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Archive for the ‘Work Of Art’ Category

MOORESTOWN — Take a soft block of pinewood. Put some wheels on
it that you grease with graphite and what do you have?

The beginnings of a beloved work of art and engineering: a
Pinewood Derby race car.

For generations, young boys in Cub Scouts — with help from their
dads, moms and other relatives — have made and raced these handmade
cars during the quiet winter months. This year, 1,400 Burlington
County boys are now participating in the Pinewood Derby at various
pack meetings throughout the county.

Saturday, the cafeteria at Our Lady of Good Counsel School here
was turned into a mini raceway, as the 30 boys of Cub Pack 61 and
their families cheered on each other in the annual event.

For some Scouts, it was a first-time experience. Others have
Pinewood racing in their blood.

“I was in it, both my sons and now my grandson,” said Ken
Kortman, 70, of Southampton, as he watched his son, David, a den
leader from Moorestown, and grandson, Ethan, 9, join in the
derby.

Greg Sisolak of Mount Laurel said his son, Luke, 7, is the
fourth generation in his family to have been involved in Scouting.
He remembers his own father giving him tips on how to apply
graphite on the axle to make the tiny race car’s wheels turn father
– “to reduce friction.”

“It’s a blast,” he said. “It’s great that we get to spend time
together building something.”

A native of Poland, Robert Les Sr. of Mount Laurel, his wife,
Urszula, and toddler daughter, Amelia, watched as Robert Jr., 7,
participated in the race.

“It’s the first time for both of us,” Les Sr. said, noting he
enjoyed working on the project with his son, showing him how to use
a saw and sand their racecar.

Young Robert looked online at the Guinness Book of World Records
to see the world’s fastest race car and took his design from that,
his mother said

“He’s very excited,” she added. “It teaches them a lot — healthy
competition, fruit of their labor. It’s a very nice bonding
experience for the son and the father.”

Over the years, the Pinewood Derby has evolved. Pack 61 uses a
six-lane raceway especially built for its derbies. An electronic
device at the end of the race track records how the cars come in
and their time.

In Saturday’s race, each car got to run six times, once in each
lane, to make sure that one lane wasn’t faster than another. Their
speeds were averaged and the top six finishers raced in the final
competition, once again performing in six heats, explained Cub
Master Jim Demartini of Moorestown. The top finishers received
trophies. The runners up got medals.

In another competition, judged by “anonymous parents,” said
Matthew Bove of Moorestown, assistant cub master and a den leader,
the numbered cars are given merits for their looks, with the winner
receiving a “Best in Show” trophy.

Bove’s son, Aidan, 8, said his car was designed so “my trunk on
the car can open and close.”

Nathan Philbin, 10, made his vehicle look like it was out of the
“Dragon Ball Z,” TV cartoon, but what he liked best about the race
was “how fast they go.” His mother, Margaret Philbin of Moorestown,
said he worked on the car with help from her and his
grandmother.

Demartini said organizing the Pinewood Derby and serving as cub
master is a lot of work, but fun.

“I enjoy allowing the boys to be boys,” he said. “The Scouts
provide that environment.”

The Pinewood Derby tradition in America has grown so that now
Lowe’s even offers courses at its stores on specific Saturdays in
January and February for neophytes to the derby — explaining the
regulations for weight and the dynamics of building a good vehicle,
even if it doesn’t win the race.

In the process, both child and adult learn a little bit about
engineering and how to work with hand tools.

“Every year you do it, you learn a little more,” said Todd Juro
of Moorestown who helped his twin sons, Nathaniel and Morrison
Juro, 8, design their cars, which both placed in the winning
competition.

“It’s a rite of passage for the dads. We get together and talk
about what we could do better this year. We get to play armchair
engineer for a couple of weeks,” said the web developer.

When the race was over, Mike Huettl of Moorestown was the winner
and Nick Rant of Evesham won Best of Show. Both are
first-graders.

Demartini said there was only one-half of a second difference
between the times of the top six cars.

“It was a phenomenal race. The best one yet,” Demartini
said.

In some Boy Scout organizations, the different packs compete
against each other, but the Burlington County Council of the Boy
Scouts of America did away with that competition, said Dan Templar,
scout executive of the council, headquartered in Westampton.

“It just put too much emphasis on who built the fastest car,”
Templar said. But, he added, some troops now have a parents’
competition for fathers who are really into the dynamics of the
race.

One of the most amazing cars Templar remembers seeing was one
designed by a boy and his single mother who used a variety of nail
polishes to paint the block of wood, without even using a saw to
cut it. “It was really wild.”

The car placed among the race winners.

It was a priceless moment, Templar said, for the child and his
mom

“That mother felt like the queen of the world. She beat all
these guys — created a memory that will last forever.”

“The real winners, Templar said, are “all those kids who had a
great experience with a loved one.”

A couple of weeks ago, based on the fact that The Artist, as it began to open across the country, didnt exactly seem to be setting the box office aflame (I dont mean when compared to Thor I mean on the traditional indie-crossover circuit), I made an Academy Awards prediction. It had much in common with a lot of the Academy Awards predictions that people have been making recently, in that it was fearlessly wrong. I said that I thought The Artist had peaked, and that The Help would win Best Picture. That could still happen, of course, but at this point I wouldnt bet the farm on it, or even a nice steak dinner. Despite its less-than-Richter-scale-rattling performance thus far, The Artist, as it racks up wins (the Golden Globes, the Producers Guild, the Directors Guild), is looking more and more like a classic Oscar juggernaut, a runaway awards train fueled by the metaphysics of the entertainment-media echo chamber, in which the relentless chatter about the inevitability of one movie winning becomes a big part of the reason that it inevitably wins. (Its Access Hollywood meets the doctrine of predestination. Or maybe just the doctrine of Harvey.)

