Tag Archives: art

Exhibition

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Exhibition

They’re taking photographs down by the water
in front of the cubist whale
float planes take off from the harbor
the mountains slumber in the morning haze.

Inside the convention center
paragraphs of opaque prose
attempt to describe the genius
of Vincent, Vincent van Gogh.

But if painting is the medium
there is no need for go-betweens
it’s all there on the canvas
the painting is what the painting seems.

Taking part in Open Link over at dverse

Photo taken at Imagine Van Gogh: The Immersive Exhibition, the convention centre Vancouver

The Lads’ Poetry Project 1 (The Sistine Chapel Contract)

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IMG_1181 (6)

 

To start, one has to go back to the beginning, to when the idea first crawled out of the primordial slime and wriggled across a landscape previously devoid of wriggling things. I want to use words like “protozoan”, “bosphoric”, “euphratic” but I can’t find a context and besides, two of them are not real words, so…..

I was talking to Slim about the paucity of themes or rather the sameness of subject matter in European religious art. You’ve got the crucifixion, the annunciation, the beheading of John the Baptist, the ubiquitous Madonna and Child , the endless emaciated martyrs staring skywards like Brazilian soccer players in a post goal celebration.
Slim, who had just spent the weekend watching back to back Guy Ritchie movies, shrugged, scratched the location on his head where there used to be hair and said: “Paucity? No one says that anymore. It sounds like a terminal disease. ‘He died of late onset paucity. It was the paucity that got him in the end’”. He then stomped out of the room, hitching up his sagging jeans as he exited. He can be an eloquent bugger at times.

Later that day, he came back with this

The Sistine Chapel Contract

Me and the lads are in the studio
working on our Madonna and Child
when in walks Mike
with a strange look in his eyes
and cool as you like
he says
They want me to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
We say: Wha’?
He says: The Sistine Chapel.
They want me
to paint the ceiling of
the Sistine bleedin’ Chapel.
Well,
you could have knocked us over with a feather.

 

and thus, The Lads’ Poetry Project was born.

 

 

Template

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Template” is a sculpture by the Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei. It is made from old wooden doors from demolished Chinese houses. At an exhibition, in Kassel, Germany in 2007, the sculpture collapsed after exposure to wind and rain. Ai Weiwei decided to leave it in its collapsed state. In an interview, he explained that nature had taken his work  and re-shaped it, perhaps made it better, had done something he could never have done. Slim has this to say:

Template

Ai Weiwei, Ai Weiwei, Ai Weiwei

Give your head a shake

Cease these po-faced utterances.

Yes, the forces of nature

Can create great wonders:

The Grand Canyon, for example.

But what we have here

Is a tornado in a trailer park.

Havoc has been wreaked.

You left your sculpture out in the wind and rain

And the wind and rain have done their thing.

Let us not pretend

That this is anything more

Than a failure to read the weather report.