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Fluid rocks, Flavie Audi, 2017, Glass and Pigments (fine gold, silver, etc)
“The forms and gestures found in it capture a fleeting, living energy and suggest a certain ambiguity, hovering between digital screen and celestial body.” -
Flavie Audi
Fluid Rocks - Flavie Audi
London-based French-Lebanese artist Flavie Audi upends ideas of both geology and glass with her sculptural series, Fluid Rocks. Audi renders blown glass not into rigid, delicate vessels but instead turns the material into colorful translucent blobs with quivering surfaces.
Although she keeps her exact techniques a secret, the artist’s incorporation of fine gold and silver into the glass helps to create the color-shifting translucence. This method, which results in the glass simultaneously displaying completely different transmitted and reflected colors, goes back at least to the 4th century as documented in found Roman glass pieces.
“Works translate the mechanism of life and light and resemble fragments of an ethereal landscape or geology,” Audi writes on her website. “The forms and gestures found in it capture a fleeting, living energy and suggest a certain ambiguity, hovering between digital screen and celestial body.”
You can next see Audi’s work in a group show this October as part of the Arte Sano Biennale at the Museo de Arte Popular in Mexico City. More of her glass work can be found on her website.
Biography
Audi’s practice finds its point of departure within the manipulation of glass. Glass plays a crucial part, for the artist, in contemplating a speculative utopian future world where humans create cosmic fragments and new types of landscape formations. Using the physical properties of glass, Flavie highlights the duality between the real and virtual worlds. Through its omnipresence in nearly all contemporary forms of digital devices, glass becomes a signifier of the tension between the realms of the tangible and the digital, as well as a facilitator of the disappearance of physical objects.
The digital atmosphere that surrounds us threatens the definition and perception of reality. In an era of technological innovation that has seen the creation of flawless, synthetic diamonds, undetectable by man or machine, Audi’s questions how we experience the real. Audi creates fragments emanating from a mass production landscape where gemmology aligns with geology in this synthetic new nature.
Flavie pursues ways of expressing sensuality and luminosity creating dazzled encounters with wonder and the sublime. Her works translate the mechanism of life and light and resemble fragments of an ethereal landscape or geology. The forms and gestures found in it capture a fleeting, living energy and suggest a certain mystery, expressing the energy and essence of existence, a sense of life, hovering between digital screen and celestial body. In a dematerialised world where all is virtual and generic, her work seeks to define a new type of aesthetic and physical materiality and invites the mind to expand in the cosmological infinite.
1986 Born in Paris.
2010 Graduated from the Architectural Association, RIBA Part II, London.
2014 Graduated from the Royal College of Arts, MA ceramics and glass, London.
Blue Water Lilies - Claude Monet
A founding member of the Impressionist movement in the late 1800s, Claude Monet was interested in direct observation and perceptual study, particularly depicting the effects of light and shadow on color. A proponent of en plein air painting, Monet is most famous for his series depicting haystacks (1891), poplars (1892), the Rouen Cathedral (1894), and water lilies (1910-20). In each series, Monet painted the same site repeatedly, recording how the appearance changed as the light shifted. His final mural-sized paintings depicting the pond on his Giverny estate feature water lilies and water emerging from almost-abstract compositions of broad strokes of bright color and intricately built-up textures. Shortly after Monet died at age 86, the French government installed his last water-lilies series in specially constructed galleries at the Orangerie in Paris, where they remain today.
Musée d'Orsay Foreword
"Nymphaea" is the botanical name for a water lily. Monet grew white water lilies in the water garden he had installed in his property at Giverny in 1893. From the 1910s until he died in 1926, the garden and its pond in particular, became the artist's sole source of inspiration. He said: "I have come back to things that are impossible to do: water with weeds waving in the depths. Apart from painting and gardening, I am good for nothing. My greatest masterpiece is my garden."
