lucida (Roland Barthes)

Everything was moving (photography from the 60s and 70s)

A great exhibition in Barbican displayed in 2 levels showing photos from 60s and 70s of many different cultures like South africa, America, USSR, Asia, West Africa. I wish I could visit again.
Just mentioning 2 favorites:
William Egglestone, 1939, American photographer, brilliant innovator who revolutionised photography with the use of colour and his "war on the obvious"... his democracy of vision."
Eggleston`s subjects are ordinary, seemingly straight forward, yet are transformed by a sense of heightened, near hallucinatory perception".

Shomei Tomatsu 1030, considered the godfather of modern Japanese photography. His images having deep relationship with the real world but he expresses his point of view by visual fragments, elliptical metaphors and sometimes abstracted surface.

Shakespeare staging the world

Exhibition in British Museum where we can find out from a visitor (tourist) from 1599 that London is not in England but rather England is in London. Is great to immerse yourself in the world of Shakespeare, to see London differently, also the all world.

A portrait of John Donne is impressing where the poet poses as an archetypal melancholy lover.
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2012/aug/28/shakespeare-britain-world-culture)
This beautiful scene has a surprising effect in our society where everyone wants you to smile and be happy all the time. Loving melancholy gives a different perspective. You might feel you are left alone by society and in this term you need the courage of recognising, showing your melancholy.

Heatherwick Studio, Desing the Extraordinary

An exhibition in V&A where the visitor found works from architecture, furniture, engineering, sculpture and urban planning. "Projects are united by a passion to create intriguing yet funtional three-dimensional forms." (spinning chair, rolling bridge, expandable zip bag, power station, bus).

Even the leaflet given to the visitors has an unusual format which gives a good variety of reading and there are displaid all sort of programs like exhibitions, events, lectures, family events.