London

Finally - the last part of the journey was a 2 week stay in London.
All the major galleries were about to install significant works highlighting major artists for the Frieze Art Fair - so I missed a Baldessari retrospective at the Tate Modern, a Kiefer show at the both White Cube's Mason's Yard and Hoxton St venues, and several others by about a week. Mason's Yard did have a great show of Zhang Huan, complet with 2 pigs installed in the gallery. There was however Anish Kapoor at the Royal Academy and good shows at The Haunch of Venison and an American abstract painting exhibition at Saatchi Gallery. Serpentine Gallery had major collection of works from German-born artist Gustav Metzger http://www.serpentinegallery.org/2008/06/gustav_metzger29_september_8_n.html parts of which were not unlike the current show at Detached by Brooke Andrew. I was the first viewer after the opening the night before to cut up an old newspaper and pin it on the wall under specific headings.

Then it was off to Birminham to meet with Heather and Ivan Morsion http://www.morison.info/ who will be coming to Tasmania early next year to undertake a project with CAST. While there Ivan introduced me to Gavin Wade, from Eastside Projects http://www.eastsideprojects.org/index.php?/more-about-eastside-projects/ which is an artist-run space given generous assistance by the local council to invigorate the local industrial community. Wade, who is a curator and artist, is doing some interesting work within an old warehouse space, where each of the exhibitions intertwines with the next.

Heather and Ivan Morsion.
Conversion of a former work I Love Pleasure Island, their work for the 2007 Venice Biennale, which is now converted into Eastside's office and meeting room.

Following on from I Love Pleasure Island, Heather & Ivan Morison present I Hate Her, I Hate Her, a dark dystopic sci-fi puppet show with a nod to Punch & Judy (below). The puppet show continues the story telling in relation to Pleasure Island, Eastside Projects unique crystalline red wood office (above), working with hand made clay, bone and fabric hand puppets performed by professional puppeteers.

Heather and Ivan Morison

Gustav Metzger

The exhibition draws together the themes and methodologies that have informed the London-based artist’s practice from 1959 until the present day. The broad cross-section of works on view include Metzger’s auto-destructive and auto-creative works of the 1960s, such as his pioneering liquid crystal projections; the ongoing Historic Photographs series, which responds to major events and catastrophes; and later works exploring ecological issues, globalisation and commercialisation. Film footage of seminal performances and actions are exhibited, as well as a new, participative installation using the archive of newspapers Metzger has been collecting since 1995

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Crisp London Los Angeles is a tiny gallery - much like an ARI, that has three floors connected only by a tall spiral staircase

They were showing Charlotte Becket, a USA -based artist. The work looks like Colin Langridge's work, except it is made of black plastic and Gaffa tape. A small motor inside makes it seem like it's breathing. She had several wall-mounted works which were better - they moved very slowly breathing in and out, with the plastic making an odd cracking sound.
http://www.crisplondonlosangeles.com/2009/charlotte-becket-2/

This exhibition by Jill Magid was worth the visit to Tate Modern http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/jillmagid/
even though most of the building was in 'install' mode

Authority to Remove marks the final chapter of American artist Jill Magid's long involvement with the Dutch secret service, the AIVD. In 2005, she was commissioned by the AIVD (De Algemene Inlichtingen en Veiligheidsdienst) to create an artwork for their new headquarters. ...The brief from the AIVD was 'find the human face of the organisation'. Instructed to work only with agents who had volunteered to participate, the artist set about recruiting her subjects with an alluring infomercial broadcast on the agency's intranet. Arranging meetings via a third party fixer, Magid met with her subjects in impersonal locations – restaurants, bars, airport meeting points – and began gathering information from a selection of agents. As part of the commission, she proposed to write a report based on these encounters, to be made publicly available, combining personal details of the individual agents she met into a collective persona of the AIVD. Forbidden from using recording equipment during her encounters, she kept handwritten notes from which she created a series of artworks including neons, sculptures, prints and drawings. By collecting the agents' personal information and their accounts of the mechanisms of the agency, Magid hoped to discover the 'face of power' at the centre of what she began to refer to as 'The Organization

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A week to go and it's over

This will probably be the last Blog as I'm off to London in 2 days time - Simone has such a comprehensive amount of information about all the art events in Venice that I think I'll just divert you to her Blog http://www.simoneinvenice.blogspot.com/
I've been to almost all the ones she mentions and have similar feelings - generally speaking, the events outside the Biennale were by far the most interesting.
See you all when I get home on October 8th
Ciao

Aqua Alta (Flooding) at Piazza San Marco

Graffiti

Chillies at the fruit and vege market

Fish market on Mondays

Mona Hatoum and Robert Rauschenberg in Venice

Some of the more interesting exhibitions can be seen outside the Venice Biennale

Interior Landscape by Mona Hatoum, at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia, is without doubt one of the better ones.

Curated by Chiara Bertola, the shows features almost 30 works, presented in the contemporary exhibition spaces of the third floor, as well as in the second floor of the historic building, formerly the home of the Querini Stampalia family, where Mona Hatoum has created several interventions in a subtle dialogue with the museum's collection.

Human hair, leather bust, wood
27 x 21 x 16 cm

The Peggy Guggenheim Museum is also currently showing a series of works by Robert Rauschenberg in an exhibition called Gluts. A little cheaper than an airfare to Venice can be had by going on a virtual tour of the museum.

http://www.guggenheim-venice.it/exhibitions/virtual_tour/rauschenberg_4/rauschenberg.html
The exhibition is a select group of forty sculptural works begun in 1986 and continued intermittently until 1995. Rauschenberg’s artistic attention in the 1980s turned toward an exploration of the visual properties of metal. He assembled found metal objects such as gas-station signs, deteriorated automotive and industrial parts littering the landscape, and transformed the scrap-metal detritus into wall reliefs and freestanding sculptures.

What is a glut? The series Gluts was inspired by a visit to Houston in the mid 1980s, when the Texas economy was in the throes of a recession due to a glut (or surplus of supply) in the oil market that Rauschenberg took note of. Asked to comment on the meaning of the Gluts, Rauschenberg offered: “It’s a time of glut. Greed is rampant. I’m just exposing it, trying to wake people up. I simply want to present people with their ruins. I think of the Gluts as souvenirs without nostalgia. What they are really meant to do is give people an experience of looking at everything in terms of what its many possibilities might be."

yet more...

This one is for Lucia

I'm now photographing door handles - perhaps it's time to come home?

Cute window... actually all the windows are cute

A bit of something stuck on a crumbling wall

Our local fruit boat

The four of us just before Stella (left) returned to Australia

Simone trying to hang our washing on out line 20 feet above ground - below is what it is meant to look like when you hang it out. Ours got tangled in a gust of wind and fell into the street - luckily we don't have a canal below

Yoko Ono - a nice exhibition - if not a tad sentimental

Tobias Rehberger's café - most people just end up falling over in this space

John Baldessari

Sherrie Levine

Glass Stress

These are all glass - the exhibition was called Glass Stress.

More general information

This is a garage

This is what keeps the water out from people's homes

This gorgeous art supply shop has everything for the budding artist including these beautiful pigments, sold loose , and for the studio cat - a well stocked array of tinned cat food and toothpaste. Quite random items that seem to relate only to those with a sense of humour.

The Robinsons have arrived

Look who I found wandering around Venice