Author: startind

Ssssshh, its a secret

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Lawrence Weiner, Postcard 2013

Lawrence Weiner, Postcard 2013

Royal College of Art Secret Postcard Show March 2014

The RCA Secret Exhibition is a firm favourite on the London Calendar. Potential buyers camp outside, sometimes a week in advance, in the hope of purchasing a work by a famous artist. All the works are available at the same price and each year the name of the artist is hidden from the public. The sale of original postcard sized works (a fantastic, versatile format) including emerging artists at the RCA, technicians and staff, is now held in the Dyson Gallery in Hester Road, Battersea. Funds from the show go toward supporting emerging and established artists studying at the RCA. Last year there were 2,700 works by 1,034 artists. Is it time to see if you can put your money on a firm favourite by seeing if you can spot a Julian Opie, a Manolo Blahnik or a Norman Ackroyd?. Or is it time perhaps to invest in an artist of the future? Only you can decide. You can view all of the pieces from last year, and some of the famous names behind them clicking here. Ssssshh, remember its a secret.

Exhibition open to view (admission free) from Thursday 13 March to Friday 21 March 2014, 11am-6pm daily (until 9pm on 20 March). One-day Sale open Saturday 22 March 2014, 8am-6pm. Figures quoted from RCA Secret website. Visit http://home.secret.rca.ac.uk/ to register for a collectors number.

The Gender of Place: Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber

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“The faery solitude of the place…his castle that lay on the very bosom of the sea…. evanescent departures of the ocean, cut off by the tide from land for half a day…at home neither on land or water, a mysterious amphibious place, contravening the materiality of both earth and waves…That lovely, sad, sea-siren of a place!." The Blood Chamber, p.8-9

“The faery solitude of the place…his castle that lay on the very bosom of the sea…. at home neither on land or water, a mysterious amphibious place, contravening the materiality of both earth and waves…That lovely, sad, sea-siren of a place!.” The Bloody Chamber, p.8-9

This very brief analysis explores how we can approach gendered relations from the perspective of location to reveal the symbolic and metaphorical significance of Mont. Saint- Michel as it is employed in Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber. This analysis was given recently in a very short presentation. Examining Mont. Saint- Michel I explore its potential to represent feminine and masculine principles, nature and culture and how it is central to relations between the bride, her mother and the Marquis. Working through visual and sonic imagery highlights the relations between female anatomy, biology and the cyclical feminine flow ontology of the ‘sea-girt’. My interest lay specifically in the concept of the sea-girt, as a border or boundary surrounded or enclosed by the sea and how we might consider this in relation to the porous and the feminine. Continue reading →

Metamorphosis of the Feminine – The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter

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Georges Méliès, Bluebeard, 1901.

Georges Méliès, Bluebeard, 1901.

The following essay performs a close textual reading of two extracts from Angela Carter’s, The Bloody Chamber. Given the constraints of the assignment [1,000 words] this is a rather crude analysis which, unable to unpack its implications, leads in some respects to the generic and the obvious. In spite of these concerns I have nevertheless aimed for perceptual depth. Since the two passages are analogous I have privileged the former while drawing upon the latter. Rather than litter the post with copious footnotes you can read the Angela Carter Extracts here.I have given the page numbers for reference.

“His wedding gift, clasped round my throat. A choker of rubies, two inches wide, like an extraordinarily precious slit throat.” [p.6]

Carter’s employment of language here is extremely precise. The idea of clasping, of holding fast suggests power and possession (to have and to hold until death do us part?), as if the Marquis’ hands are literally round her throat. If we read this metaphor as asphyxiation, of becoming unable to breathe, and the ‘choker’ as a restriction of the body, particularly the neck (an erogenous zone) and vocal cords this would also increase the awareness of one’s own body as an object. His apparent gift is not just a symbol of wealth but a contractual exchange to which the female protagonist is committed by receiving and wearing it. At this point the choker metaphorically pre-figures the female protagonists fate in the final act and what appears to be her inevitable decapitation.

Continue reading →

Rapture

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Loïe Fuller (physical poet) & The Serpentine Dance, 1862-1928

Loïe Fuller (physical poet) & The Serpentine Dance, 1862-1928

“Yet we are talking about major ruptures that affect everyone, every generation, and all their images, languages, ways of life. From one moment to the next, this opens in us, allowing us to see this vast drift (derive) of the world. From one moment to the next, we find ourselves sensibly and physically outside of ourselves, outside the blind slipping away of our tiny stretch of time. We see the night that borders our time, and we touch on some aspect of it- not the future, but the coming of something or someone: the coming of something that is already of us and of the world, but that has to come from somewhere else, displaced elsewhere into an unimaginable elsewhere.”

Text quoted from the Changing of the World in A Finite Thinking (2003) Jean-Luc Nancy, Ed. Simon Sparks, Stanford University Press: USA 2003, pp.301. Image reproduced from http://www.erinwylie.com/2012/08/loie-fullers-the-serpentine-dance/ accessed 19012014.

Walk On, MAC Arts Centre, Sat 8th Feb-Sun 30th Mar 2014

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Published by J. Pitts, no. 14 Great St. Andrew Street Seven Dials, July 1, 1813). Copperplate map, with added color, 34 × 45 cm, on sheet 41 × 51 cm. Unknown Author

“The Pilgrims Progress, or, Christians Journey from the City of Destruction in This Evil World to the Celestial City in the World That Is to Come”. Published by J. Pitts, no. 14 Great St. Andrew Street Seven Dials, July 1, 1813. Copperplate map, with added color, 34 × 45 cm, on sheet 41 × 51 cm. Unknown Author.

  “The geography of our consciousness of reality is one of complicated coastlines, lakes and rugged mountains.”

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, Serpents Tail: London 1991, pp.147

In perfect peripatetic timing with the exhibition at the Mead Gallery, Uncommon Ground, Warwick Arts Centre,  Sat 18 Jan – Sat 8 Mar 2014 Walk On at the MAC celebrates 40 years of Art and Walking. The exhibition seeks to examine the myriad ways that artists “since the 1960’s have undertaken a seemingly universal act – taking a walk – as their means to create new types of art. The exhibition proposes that, across all four of the last decades, artists have worked as all kinds of explorers, whether making their marks on rural wildernesses or acting as urban expeditionaries. The exhibition brings together nearly 40 artists who all make work by undertaking a journey on foot. In doing so, they all stake out new artistic territories. Featured Artists include Francis Alÿs, Richard Long, Hamish Fulton, Julian Opie, Bruce Nauman, Marina Abramovic, Sophie Calle, Janet Cardiff, Melanie Manchot, Tim Robinson, Carey Young, Tim Brennan, Mike Collier, Brian Thompson, Alec Finlay, Chris Drury, Dan Holdsworth and Richard Wentworth to name a few.” Continue reading →