Mary and Max: The Exhibition.

Exhibition of artworks and props from this genious animation film, at the Australian Centre for the moving image.

Enter the marvellously miniature world of Mary and Max and view the hand-made characters, props and sets from Adam Elliot’s claymation feature film.

Oscar®-winnning director and writer Adam Elliot in collaboration with ACMI, has developed a unique exhibition from the plasticine world of Mary and Max (2009), the chronicle of an unlikely pen-pal friendship between lonely eight-year-old Mary Daisy Dinkle and Max Kerry Horovitz, who has Asperger Syndrome and loves chocolate hot dogs.

From the manicured lawns of Mount Waverley to the New York city skyline, Mary and Max: The Exhibition is an exclusive behind-the-scenes opportunity to see these wonderful creations up close.

Discover Adam’s ingenious artistry of stop-motion animation. Items on display include character models, costumes, sketches, sets, storyboards, props (meticulously crafted miniature hand-blown wine glasses, a working typewriter, light bulbs) and footage of the animators at work.

A labour of love by Adam Elliot and long-time collaborator Melanie Coombs, Mary and Max premiered as the opening night film of the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. The film has since won several Australian and international awards.

Mary and Max: The Exhibition is co-curated by Adam Elliot and Fiona Trigg

RELATED LINKS

Official french site (more fun than the international ones…. presentation of the characters, videos, photos of the making of)
Interview with Adam Elliot on Mary and Max here [cin-e-tol-og-y blog] and here [design federation] and here [indiewire] and here [the story department]

Review on the film here

A book talking about urban art. Urban art in the broader sense. Finally. Since graffiti paintings became expensive gallery and museum objects (not in this sense….), this, just like many other street art disciplines has decayed (see how bcn changed in 2006… now it’s even greyer [1]) and artists have been adopting to the increased legal persecution…

But urban or street art is much more than graffiti. In this book we are talking about urban interventions. Artists that bring their work to a broad audience, in a democratic way without the hindrance of social/ class or intellectual differences. Away from political institutions and economic dependence. The interventions covered in this book are  showing the growing connections and interplay of this scene with art, architecture, performance, and installation. And it also shows how street art is being used for the commercial side of the world. Nowadays advertising is looking for the most “different” ideas to get to consumers hearts, which they find more and more in street arts. And give an artist a hell load of money to do their work and they’ll do it. Urban intervention describes and critizises the “planning, use, and commercialization of public space”. [2]

INFORMATION
Urban Interventions: Personal Projects in Public Places
Edited by R. Klanten, S. Ehmann, M. Huebner

Published at Gestalten Verlag

EU Release: February 2010
US Release: March 2010

Price: € 44,00 / $ 69,00 / £ 40,00
Features: 256 pages, full color, hardcover
ISBN: 978-3-89955-291-1

FOOTNOTES
1.  To animate all street artists and activists: Banksy is loyal to his idea(l)s and himself: Banksy rocks Sundance festival with Gift Shop Film ↑
2. from official press release↑

aprovechando del utlimo dia de las expos de Drap-Art’09 en el cccb…. [PHOTOGALLERY]

y Ray Johnson. Please Add to & Return [1] en MACBA… [VIDEO HERE]

FOOTNOTES
1.  to advertise his graphic design work, ray johnson started mailing around freaky lithographed postcards and letters. Later he added the request to “add to and return” the little objects of “mailart” (a project in which he would mail unfinished pieces of his art to other famous people, friends, and strangers with the simple instructions to: “Please ADD to and RETURN”. )….

very inspiring expo and artwork. his concept of his “moticos” is pretty funny too: they served to describe the fleeting and fragmented nature of things and ideas. lots of ironic work, many moments of big smiles…. ↑

The one and only time i got a response to a balloon contest, knowing WHERE my balloon flew to: it crossed the inner german border (without a visa!). A boy at the other side of the border found the ballon and contacted me. That’s how i learned about the iron curtain, berlin wall and censorship of western candies….

You can preview the magazine here

ephemera assemblyman.