I bring up my mistake not so much to come clean (the great thing about Academy Awards predictions is that so many people get so many of them wrong that you dont have to), but because I think the reason I was wrong illustrates a quiet sea change that has taken place in the Oscars: The audience remember them? is no longer a very big part of the equation. I had assumed, mistakenly, that because The Help was an astonishingly big hit, and because its success sprung from the way that it clearly touched a racial-cultural nerve in people, that the movies organic popularity as opposed to the heavily marketed freeze-dried quasi-popularity of The Artist would be decisive at the Academy Awards. But all I was demonstrating was a mode of analysis about how the Oscars work that is now, more or less, completely outmoded.

The change has only really occurred within the last couple of years. As a kid, I loved the Oscars, but I always remember the first time I watched them as a film buff. It was 1977, my freshman year in college, and the year that Rocky won. You could say that Rocky was an inspired choice, but when you look at the movies it was up against All the Presidents Men, Taxi Driver, Network, and Bound for Glory the triumph of Rocky looks a lot more like what it was: Hollywood honoring the movie that year that had struck the greatest populist chord. Of the five nominees, it was hardly the most indelible work of art, and no one pretended that it was. It didnt have to be. It was a classic crowd-pleaser, and the reason it won is that, make no mistake, that was the business that Hollywood was in, and always had been in. Pleasing crowds.

For decades, ever since the dawn of the New Hollywood (and probably before), to be a movie freak and to watch the Academy Awards was to partake in a unique ritual of fused celebration and cynicism. The glamour and star power were the real thing, and a lot of the movies and performances that won were timeless. Yet the cynicism came from ones awareness that the voters, no matter what their personal taste, always had one eye on the mass audience. At the Academy Awards, box-office success legitimized a movie, gave it cachet, and, in so doing, altered its meaning. And there was an unabashed hint of pop corruption in that. It was the tasteful middlebrow version of the blockbuster mentality. Yes, a movie that was a work of art could win the Oscar for Best Picture, and often did provided, of course, that it was a major hit (On the Waterfront, Lawrence of Arabia, Midnight Cowboy, The Godfather, Annie Hall, The Silence of the Lambs, Schindlers List). But just as often, the movie that won wasnt a work of art, yet it was a work of entertainment that meant a lot to a lot of people (Marty, The Sound of Music, In the Heat of the Night, The Sting, Braveheart, Dances With Wolves, Chicago).

For a long time, it was all too easy to be a snob about the Oscars. Now, though, you could almost say that the snobs have taken over the Academy asylum. The Oscars now covet something much more than popularity: They covet cred. It all shifted two years ago, when The Hurt Locker won Best Picture. The movie had grossed around $15 million, and no Best Picture winner in history had been seen in theaters by that tiny or select an audience. That simply wasnt the way that the Oscars worked. But now, suddenly, The Hurt Lockers triumph among critics groups and its big win at the Academy Awards became part of a continuous, aesthetically dictated sweep. In the old days, or even just a few years before, Avatar the main movie that The Hurt Locker was up against would likely have taken the award for Best Picture. Now, though, it wasnt just critics, or small or elite groups of viewers, who had become art-conscious at the expense of even thinking about popularity. The entire Academy, reversing course on 80 years, had tossed out popularity as a priority.

You could argue that it was a fluke. The following year, the Oscars got swept by The Kings Speech, which was a classic art-house crossover movie. Suddenly, it seemed, popularity was relevant again. I began to think that the year of The Hurt Locker was merely an anomaly. Only here we are in a new Oscar season, and the hot buzz is gathering around a movie and one key performance that remains stubbornly unaffirmed by the old populist yardstick. The Artist, when it first began to generate excitement, was presumed to have a major mainstream viability: It would be the silent black-and-white heart tugger that made the antique new, that turned everyone in the plex onto old-movie magic. But now its looking a lot less universal in its appeal (not that theres anything wrong with that). And wouldnt it be ironic if Meryl Streep, who looks like she might take home an Oscar for the first time in 30 years, did so for a film that, with its already middling per-screen average, has basically demonstrated how little most people want to see a movie about Margaret Thatcher. (Or maybe they just dont want to see one as brassy and maladroit as The Iron Lady.)

At this point, a lot of you are probably thinking: This is all a good thing! Why not sever the Academy Awards from the scuzzy sway of popularity? I’m tempted to join the chorus. Except that a couple of things bother me about how, and why, the issue of what the audience thinks has become a nonstarter for a great many Academy voters. It seems to me that in the old days, the Oscars were striving, in their way, for a fusion of commerce and art, of popularity and acclaim, that represented the very soul of the Dream Factory. Sure, the Oscars didnt always achieve that fusion (remember when Chariots of Fire won? Or, of course, Crash?), but there was something honorable in the attempt. In the current era, Academy voters have evolved to the point that they keep a new kind of kosher, with Art and Mass Entertainment on separate tables, and increasingly rarely shall the twain meet. Thats why franchise movies, even stupendous ones like The Dark Knight, or a cathartic zeitgeist comedy like Bridesmaids don’t get Best Picture nominations. They may be works of art, but they come from the wrong table. And that’s why a likable (but, to me, minor) curio like The Artist, even when it has connected only modestly to the enlightened audiences that made hits (and Oscar victories) out of The Kings Speech or No Country for Old Men, can already look like an official shiny winner in the hermetic new world of Academy Cred.