Eliminating the horizon and the sky, Monet focused on a small area of the pond, seen as a piece of nature, almost a close-up. No details stand out and the overall impression is one of a shapeless surface. The square format reinforces the neutrality of the composition. The lack of a frame of reference gives the fragment an infinite, limitless feeling. Never was the artist's brushstroke so free, so detached from the description of forms. A close-up view of the canvas gives a feeling of total abstraction, because the brushstrokes are stronger than the identification of the plants or their reflections. The viewer has to make a constant visual and mental effort to piece together the landscape suggested in the painting. The unfinished borders accentuate this insistence on painting as a surface covered with paint, which was not lost on artists after the Second World War, particularly American painters exploring "abstract landscapes" and "lyrical abstraction."
Ai Weiwei review – the manifesto is in the medium
Original: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/sep/20/ai-weiwei-royal-academy-bicycles-world-goes-pop-review
Ai Weiwei is the world’s most famous living artist, but is this entirely because of his art? More people know of him as a fearless scourge of the Chinese government than have ever seen a single one of his works. So the very least achievement of the Royal Academy (which has had to watch in horror as Ai managed to get a visa to travel from China only to fall foul of our own asinine immigration service) is to set forth an enormous array of his sculptures, installations and films for the first time before a British public.
Ai’s gift is for the humanisation of conceptual art. Marcel Duchamp was his god as a student in New York in the 1980s – a coat hanger bent into the shape of Duchamp’s profile, the hook forming a question mark, is a deft homage – and the ready-made remains his regular medium. Bicycles, humdrum symbols of Chinese daily life, are suspended in silver clusters to make a soaring chandelier. Qing dynasty tables, reconfigured by master craftsmen, become martial arts fighters: two legs planted on the floor and two against the wall as if straining against the pressure of tradition.
A cluster of Qing stools, strung together and spiralling upwards like a sputnik or diadem, invokes the people of the past in a beautiful new form. Each work has its deep local meaning but each is an emblematic gathering of souls, of human communities as opposed to communism.
Ai remakes the ready-made, but also the destroyed. The cycling artist is the great recycler. Ancient carved-wood fragments are massed into a kind of catafalque for the dead (though with discreet handles for a gymnast to swing upon, a typically upbeat addition). What is compacted in this massive block is not just Chinese wood but Chinese culture: the curlicues of demolished temples, the fragments of old houses, old furniture, the elements of people’s lives – and their livelihoods.
One of the most dramatic works here is a bricked-up temple – or so it appears. Chunks of wall jammed into a carved-wood facade are not in fact ancient but poignantly modern: the remnants of Ai’s studio near Shanghai, demolished by the Chinese government before it was even completed on specious planning charges in 2011. The story of Ai’s own struggle runs through this show from first to last, with films about the demolition, his house arrest and the crab dinner he threw to mark the destruction, which was attended by a thousand guests (though not by the artist, again detained by police).
A heap of porcelain crabs silting up one corner of the Royal Academy – a lone hero crab climbing free of the rest – marks the occasion once more. As Sean Scullyremarks in the catalogue, Ai is modestly immodest.
The activism and the art are one, Ai has said; and almost all the art in this show speaks to the conditions of Chinese life. Over the years, Ai has employed a vast team of compatriots to expand this point. Who can forget the tide of sunflower seeds stretching across the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in their millions, each handmade in porcelain and each unique, every worker made to count. The opening room of this show is hung with radiant silver rings – 14 of them, large and shining, reprising the lunettes of the Royal Academy’s architecture but with an ultramodern industrial look that transports you to the mass-production factory far away where they were made. This is Ai at his subtlest, his speech both global and local. For although they look like mysterious planets, these rings, in their build-up of internal rims, describe the topography of China.
This show is variable. Ai has part-ownership of a marble quarry and has for several years employed masons to recreate contemporary objects in stone. Marble handcuffs, marble lipsticks, marble pushchair: the transformations go two ways. Some things are elevated while others turn absurd, such as the surveillance camera constantly trained on Ai’s home rendered sightless and impotent in marble. But Ai repeats the trope so often that its weaknesses are readily exposed.