This major career retrospective on Tim Burton (American, b. 1958), consisting of a gallery exhibition and a film series, considers Burton’s career as a director, producer, writer, and concept artist for live-action and animated films, along with his work as a fiction writer, photographer and illustrator. Following the current of his visual imagination from early childhood drawings through his mature work, the exhibition presents artwork generated during the conception and production of his films, and highlights a number of unrealized projects and never-before-seen pieces, as well as student art, his earliest non-professional films, and examples of his work as a storyteller and graphic artist for non-film projects. The opposing themes of adolescence and adulthood, and the elements of sentiment, cynicism, and humor inform his work in a variety of mediums—drawings, paintings, storyboards, digital and moving-image formats, puppets and maquettes, props, costumes, ephemera, sketchbooks, and cartoons. Taking inspiration from sources in pop culture, Burton has reinvented Hollywood genre filmmaking as a spiritual experience, influencing a generation of young artists working in film, video, and graphics.

Burton’s films include Vincent (1982), Pee-wee’s Big Adventure(1985), Beetlejuice (1988), Batman (1989), Edward Scissorhands(1990), Batman Returns (1992), The Nightmare Before Christmas(as creator and producer) (1993), Ed Wood (1994), Mars Attacks!(1996), Sleepy Hollow (1999), Big Fish (2003), Corpse Bride (2005),Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), and Sweeney Todd(2007); writing and Web projects include The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy & Other Stories (1997) and Stainboy (2000).

Organized by Ron Magliozzi, Assistant Curator, and Jenny He, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Film, with Rajendra Roy, The Celeste Bartos Chief Curator of Film.

Tim Burton

November 22, 2009–April 26, 2010

Theater 1 Gallery
Theater 2 Gallery
Special Exhibitions Gallery, third floor
Museum Lobby

…and much more images at Raven Row, where they had an exposition about the collage master (Ray Johnson. Please Add to & Return. 28 February – 10 May 2009)

Johnson used radical means to construct and distribute images, inadvertently inventing the ‘mail art movement’. He made art out of social life – both real and imagined – gathering celebrities, the art world, and friends into his work. His influence on twentieth century art far exceeds the recognition he receives.

Imagine painting with projections, without the use of any paint, live and with out post-production. Blake Shaw and Bruno Levy of the new SWEATSHOPPE collective have done that with the use of Jitter and a laptop, transforming ordinary paint rollers into tools for apply real projections like light graffiti. They demonstrate the work on the walls of New York City neighborhoods. The gimmick alone is striking, but it’s ultimately the design – as usual – that carries their creation and draws you in (so to speak). With brilliant, acidic-neon colors, and high-contrast, Warhol-style graphic imagery, they bring back some of New York’s renegade spirit. Blake hails from my hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, a city that has some experience in making two-minute loops exciting. Suffice to say, this work is also very much in the spirit of the augmented mural I also found in my inbox this week.
More background on this immensely talented and accomplished crew, plus the elegant method that makes the trick work (the revelation of which, to me, makes it no less interesting).

Description of the top video:

In an effort to establish new platforms for public art and performance, the multimedia duo SWEATSHOPPE has developed a new interactive technology that enables them to explore the relationship between video, mark making and architecture. Dubbed “video painting”, this technology allows them to essentially “paint” video onto anysurface. Shooting in Queens, Brooklyn, and Manhattan, the duo spent weeks documenting their work in urban settings to create “The Landing” the first in a series of episodes that showcases their work as artist, technologist and performers.

via SWEATSHOPPE, The Landing on Vimeo.

the best thing about it is its’ real handmade look. if i show this to my granny, maybe she will finally understand what “chat” means… as the guys from multitouch say : “

We find this project to be very descriptive: It is our best answer to the question ‘What do you do?’. “

view more photoes here…

from the guardian:

Gustav Metzger: the liquid crystal revolutionary | Jonathan Jones | Art and design | The Guardian .

A car has been parked inside the Serpentine Gallery in London, its blue paint mirroring the trees outside. The room is peaceful, with technicians quietly installing works of art by the 83-year-old troublemaker Gustav Metzger; but soon, a curator tells me, they will be taking sledgehammers to the car. Technicians will pound it until it resembles the crushed husk in a news photograph of a street demonstration Metzger once witnessed. He shows me this photograph, two kids standing on the roof of the smashed car. “They were shouting, ‘Kill the car, kill the car!’, until they were exhausted,” he says.