I guess Im saying that there was something, in its wisdom-of-the-mob way, that made the Oscars sort of soulful in the era when the judgments of the Academy had to be validated by the raw power of the audience. Back then, you could only take the Oscars halfway seriously (if that), but at least Academy Awards night, in its combination of glitz, pandering, and middlebrow taste, represented the unity of Hollywood movies and everyone around the world who adores them. On the surface, at least, the new Academy Awards appears to be far more tasteful and pure. The movies, by and large, are smaller, the judgments more refined, and the popcorn movies remember them? that the vast majority of the audience prefers are nowhere to be seen. (In effect, theyre shunned.) But since the folks in Hollywood spend most of their time making those movies, you have to wonder if leaving the audience behind on Oscar night is a sign that the Academy Awards have evolved to a new artistic seriousness, or if theyve turned art into another high concept, and if the voters are just pandering in a new way: not to the masses but to themselves.

So do you agree with me that the Academy Awards, more and more, seem to be cutting the audience out of the picture? Or do you think that the Oscars are simply evolving in a better direction?

Follow Owen on Twitter: @OwenGleiberman

The de-linking of democracy from capitalism ought to prompt fresh thinking, says Kgalema Motlanthe

The success of the next 100 years of the ANC will be judged on our ability to raise a new generation of South Africans who have equal access to opportunities and development resources to build a prosperous nation.

The ANC needs to recognise that revelling in self-adulation due to a rich history does not mean much unless we can lift the necessary lessons to respond to the challenges of the moment.

Most importantly, the meaning of these 100 years of struggle must provide the ANC with the opportunity to stand back and look at itself from the vantage point of hindsight.

By opening up its mind and introspecting this way the ANC will also afford itself an opportunity to know how others in turn view its progress and prospects towards the future.

No organisation is guaranteed eternal life based on its historic achievements alone or merely because it fashioned the course to freedom.

Organisations are sustained through long-term visions resulting from conscious actions taken today in the interest of present and future generations.

Once the ANC itself begins to bemoan the challenges facing society, instead of tackling them, it can no longer be seen as a leading force and an agent for change.

Thus, the ANC will have to renew itself by re-emphasising the traditions and core values and by preventing its quintessence from being corroded by sins of incumbency that have plagued post-colonial liberation movements elsewhere before.

Consequently, the ANC needs to work to ensure that it emerges in this current period fully consistent in outlook and orientation with the character of a modern progressive party.

Throughout its many decades of existence, the ANC has had the versatility to reorganise itself in the light of new experiences and to keep up with the historical process.

Its history has not been linear and smooth sailing. At every turning point in its history it had to pause to find a way of accommodating the particular phase of the struggle.

Practical experience over the last few years requires that we relook at the issues of organisational systems and processes with the object of strengthening existing internal democracy and leadership systems.

Such a move will require us to also re-look at conditions of transparency in our internal business, including governance, democratic rights of members, improving the quality and nature of our congresses and electoral systems as well as safeguarding the system of democratic decision making.

The ANCs renewal project must ensure that people remain in the state of high mobilisation in pursuing our strategic vision.

The social content that lies at the core of our vision charges us with the duty to oppose unregulated markets and the circumscribed role of the state, fully aware that markets have no sense of historical experience and can therefore not address the injustices of the past if left to their own devices.

For centuries, democracy has been serving as the best integument for the system of capitalism. However, developments within the eurozone have dispensed with some of the key elements of democracy by prompting changes of government without going through elections, as has happened in Greece and Italy.

What these developments do is call into question concepts that have until now been universally accepted as axiomatic. Perhaps these developments present a challenge to the South African and indeed African intellectuals to figure out the practical implications for Africa in terms of democracy and economic development.

On this account, the ANC is aware that as it continues to fight poverty, unemployment and social inequalities, it is doing so under historically given economic conditions over which it has little control.

The serious limitations of the socioeconomic system on what can be achieved cannot be underestimated.

South Africa attained democracy 18 years ago and was welcomed into the world community of nations, a world whose global economic system was beginning to experience chronic and vicious cycles of crises.

We have to learn from the history of progressive movements elsewhere in the world in terms of post-colonial experience and how they have tried to modernise themselves to deal with present-day challenges.

In the past people were their own liberators and still remain so today. Consequently, success in our duties is contingent upon transformation being people-centred and people-driven.

The ANC must studiously avoid substituting itself and its leaders for the people; instead it must be a vehicle of the peoples aspirations.

National oppression and its social consequences cannot be resolved by formal democracy underpinned by market forces.

While formal democracy may present opportunities for some blacks and women to advance, without a systematic national effort, led by the democratic government, to unravel the skewed distribution of wealth and income, the social reality of apartheid will remain.

By the same token, the value system that inheres in and defines a socioeconomic system that frames the democratic state presents a counterpoint to the historically noble heritage introduced by the ANC.

This is reflected in the material acquisitiveness that has enveloped the outlook of society, including some of us in the ANC today.

No less a figure than George Soros hit the nail on the head in this regard when he held that: Unsure of what they stand for, people increasingly rely on money as the criterion of value. What is more expensive is considered better. The value of a work of art can be judged by the price it fetches. People deserve respect and admiration because they are rich. What used to be a medium of exchange has usurped the place of fundamental values, reversing the relationship postulated by economic theory. What used to be professions have turned into businesses. The cult of success has replaced a belief in principles. Society has lost its anchor.