There is a lot of renovated pop here – Chinese vases dipped in high-chrome paint, Coca-Cola crassly inscribed on a 2,000-year-old bowl (raising the obvious question of whether the artefact would now be more or less valuable). Presumably this must have special significance to Chinese viewers, but it feels otherwise commonplace. Over at Tate Modern, in their new show The World Goes Pop, dozens of artists in Mexico to Japan were doing something nearly identical back in the 60s. Coke, Hoover, Nissan, nuclear warheads, the cold war, the objectification of women – the targets were consistent, the techniques of collage, screen-printing, soft sculptures and shrill photo-based painting universal. The curators have even found Ukrainian examples in what amounts to a research project in three very banal dimensions. Pop, as if we didn’t know it, became a convenient megaphone for propaganda.
One vitrine in Ai’s show contains the bones of an intellectual who died in one of Mao’s labour camps – or rather, the bones cast in bronze and painted in exact facsimile. The commemoration lies in that (invisible) transformation. It must at least be acknowledged that the act of honouring the dead is as important as the art itself – perhaps more so. The deed is what counts. In some respects, what’s on show at the Royal Academy are the relics of a lifetime’s performance art.
It is no surprise that the strongest works here are the largest – Ai is at his best on a grand scale – and the most searingly political. The potency of Straight, his commemoration of the 5,000 children who died in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake that shattered their jerry-built schools, lies mainly in his devotional act of straightening by hand 90 tonnes of twisted metal collected from the ruins of the schools. Tides of rusting bars form a welling landscape on the floor, somewhere between gently undulating hills and a landslide.
It is a solemn and poignant commemoration, as if one could roll back time. Though what really mattered to the people of Sichuan was the way Ai used his world-famous blog to try and name both the victims and the officials involved in the deadly construction that brought these schools to instant collapse.
Ai’s blog was shut down (though many entries have been published in a book) and he was later illegally incarcerated for 81 days. Six rusting tanks in the final gallery give us something of this experience. Peer through a grille and what you see in each is a diorama of the cell, half life-sized, featuring Ai and two guards in effigy. Silent and watchful, the guards march him up and down the cramped space, stand over him as he eats and sleeps, scrutinise him in the shower (one squinting critically at his manhood), menacing him with intimate surveillance.
It is a brilliant and frightening work, his confinement evoked in the claustrophobic reduction that allows you to become both a witness and a spy, embarrassed and appalled. And it is the essence of Ai’s activism: a work that simultaneously documents an act of state brutality in a spirit of defiant freedom, a work that unleashes the political power of art.
Grapes - Ai Weiwei Catalogue note
Original: http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2017/modern-contemporary-art-evening-sale-hk0736/lot.1072.html
Instantly arresting in aesthetic and gripping in appropriation, Grapes embodies the brazen spirit that characterises Ai Weiwei’s dissident oeuvre. In the work, twenty-five stools dating back to the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) are woven together with legs pointed out so as to form a sort of high-sided semi-spherical bowl – a shape akin to a cluster of grapes. In its subversion of found objects that nods to Marcel Duchamp’s legacy, and by choosing the motif of grapes, a cherished subject of the Western still-life genre, Ai subverts two historical traditions in one elegant gesture. Ai has previously asserted that these sturdy tri-pronged stools are a fundamental expression of the centuries-old aesthetic of rural China; they are crafted with no nails or glue, and every countryside home would have one or more, often passed down from generation to generation. In his reconstructed sculpture, Ai inherits the integrity of the exquisite carpentry whilst overturning the practical function of the stools, transforming the furniture pieces into an inoperative yet strangely graceful mutation. Charged with conceptual wit, Grapes hails from one of the most symbolic series of the artist’s career and is highly representative, having been prominently featured in many of the artist’s large-scale solo exhibitions. Grapes is at once immensely personal and internationally significant, epitomizing Ai Weiwei’s acclaimed oeuvre that defies boundaries of geography and time. The artist first embarked on a body of work involving Qing furniture in 1997; previously, he had already done extensive work involving Han Dynasty and Neolithic urns. In the early 2000s he created his celebrated bicycle works that use found objects as modular building units within larger and more complex