Pick Me Up, contemporary graphic art fair at Somerset House

Worth looking at in preparation for your end of year show, and as a follow on from your society group project you just did...Blurb from the Somerset House website about this exciting art fair...

23 April - 3 May 2010

Embankment Galleries, South Wing 
£5, concessions £4


Open daily 10.00-19.00, until 20.00 on Fri 23 April and Thur 29 April.


Special Glug evening Wed 28 April, 19.00-22.30, £7.50


Somerset House presents Pick Me Up, the first contemporary graphic art fair in the UK. The fair will bring together the most exciting graphic artists working today, giving you the opportunity to buy limited edition, affordable graphic art, illustration and design.

 The fair will be presented alongside a lively programme of events and activities including an open studio from legendary paper artist Rob Ryan.

Buy graphic prints, drawings,

t-shirts and fanzines

Art and design collectives and galleries, including Evening Tweed,It’s Nice That, Print Club London, Nobrow, Concrete Hermit, Le Gun, Peepshow, Landfill Editions, Nous Vous, will set up shop at Somerset House selling specially commissioned work. With graphic prints, drawings as well as T-shirts and fanzines on sale, there will be something for everyone.

The space will include screen-printing workshops run by Print Club London with invited guest designers drawn from the great and the good of the graphic design world, and a programme of film screenings curated by It’s Nice That.

Author project pictures on Flickr

See photos of your costume debuts and final presentation of all Author work before Easter on the right side in "Us"

Cut-out animation from Jan Lenica

You may know Jan Lenica's poster work, but he has worked in many fields such as costume design, children's book illustration, architecture, music, and film. In his animation you may recognise a lineage of political satire collage/cutout style harking back to the Dada group of artists such as Max Ernst, Kurt Schwitters or John Heartfield, but as this clip points out, you may also recognise his influence on the likes of Terry Gilliam (Monty Python animation era) and Jan Svankmajer. If you are interested in this lineage, see this great website with its timeline of photomontage, called "nu-real: fantastic photomontage and its possible influences 1857-2007"

If you click this film and see it in youtube there are many other very seminal films to view down the right hand side or just look here at TheMotionBrigade's movie selection...all very good.

Mythologies exhibition at Haunch of Venison

Just back from another excellent exhibition at the Haunch of Venison which I urge you to see before it closes on 25th April. See all about it here but don't place too much judgement on the images on the website, they have to be seen in the flesh. Also prepare for the ground floor not to grab you so much as further floors and rooms upstairs.

Here are some of the most relevant pictures (for your current stage of the project) I could get from the website, but go and see the whole range in person. It's free to get in!

If you enjoy eccentric and curiosity-laden archaeological and anthropological museums like the Petrie, Sir John Soane's, Pitt Rivers, Hunterian, Horniman , then this exhibition (which is inspired by the previous occupier of the venue, the ethnographic Museum of Mankind), will be of great interest. I personally spent many an hour sketching in that museum which, along with the others above, inspired my thesis on the objectification of the unknown, the urge that discoverers and the resultant hegemonic powers had to categorise and study unfamiliar cultures, sometimes with innocent wonder, and sometimes with much more troubling consequences. This exhibition is a reappraisal of our current world through the eyes of the past. As the exhibition guide says, in "exploring museological strategies such as archiving, display and taxonomy, whilst blurring the boundaries between the parallel universes of art, natural history, ethnography and anthropology, the exhibition aims to re-awaken a sense of wonder. In the last 50 years ethnography has struggled to rid itself of its focus on the strange and mysterious but these are qualities that inspire many contemporary artists. Artists are perhaps today's field researchers, ethnographers and storytellers, offering us ways to explore and interpret the strange phenomena that is contemporary life around the world". 

It uses, as its inspiration, themes which were the titles of exhibitions at the Museum of Mankind, 'Beginnings and Endings', 'Rites and Ritual', 'Religion', 'Magic' and 'Material Culture'. It might relate quite strongly to the work you have been doing in your societies- creating beings, cultures, rituals and behaviours, and artifacts of your societies' cultures.