Money defines the value of everything; it prompts the relentless pursuit of material riches to assert human value.

As a leading social force aiming to exterminate social conditions that breed underdevelopment, ANC cadres must remain vigilant lest they be sucked into the vortex of the socioeconomic system that defines our era.

It is a social system that puts individualism and greed above all else and goes against the grain of the ideals of a humane society.

This socioeconomic system has foisted an antithetical cultural outlook that puts a premium on the money agenda; an agenda that reflects material riches as the point of departure.

This is the story of our past. As they say, the past we inherit; the future we create!

Delvoye is the poster-boy artist for David Walsh, the eccentric millionaire who brought MONA into being last year, putting Hobart on the map of world art and earning the undying gratitude of Tourism Tasmania. One of the most provocative items in the first exhibition, which set out to confront and hopefully offend its audience, was Delvoyes Cloaca Professional (2010), an oversized chemistry set that mimics the human digestive system, taking in food and producing a daily deposit of excrement.

The poo machine reputedly cost Walsh a million dollars, but there has never been an Australian collector so cavalier about money. He has pulled out all stops for the Delvoye survey, which allows visitors to MONA to sample no fewer than five versions of Cloaca displayed in a large, mirror-lined room.

This is the centrepiece of the show, although there are plenty of other eye-catching installations including Tattooed Tim, a living work of art who has been conducting tours of the exhibition this past month. Tim – Tim Steiner from Zurich – is in many ways even more iconoclastic than the Cloaca works, because after being tattooed by Delvoye, he was sold to a German collector via a commercial gallery. Under the terms of the contract of sale he must appear at several art events every year, at the request of the purchaser. When he dies his skin will become the property of the collector, or presumably, of his heirs.

Tim was sold for the same price that Delvoye sells tattooed pigs skins from a farm he keeps in China. This systematic attempt to tear down the borders between species; to trample over quasi-sacred concepts such as human dignity, and to use the art context to investigate the biological rather than the spiritual aspects of existence has propelled Delvoye to a lofty position in the hierarchies of contemporary art.

He has fashioned a career with supreme finesse. Most artists tend to embarrass themselves when they talk about their work. Many would sooner say nothing at all, partly from anxiety that what seems profound to the eye may become banal when described or explained. This is not the case with Delvoye, a born salesman who would have been successful in any profession he adopted.

In discussing his work, Delvoye is charming and persuasive to a degree that is virtually unprecedented in my experience. Its a curious contrast with his patron, David Walsh, who avoids all public statements, preferring to give us his thoughts in stream-of-consciousness raves in the catalogues he publishes.

Beyond the scats and tats, there is an intellectual agenda in Delvoyes work that pushes him from one big idea to the next. Like his Belgian predecessor, Rene Magritte, he loves to confound expectations. In a Magritte painting the sky might be bright while the earth is in darkness; an apple might fill an entire room, or a huge stone hang suspended in the air. Delvoye brings us a series of gas cylinders made from porcelain, decorated with blue Delft motifs. The decorated porcelain reappears in a set of long-handled shovels – perhaps in distant homage to Duchamps found object sculpture, In Advance of the Broken Arm (1915).

In works that invoke both science and religion, metal crucifixions are twisted into the shape of the double helix. In another series huge pieces of industrial machinery such as a cement mixer are made out of elaborately carved teak, while a Meccano model of a Gothic cathedral is twisted into the shape of a cocoon. The elaborate patterning would have been Looss worst nightmare, as he believed that in any society the degree of ornamentation was inversely proportional to the level of cultural sophistication.

Delvoye is aware of Looss ideas – he is even mentioned in the catalogue – but would probably argue that proscriptions applicable to the early modern era bear no resemblance to a world that has come through the irony and hyper-ornamentation of postmodernism. Delvoye wants to break down the veneer of civilisation and take us back to fundamentals. Nothing could be more basic, more universal than shit, and this may explain the mixture of attraction and repulsion that audiences bring to the Cloaca works.

Other items in this show may have a greater propensity to offend. For example, Viae Crucis (2006), which shows X-ray images of rats acting out the Stations of the Cross; or a series called Anal kisses (2011), in which Delvoye convinced a number of his friends to smear lipstick on their sphincters and make prints on hotel notepaper. Perhaps the most revolting piece is a video called Sybille II (1999), which apparently depicts white and yellow grubs emerging, concertina-like, from the earth. Its only later one realises this is actually an extreme close-up of somebody squeezing pimples from their nose.

Despite these grotesqueries, it would be naive to see Delvoye as merely a professional provocateur, intent on giving the long-suffering bourgeoisie another smack in the chops. There is an aspect of his character that resembles an old-fashioned anarchist.

During the launch of this show he said that whenever he visited the Louvre or some other great museum, he would look at the Old Masters and only see evidence of class struggle and inequality. Not even the most hide-bound Marxists would feel relaxed about admitting as much nowadays.

He has not responded by taking up arms against capitalism, but by embracing it. Today, Delvoye is virtually a global corporate entity. His works are constructed by teams of specialists working to his specifications.

He constantly plays with logos and brands, writing his name in the manner of Walt Disney and calling his website Wim City. He has even issued share certificates for various projects. His latest grand scheme is to start a new religion, based in India. It will be designed along lines suggested by comprehensive market research, allowing adherents to get maximum satisfaction from their new faith.