This is, I suppose, a very literal manifestation of auto-destructive art, the movement Metzger founded in Britain at the end of the 1950s. Of course, auto-destructive art doesn’t always mean destroying a car; rather, it means a work of art that contains the seeds of its own destruction, or that is destroyed by its creator. It is also pointedly political: Metzger’s new exhibition Decades, a survey of a life’s work, will seethe with passionate denunciations of nuclear weapons, climate change and capitalism. A poster calling for an end to flights to international art biennales will be one of the uneasier works for the cognoscenti to view; this really is biting the hand that feeds him. It betrays the same mischief that makes Metzger tell me, as people labour in the gallery behind him to recreate his work, that “auto-destructive art doesn’t exist except in the mind”.

Over the last 15 years, this veteran activist has been shown at one biennale after another. An artist who wilfully marginalised himself has been resurrected by a younger generation of curators and artists. Hans-Ulrich Obrist, co-director of the Serpentine – and co-curator of this retrospective – has been one of Metzger’s most consistent champions, but there are many others. Metzger has lived in Britain since 1939, but now Decades will bring him before a mainstream British public. An underground hero will arrive blinking into the daylight of Kensington Gardens.

And what will people see? A steel plate fixed to the wall of the gallery hides a photograph of a Nazi rally. An upturned tree splays its roots, like unkempt hair or crazy fingers. There is a cloth on the floor that you crawl beneath, only to find yourself staring with uncomfortable immediacy at a hugely enlarged picture of Jews being forced to scrub the streets of Vienna in 1938. There is a film of Metzger in gas mask and tweed jacket, hurling acid at a sheet of nylon on London’s South Bank in 1961.

Earlier this year, Metzger’s work was shown alongside artists a quarter of his age in the Tate Triennial; even now, he seems to speak directly to young artists. In 1959, he rejected his own training as a painter and sculptor (under no less a teacher than the futurist painter David Bomberg), choosing instead to demolish art and then remake it as something else: as science, for instance, in works such as his Liquid Crystal light projections, now bubbling at the heart of this show.

In the 1960s, his argument that destruction is a form of last-chance creativity in a terminal world had a subterranean influence – not least on Pete Townshend, who was Metzger’s student at art college and credits him with inspiring the Who to destroy their instruments. Metzger was also an activist in the Committee of 100, the CND breakaway group that believed in direct action. He has been a Marxist “since I was 16, 17″, and still sides with “the opponents of capitalist systems”. He will be exhibiting his own archive of newspapers, witness to a lifetime’s anger at the daily news.

In 1974, Metzger called an Art Strike: for three years, from 1977 to 1980, he refused to make, sell or exhibit art, or to promote himself as an artist in any way. That left him, in the 1980s, a forgotten figure, ripe for rediscovery by fans such as Obrist. When I first interviewed him, in the mid-1990s, he was a small, wizened, harshly articulate figure bearing a carrier bag full of notes and an unwashed jacket. He hasn’t changed.

Today, at the Serpentine, I ask him why he invented auto-destructive art, what he meant by it. “It was a summing up of my entire life until that period,” he says, in the German accent he has never lost. “It was my childhood in Nazi Germany, coming to this country as a refugee, as a survivor. And then when we had peace, the entire planet being transformed by nuclear weapons. That is at the centre of my life.”

The first time I interviewed Metzger, he took me to the Wiener Library in London, a Holocaust research centre, to show me an album of photographs of the Warsaw Ghetto. He was born to Polish-Jewish parents in Nuremberg in 1926. From 1933 onwards, the annual rally of the Nazi Party was held in a specially constructed stadium outside this old town. Before being addressed by Hitler, the massed ranks paraded through the picturesque city; you can see them in Leni Riefenstahl’s film Triumph of the Will.

A child in Nuremberg

Metzger and I spoke earlier in the summer, one soggy weekday in a remote corner of the National Theatre, and I asked him about his childhood then. I was taken aback by his belief that it says everything about him. “I recently had this clear thought,” he said, “that those 12 years totally dominate my life, and will do to the last moment of my life. A central part of my childhood was my experience of Nuremberg. Nuremberg must have been one of the greatest medieval and Renaissance cities in the world, and I would go in again and again.” Every year, from the age of six or seven, he saw the Nazis parading, the uniforms getting smarter, the strides more confident, the martial display more darkly seductive. As he described it, I seemed to see it: there was a quality of total recall to his childhood memory.