sculptures. Later on in 2013 he exhibited Bang, an explosive installation of 886 stools depicted in chaotic disarray, at the Venice Biennale. The ante was upped further in 2014, when Ai displayed over 6,000 stools from the Ming and Qing dynasties in the atrium of the Martin-Gropius-Bau Museum in Berlin. The immense scale of the work could only be appreciated from the museum’s second-floor balconies; from that height, each stool became a tiny pixel within a vast tapestry, like soldiers in an army. The stunning spectacle teased out multiple connotations alluding to relationships between history and contemporaneity, part and whole, identity and nationality, and the significance of humble everyday objects. Such timeless and universal themes, expressed and evoked through a wholly Chinese motif and aesthetic, are testament to Ai Weiwei’s sophisticated artistic vision that seamlessly stretches from the local to the global. Ai’s devoted appreciation and aesthetic preoccupation with daily materials are particularly worth highlighting. In a lot of his works, what shines through most powerfully is not his own authority as the creator but the physical nature of the particular materials he employs, be it wood, stone, or old stools. The artist recalls: “When I was a child, we had to pile up wood for the winter. Every house had a woodpile by the front door. Our woodpile was very tight and orderly, without any gaps. The people in the neighbourhood used to comment on it. During the Cultural Revolution, every school had a set of parallel bars and a basketball hoop in the schoolyard. We all competed to see what we could do with this piece of equipment that was basically two metal bars” (the artist cited in Ai Weiwei: According to What?, Mori Art Museum, 2013, p. 16). As Mami Kataoka observes, such a remark “displays Ai’s aesthetic preoccupation with daily activities and the process of giving them artistic form, as well as his focus on eliciting the creative value in ordinary objects” (Ibid.). With its appropriation and reverential transformation of Chinese furniture, the present lot hails from a series that is perhaps most representative of the artist’s profound interest in structure and craftsmanship. It is crucial to note that, in the creation of this sculpture, the stools have not been destroyed – while modified, their original form has not been denied, denigrated, or attacked. In fact, quite the opposite: Ai has not only relied on their inherent shape in his formation of the larger sculpture, but also on the constant assistance of local artisans in its production, using traditional carpentry and joinery techniques. Thus, in Grapes, the artist is not abandoning or attacking the mores and traditions of China, nor is he trying to make something that is not, at its root, inherently Chinese. Instead he is commenting, even symbolising or emblematising, the immutable winds of change blowing through the country of his birth. Together the stools form an entirely new object which, viewed holistically, appears barbed and defensive – knit together with consummate impregnable strength. Its form seems more organic than manufactured, seeming as if it has sprouted naturally and furthermore as if, given time, it might continue to grow into a whole impenetrable sphere. The work takes on a whiff of revolution; these humble household objects have abandoned their passive purpose to unite and form something new; something irrepressible and assertive. At the same time, Grapes constitutes a subtle yet powerful statement on the value of each and every individual life. The series was created after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake – a pivotal incident within Ai Weiwei’s career which outraged the artist and formed an important motivation for his art-making. More than 5,000 children lost their lives when shoddily constructed schoolhouses collapsed, while most of the surrounding buildings remained standing. The series of works which Ai created in response to the injustice reveal a sense of duty to commemorate the lost souls and to defend the fundamental value of human life, however ordinary, average or weak. In choosing the three-legged stool as his motif, so rustic and rural in its appearance but so quintessentially and humbly Chinese, Ai puts faith and strength in his fellow countrymen and points unequivocally towards the potent agency inherent in each unique human being. Packed with rich interpretative meaning and delicate social commentary, Grapes evidences the indomitable spirit and unparalleled artistic genius of one of the greatest living contemporary artists in the world.
Claude Monet (1840-1926), Nymphéas Bleus, Between 1916 and 1919
"I have come back to things that are impossible to do: water with weeds waving in the depths. Apart from painting and gardening, I am good for nothing. My greatest masterpiece is my garden."
A world just under our skin by James Patterson
It’s not a planet. Taken in a lab in London, Patterson’s shot is a light micrograph taken through a section of cat skin – showing a hair follicle developing beneath the surface.