None of this is especially far-fetched. Delvoyes religion could hardly be more improbable than Scientology (invented by a pulp science-fiction writer), Raelism (founded by a French motoring journalist), or the Jedi faith (based on the Star Wars movies). Even his contract with Tattooed Tim has a precedent in old Japan, where collectors might vie for the posthumous acquisition of a lavishly decorated skin. What is new is Delvoyes insistence on putting all of this within an art context.

In Wim City, everything from poo, pigs, pus, cement mixers, tattoos, share certificates and, finally, an entire religion, can be considered to be art.

This is an impressive achievement – to a degree. Like the Disney Corporation, Delvoye likes his work to be well-made and entertaining. He once told an interviewer: Boring art doesnt have more meaning; its just boring.

Although Im inclined to say hear, hear, when confronted with, say, a room full of Damien Hirst spot paintings, I cant shake off the romantic idea that there is always something in a great work of art that escapes analysis – something that speaks to us on an instinctive, non-verbal level.

Call it spiritual, or simply visceral, but this element is absent from Delvoyes spectacular concoctions. While this obviously appeals to an outspoken rationalist such as David Walsh, I emerged from this show with a hollow feeling. Its intelligent, high-end entertainment, but there is no fire and ice.

So go along and snicker, but dont expect to feel moved – unless its an involuntary tremor in the stomach.

johnmcdonald.net.au.

WIM DELVOYE

Museum of Old and New Art,

Hobart, until April 10

A SCULPTURE of a county gymnast has been unveiled at Heathrow Airport as part of the build-up to the Olympics.

The casting of rhythmic gymnast Frankie Jones is part of a series of Olympic-themed artworks which have gone on show at Terminal Five’s Expo Fine Art Gallery ahead of the London 2012 Games.

The 21-year-old five-time British champion, of Wellingborough, is being tipped as one of the UK’s Olympic medal hopes.

She lives in the county, but competes for Wales due to her father’s roots in Pontypool, Torfaen.

Miss Jones was present for the unveiling of the carbon fibre resin sculpture by artist Eleanor Cardozo.

It includes a plaque stating: “This sculpture is dedicated to Francesca Jones, whose youth and talent embodies the Olympic spirit and the promise of a generation.”

Her dad Colin Jones said: “As her father I was very proud that the sculpture was unveiled, and she was very thrilled.

“She’s working very hard at the moment ahead of the Olympics. She’s flying out to Bulgaria tomorrow for five weeks training.”

The series has previously included a wire mesh sculpture of diver Tom Daley and a work in bronze depicting Paralympic gold medallist Lee Pearson.

Miss Jones, who earned a silver medal in the Commonwealth Games 2010, was joined by the Great Britain Senior Rhythmic Gymnastics Group for the opening of the new collection of art, which is being held to celebrate sports, including gymnastics, at the official Host Airport of the games.

Passengers can buy any of the 50 works of art on show at the exhibition, with proceeds split between the artist and the British Paralympic Charity.

A spokesman for the airport said: “This exciting new exhibition honours the best of Britain’s sportsmen and women as we eagerly countdown to the 2012 London Olympics.

“We are constantly looking at ways to make every journey better at Heathrow and provide passengers with an immediate taste of British sport and culture, and believe that this art exhibition will be as captivating as it is unexpected.”

But on to the art. Now I’m not a connoisseur of art, and I’m old school and prefer the masters like Raza and Souza and Gade. And I just loved the Jamini Roys and Husains at the DAG booth and the Souzas and Gades at the DMG booth, and of course Ketaki Sheth’s black and white photographs. There were some beautiful sculptures and installations by new contemporary artists.

Now while I understand that I might not have got the finer nuances of some of the art works on display, I do believe that an art work even if it is multi-layered, must appeal at least at one level to anyone viewing it. Everyone doesn’t need to get the subliminal meaning. But if you need a detailed primer or ready reckoner to explain what a book or painting or film is trying to say, for it to appeal to you at any level, I feel it somehow misses the mark.

So people who watch Apocalypse Now, appreciate it or don’t like it as a well-made war film even if they don’t get the Heart of Darkness or TS Eliot references. Or you can enjoy Animal Farm as an entertaining fantastical story and not realise the commentary on Stalin. Of course, Orwell might be turning in his grave as a result, but at least everyone gets something out of what he’s created. Or even if you didn’t get Dali’s surrealism, the sure fantastical nature of his paintings catches your eye.

But what do you make of  a massive steel plate around 12 feet in diameter with strange white phallic-shaped white items each a foot in length piled onto half the plate? Now I didn’t realise my faux pas when I asked someone what it was, only to be greeted by disdain and told that it was the avant-garde Subodh Gupta’s work. That I didn’t get kicked out of the Fair for my show of ignorance is a miracle. A friend did take pity on me and explain that the white phallic pieces were magnified grains of rice. Aah, a commentary on hunger in India. Or so I hope. Anyway, it matters not because there were enough people ooh-ing and aah-ing over the piece.  I seemed to be the only one who’d missed the boat.

The second piece was at Chatterjee and Lal which I might have been drawn to because of the Bengali name. On display was a slightly tattered Victorian lady’s dress which was reminiscent of Dangerous Minds with John Malkovich and Michelle Pfeiffer. And behind the gown was a small photograph of a man wearing the same gown. A little unnerving. The picture, it was written, was of the artist wearing the gown, which he had worn while creating his work. The ‘work’ itself was not clear. Now, in an attempt to widen my horizons, I did some reading up when I came home and learnt that the artist, Nikhil Chopra is a performance artist and wears guises and places himself in theatrical settings. For example, in an earlier performance abroad, Chopra would sit in front of backdrops for four hours at a stretch in various guises. In one scene, he sat at a table eating chocolate cake while wearing white boxers, as a commentary on colonialism and identity.  Now if someone had explained all this to me, while displaying a Victorian dress to me even with no Nikhil Chopra inside it, it might have all made a lot of sense to me. Or however much sense it could make. But just a Victorian gown with a picture of a man wearing it, simply made me feel like I’d walked into a seamstress shop.