We talked more recently about Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. He acknowledges its brilliance as cinema and says that as a film-loving child he saw Riefenstahl’s other masterpiece Olympia, a Nazi hymn to the athletic body, “five or six times” in a Nuremberg cinema. Of watching the parades, he says now: “Certainly the brutality of seeing 10,000 people marching like machines – as a child I must have rejected it.” Did it make him the artist he is? “It could be that I saw so much power that I needed to get rid of it in myself. That’s one way to understand the origins of auto-destructive art. In Judaism there is a tradition of rejecting power: the Prophets rejected power. That was part of my childhood, giving up rather than acquiring.”

In 1939, Metzger and his brother came to Britain under the auspices of the Refugee Children’s Movement; he is one of about 10,000 children saved by the Kindertransport. The rest of his family stayed in Germany. His two sisters eventually got out via Sweden. In 1943 his father was deported to Poland as the systematic extermination of Germany’s Jews went ahead; his mother followed. They died. “Died,” Metzger repeats softly.

You could say that Metzger is the Kindertransport’s greatest failure: instead of building a constructive life for himself in postwar Britain, he invented a destructive life – or a destructive art. His art is a refusal to forget, to assimilate, to move on. His anger at the world is almost that of an alienated child: he tells me that, in a photograph he once showed me – of a child holding his hands up during the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto – he sees himself: “I identify with this child.”

Violent art is Metzger’s response to a violent world. In his exhibition, that same Warsaw photograph will be shown concealed behind a barrier, like the other images in his series Historic Photographs. These are his most enduring and remarkable works: you crawl on your hands and knees across the images as a way of remembering what happened.

“It just occurs to me now,” he says of this work, “that the holiest relics in Judaism are the Torah scrolls, and they are hidden and only shown occasionally.” This, too, is a memory of childhood: he stopped going to synagogue when he left Germany.

Miracles happen. Gustav Metzger is someone who has spent much of his life on the outside – “in the cold”, as he puts it. What an extraordinary thing that, in 2009, his work is the subject of so much renewed attention. But the real miracle is that his art lives up to the claims made for it: it is at once playful and aggressive, plainly sincere, and powerfully, brutally direct.

Naif magazine has launched a new project to fight against Malaria. They invited 12 artists to customize a doll. In the run of the year 2010, the collection will be exposed in various cities in Spain, amongst them Barcelona, Valencia and Madrid. After the tour the dolls will be sold by auction. The money will go to a village in Mali, to support the habitants in their struggle against malaria.

Last week there was a little preview of the artworks, as seen here…

Karla is one of the invited artists! Here you can see the dolls….

video installation by El Palomar; Alfred Mauve/Karla Kracht

Set in an elevator, this installation that reflects on the issues of nomadism and unusual living spaces.

Installation view at “La Caldera”, 13.06.2009. It was part of “nodes de gracia“, a festival of contemporary creation in Barcelona.

RECORD > AGAIN! – 40yearsvideoart.de – Part 2 concentrates on early German video art and shows numerous discoveries, which, for the most part, have no longer been available for viewing for decades. Included are major reconstructions, such as the installation »Schafe« by Wolf Kahlen from 1975, shown on six black and white televisions; a rare work by Ulrike Rosenbach with her partner at the time, Klaus vom Bruch, the boxing match from 1972 that Joseph Beuys participated in at the documenta 5, and the first video synthesizer collages by Walter Schröder-Limmer. Many of these videos had to first undergo elaborate restoration in the ZKM laboratory for antiquated video systems in order that they could be played at all. Another special feature is that the material will be presented on contemporary screens.

Exhibitions:
ZKM Karlsruhe: July 17th, 2009 – September 6th, 2009
Ludwig Forum Aachen: September 18th, 2009 – November 15th, 2009
Kunsthaus Dresden: November 28th, 2009 – February 14th, 2010
Edith-Ruß-Haus für Medienkunst Oldenburg: February 26th, 2010 – April 5th, 2010

related: 40yearsvideoart.de – Part 1