The most bizarre and the one which made me most uncomfortable was the sight of six people walking around in t-shirts emblazoned with “Talk to me! Living work of art.” These poor dears were part of Mumbai-based artist, Preeti Chandrakant’s exhibit. She’s supposedly spent 6 years ‘molding’ these people and the exhibit was supposed to be a commentary on the fact that everything is for sale. According to news reports (Daily Pioneer), she has said that she has, “made their thinking more precise, their seeing more aware, their hearing more sharpened, their touch had been trained to respond to the subtlest of stimuli, whose tasting has been refined, whose smelling has been heightened, whose sensing has been awaken, whose very materiality has become aware of itself”. A veritable Lady Svengali.

The poor ‘molded’ sextet looked quite out of sorts and seemed to spend at least the hour that I was in the vicinity, speaking just to each other in a huddle. One of them was on his mobile, most probably telling a friend that life had seriously dealt him some cruel cards. Some curious people did take their pictures and chat them up a bit. Or maybe they were testing out the attributes of the sextet, because as a sign of how serious Preeti is in her artistic vision, people can buy any of the ‘living works of art’ from the ‘molder’, and they can take the person or ‘work of art’ home according to the terms of the contract. That I thought negated the entire point Preeti was claiming to make as both the artist and her gallery would be making money of contracting out a person to some slightly warped buyer.

But hell, that’s just me. I obviously only understand art for art’s sake and not for some hidden cause which is impossible to identify without a guidebook. And whether I understood Subodh Gupta’s steel plate and phallic rice grains and Chopra’s Victorian gown or Chandrakant’s living works of art, the first two are the toast of the global art circuit and the third has managed to generate enough media columns to make her a gallery favourite. Obviously the art fair is not catering to philistines like me. So I just hot-footed it to the vodka bar in the hopes of clearing my head.

Rajyasree Sen is a bona fide foodie, culture-vulture and unsolicited opinion-giver. You can read about her adventures with food and life in Delhi on her blog www.brownsahiba.blogspot.com or follow her at @rajyasree

Veronica Ryan Sculpture Stolen For Scrap Metal
Boundaries a work by a Tate collection artist follows Moore Hepworth and Blake to the smelter

Police are on the lookout for a gang of metal thieves after a two valuable bronze sculptures worth tens of thousands of pounds were stolen from a Peterborough sculpture park. The sculptures were based on the forms of cheese plant leaves, creating a challenging relationship with the green surroundings of Thorpe Meadows and the verdigris work of art. The sculptures were taken on 3 January from the citys Sculpture Park, which contains 16 other pieces of art some on a monumental scale.The Trust was set up in 1988 by the Peterborough Development Corporation. Under the New Towns Act, the Corporation itself was set up in 1968 with the task of overseeing the expansion of the City and as part of this it sought to encourage an appreciation of the arts, purchasing a selection of sculptures by major British artists between 1978 and 1988 for permanent public display throughout the City. Pc Craig Farrington said: It is a distinctive sculpture, very heavy and thieves would have needed transport to take it away.

Veronica Ryan is best known for her sculpture. She has worked largely with marble donated by the Hepworth Estate, creating a number of sculptural works, two of which are owned by Tate (Quoit Montserrat 1998, Tate T07770 and Mango Reliquary 2000, Tate T07771). Her drawings are not a great departure from the sculptural works, however. The shapes of the painted sections echo the forms of the seeds and pods that feature in many of Ryans sculptures, as well as referring to Hepworths sculptural forms. The masking of the photographic images also reaffirms Ryans concern with wrapping or hiding elements that is typical of her sculptures (as in Relics in the Pillow of Dreams 1985, Tate T06530). Ryan sees these drawings, with their photographic basis and biographical connections, as having a more distinct narrative thread than her sculptural pieces.

Ryan studied at St.Albans, Bath Academy of Art, the Slade School of Art and the School for Oriental and African Studies and has had solo shows at the ICA, London and Kettles Yard, Cambridge. The Corporations aim was to create a reference point in time for future generations growing up in the new City, relating the artistic activity and aims of the best British sculptors working at the time with the architectural style and planning during the period of expansion Peterborough Sculpture Trust was set up to carry on this work and owns all of the sculptures bought by the Corporation. They have a programme of educational and development work to further enhance the appreciation and provision of the arts in Peterborough, continuing to add new works by the best of todays sculptors. They also offer a consultancy service enabling local businesses and developments to more easily commission new works with the benefits of our years of experience.

There are now 26 pieces in the trusts permanent collection, plus other works on loan from artists and other organisations. Most are situated on sites developed by the Corporation, in shopping centres, old persons housing and public parks. Recent additions to the collection include Cormorant by Elizabeth Cooke, A Spire by Renn amp; Thacker and People by Tolleck Winner.

Work of art: Mohd Hafizan, 16, (right) and Khairil Anuar, 13, helping their father Ismail (inset) to complete the traditional bed frames at their home in Pulau Kerengga.

But what is less obvious is how these affect each other. After all, sometimes the document and the work of art support each other, but very often, subjects will interrupt or even disrupt the more subtle qualities that a photographer has sought to capture in a given print.

Our culture demands photographs of important things, events and people. This puts photographers in direct contact with the most noteworthy happenings and humans. They are the surrogate witnesses of our culture. It is through them that we see modern history.

However, I am turned off by the idea of celebrity as a quality in itself, so I was not particularly interested in seeing Making Faces: Photographic Portraits of Actors and Artists, now on view at the Portland Museum of Art.

But I was very glad I did. Not only does it include some great and entertaining photography, it is split into two parts that together allow for a thoughtful consideration of the role of celebrity portraiture in an art museum.

The main part of the show features many great — and sometimes famous — pictures by important photographers. To say the least, it is entertaining.

But it also reminded me why I dont like celebrity portraits in general. There is a picture of Tony Randall by Philippe Halsman, for example, that shows Randall yelling at a lion penned in a zoo. I always loved Randalls hilariously neurotic character in The Odd Couple, but what a disappointing jerk he seems to be in this picture.

I could say similar things about photos of Lucille Ball, Ray Bolger and Ansel Adams. Its not that they are misbehaving in the images, but the photos have little to do with their talents or accomplishments. A rare exception is Halsmans 1950 photo of Milton Berle. It comes together as an artistic portrait that literally flickers with Berles playful wit.

Where Making Faces really begins to succeed is with portraits of artists in their studios. While many simply ride the celebrity of the artists (its hard not to ooh and ahh at Picasso or Fernand Leger, especially when photographed by the great Robert Doisneau), some offer amazing insights.

Seeing the stocky and cocky Le Corbusier in 1944 in his double-breasted leather coat standing over his paints and brushes, I felt myself torn between his messy boots-on-the-ground relation to his gear and what I have always held to be disturbingly fascistic tendencies in his purist-style paintings. Frankly, he looks like a Nazi in Doisneaus photograph, and his troubling relationship to Nazism is a critical element of the conversation about his role in history.

Still, there is much to appreciate and enjoy in this show. Peter Ralstons portrait of Andrew Wyeth and Battleground will lead to many amazed double-takes. Barbara Goodbodys 1988 portrait of Robert Indiana on Vinalhaven is wonderfully jovial and lively.

Doisneaus portrait of Savignac playing chess with one of his paintings is brilliantly hilarious; his 1958 image of the sculptor Jean Arp through two of his marbles is serenely sophisticated (its much better than the Arp sculpture in the room); and his 1951 portrait looking down into the face of the great sculptor Alberto Giacometti in his studio is one of my favorite studio portraits of any artist. I could go on.

Yet is the second part of Making Faces that really lifts the show to another level. In a small gallery, works by a dozen artists have been paired with photographic portraits of them by David Etnier. Its not as though Etnier is on the same level as Berenice Abbott or Doisneau, but at his best, he is very strong.

His portrait of Brett Bigbee, for example, is a great photograph: The stiff though delicately beautiful artist sits on a couch, uncannily balanced by a wispy but confrontational drawing of a recumbent nude. As well, Etniers image of Dozier Bell is stark and bristles with an alert intelligence so fitting to the artist and her work.

Many of the portraits show the artists at work, and that is somehow fitting for the Maine artistic ethic. It makes sense to see artists such as Linden Frederick, Chippy Chase (1908-1998) and Tom Crotty absorbed in their work.

The depicted artists work in the show is virtually all fantastic. My favorite is a tightly balled-up watercolor landscape (showing a train on a mountainside?) by John Heliker (1909-2000). Its both powerfully dense and explosively exuberant.

I also particularly like Fredericks ultra-realistic, dusk-lighted motel in Machias, Crottys surprisingly complex watercolor of a mitten-adorned boy holding tight to a yellow balloon, Eric Hopkins swooping 1988 island scene, and Richard Estes lapping-water scene painted with the gorgeously loose brush he seems to reserve for his more intimately scaled works.

Shown with works by their subjects, Etniers photographs feel like so much more than celebrity portraits. For the viewer, it makes for an unusually enlightening and interesting show — especially if you have any interest in Maine art.

Its rare that I think a show is much better for being split into two distinct parts, but Making Faces is that exception. It is smart and thought-provoking.

Freelance writer Daniel Kany is an art historian who lives in Cumberland. He can be contacted at:

dankany@gmail.com

Several things strike one when looking at this. The first reaction – Ive tried this out on a few people who have somehow managed not to see the image yet – is laughter: a short, shocked laugh that suddenly evaporates, like a drop of water on a hot shovel, as the works various contradictions and ambiguities align and realign themselves within your consciousness.

First, you notice the audacity. Its a work of what seems like blinding obviousness. But in attributing the ability to express a condition to something that is manifestly unable to do so, Shrigley is having a go at the infantilising anthropomorphism currently sloshing around daily culture: the coffee cup which has Careful – Im hot! printed on it; or, as I saw recently on a tourist double-decker the other day, Sorry – Im not in service. But theres more.

What the work is inviting us to do is, literally, to laugh at death – for that is what you are seeing: almost all you are seeing. But not all, for a living hand arranged the body, wrote on the sign, and stuck the sign in the paws. There is life there, but a cruel kind of life, the kind that is rumoured to make sport of the corpses in the back rooms of undertakers, that (at its most innocent) makes the bodies of the dead assume unnatural positions, or look as though theyre doing silly things. But theres still more, yet another flip side: he may be making the animals do things they were incapable of when alive, but theyre doing things that cartoon animals have no problem doing and, moreover, the truth they are proclaiming cant be gainsaid. That animal is dead, after all, just as its placard proclaims.

The more one thinks about it the more eloquent a statement about death it seems. For all its ambiguities, sparked off from the simplest of elements and generating a surprisingly rich and accessible range of interpretations, there is, just as one may say about death, no let-out, in the end. It makes Damien Hirsts works of taxidermy, with their endless titles, almost look as though, in comparison, they are evading the issue. (Theres a Shrigley cartoon in which a father and son are looking at one of Hirsts flyblown headsin a perspex box. Its bloody brilliant, son, thats what it is, says a speech balloon, and – as Shrigleyhas used the same joke in a short film urging us, andgovernments,to support the arts – you suspect that he really does think itsbrilliant.)

Yet one of the most curious things about Shrigleys works of taxidermy is that somehow – and I have not got close up enough to one to see if any trickery has been used, but I would guess not – these animals faces look, uncannily, as though they have been drawn by David Shrigley. The expression, the unsettlingly expressive blankness characteristic of his cartoon figures pupil-less eyes, is Shrigleyan. They have become subsumed into his world. Now, that really is clever.

In one of his introductions to Shrigleys collections, Will Self wrote that, once youve looked at enough of his drawings – he gives a figure of a hundred – there is no plane of reality other than that described by Shrigley. Its a good point, and a testament to Shrigleys genius, which is not a word I use lightly.

On first encountering a Shrigley drawing, one is of course immediately aware that we are in a realm of artistic fluidity. You might even experience, before its sunk in, a spurt of outrage that anything like this can earn any claim to our attention. And then you might ask: are we looking at a cartoon, or a work of art? Surely something so rudimentary cannot be art? But then you cant really say theyre cartoons either, or not with complete confidence. A cartoon that does not make us laugh can be said to have failed; a Shrigley drawing that does not make us laugh makes us do something else – think, probably. This already puts it in the premier league of conceptual art, which, too much of the time, makes usonly think darkly about Arts Councilfunding, or the limits of human gullibility.

And yet by adopting the aesthetic of the disturbed adolescent who cant draw particularly well, or the disturbed man in a pub toilet with a pen, a blank surface to draw on and a bit of time on his hands, Shrigley sneaks profundity in under the radar. He is adept at blurring boundaries, as everyone who thinks about him notices: naive/sophisticated; whole/part; framed/unconstrained; to scale/in perspective; naturalism/fantasy (Self again). To which one can add, among other things: funny/not funny.

He also, in his sculpture, make us wonder whether we are in fact seeing a sculpture or a three-dimensional cartoon. One of my favourites is a cardboard box, placed on some cleared and derelict urban space, perhaps an old bombsite, in what looks like Glasgow. There is a rectangular door-shaped hole cut in the box – which itself looks as though it is roughly four feet across and two feet high, maybe less. Above it are written the words LEISURE CENTRE. Now, everyone who sees this laughs; and the more you think about it, the richer that laughter is. Forsomething that looks as though it took half a second to dream up, and maybe 60 seconds to execute, this is quite an achievement.

But the slapdash nature of Shrigleys work is deceptive. Winningly happy to talk about his work and his creative methods, he is emphatic about not making too many bold claims. About his libretto for an opera, staged last year, Pass the Spoon, a bizarre story involving a spoon, a fork, a banana, a manic-depressive egg and the sinister Mr Granules (why, incidentally, is that such a great name?), he said: I suppose that these characters and these events that Ive imagined will come from the same place as all the other crap Ive produced … To be honest with you, the only thing Im really qualified to do is to make the poster. And yet he puts the work in – he spends eight hours a day drawing.

Here are the words I removed to create the ellipsis in the quote above: they will be recognisable, and I think you will see my hand in it. Sandwiched between two very self-deprecating statements – can you imagine any other artist saying anything like that? – is the acknowledgement of an artist who knows what hes doing, and what hes about. Even when hes not producing art/cartoons, or cartoon/sculptures, he can do something Shrigleyesque. Looking at his work makes us wonder about style, or what it is about an artists vision that makes it recognisable; how you can see the artists hand in it.

For an entertaining half-hour, you could do worse than type the words David Shrigley into Google and then click on images. You will get – for Shrigley would appear to be generous with his talent, and would probably knock something out for you if you asked nicely enough – at least 11 pages of cartoons (or whatever they are). SORRY I PAINTED THE WORD TWAT ON YOUR GARAGE DOOR is the entire text of one of his image-less drawings (or whatever you want to call them); PLEASE EXCUSE THE TERRIBLE INJUSTICE (and in much smaller capitals, below: THANK-YOU) is that of another. What is it that makes us accept that one sensibility alone produced both of these? What is the place in Shrigleys head to which he alludes that produces this crap?

Our favourite exponent of contemporary outsider art, was how Esquire magazine described him last year, but it is not exactly outsider art (which tends to involve some kind of pity, or condescension, on the part of the viewer). This is, in fact, almost completely wrong: the thing about Shrigley is that he produces insider art: manifestations and expressions of an interior weirdness to which he grants us access, and which we can, at some inarticulate but immediate level, identify with and understand. In the vile and unending struggle against futility, shame and violence, you gather pretty quickly that Shrigley is on your side. It is not an idle exercise. One of the images that will come up in your Google search is what I gather is a tea-towel with these words on it: TELL ME WHEN I AM NO LONGER NEEDED AND I SHALL GO. To which one can only reply: youre still needed. Do please stick around.