A scary Happy Easter! Greetings Cards pt 1

Recurring themes of eggs, rabbits and chicks are used in these vintage greetings cards (as in many Easter cards) to symbolise new and abundant life, referring to the rising of Jesus from the tomb in the christian public holiday of Easter. Somehow these cards manage to make it seem like a creepy celebration, and not the innocent and joyful one it is intended to be!!! Chosen for comedic effect!



And here a perversely friendly halloween card! This uses some of the traditional Halloween symbols of Pumpkin Heads, black cats, moons and bats, to represent death and evil spirits and the warding off thereof!

See more vintage public holiday cards here

Flags and heraldry

Going back to the Mardi Gras theme, the sense of a cathartic state of mind, an ephemeral "State" of freedom, and turning upside down of social and power hierarchies for the period of carnival, there are kings and queens of the carnival, but also there is a Mardi Gras flag with traditional heraldic colour representations as follows, purple for justice, green for faith and gold for power (chosen by the visiting Grand Duke Alexei Alexandrovich of Russia in 1872) ...

Mail Art

Shameless second plug of the Raven Row exhibition of Ray Johnson's collages and mail art work. Excellent gallery (amazing building in itself), excellent and extensive exhibition featuring previously unseen collages and mail art of his. He was often described as being affiliated to the fluxus movement and a forefather of the Pop Art and Mail Art movements. These images here are just a small example, but the works in the exhibition are spectacular. It's free to get in and you get a great free brochure of many of the best images to take away with you.

Monuments

The Festival of Britain. A monument to Britain's achievements and a reinforcement of its strengths, traditions, manufacturing, craft, design and progressive innovations after the war. A chance to celebrate and remember who we were and what we were good at, after taking a battering. This film was sponsored by the Central Office of Information of the government and endorsed by the Crown. The above brochure cover for the festival is by Abram Games, a noted Graphic Designer of the times. He produced strikingly iconic work for such things as London Underground walls, book covers, propaganda and public information posters, and stamps. He was the Official War Artist during the second world war and produced around 100 posters during that time. Therefore the perfect designer for the task of the festival brochure. See more of his work here, and here.

http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif


See another documentary retrospective of the festival here. More honest, not such a propagandist film like the above, more a fascinating and evocative visual essay, produced by The Observer newspaper group (but also sponsored by the Central Office of Information of the government), on the dynamic designs and ethos of the festival, and the state of the nation at the time.

The legacy of the festival is of course abundantly clear on the South Bank now with the original Royal Festival Hall building from the time still there, and the creative and innovative ethos still perpetuated in the exhibitions, performances, architecture and environmental designs and visuals. This demonstrates the lasting power of bold statements.

Then there was the Dome...



Widely considered to be a poor imitation of the aims of the Festival of Britain with less substance and clarity, but perhaps hampered by the somewhat less tangible industries that Britain was then known for in more abundance than the manufacturing and craft based industries of the 1950s, and the less distinct identity of the nation as a whole. Its legacy is less determinate as a result.

Passports

Who are you? Where are you from? Where have you been?







Qing Dynasty Passport



Lord Leighton's passport



A Polish passport from 1931

Stamping

Wild Plakken's stamps for the centenary of the Dutch trade union movement, produced in 1989. These use the iconic symbols of joining of hands to focus on the principles of solidarity, emancipation and democracy as the central tenets of the Nederlandse Vakbeweging. See a history of Dutch stamps here



Romanian stamp commemorating the Romanian Revolution from Ceaucescu's despotic rule.











A wide range of techniques, but all bold and direct, communicating often powerful statements of political, social, cultural and industrial ideals or achievements. All succinct for the limited surface area (and sometimes low grade papers) of the stamps. See more courtesy of here



My own collection of Czechoslovakian stamps. Though they span a period from 1918 to maybe the 1980's (before the dissolution into the independent Czech Republic and Slovakia), and a wide variety of subjects and illustrative approaches, they seem to share a certain sensibility and idiosyncratic aesthetic that indicates the fluctuating social, industrial and political effects on Czechoslovakian cultural identity during those times (the state being a somewhat forced mix of different ethnic groups, all with strong visual culture, but perhaps with the Czech identity at the fore). Perhaps the need to express the unity and identity of this emergent state resulted in this exuberant display.

Flagging

The story of the Union Jack, clever amalgamation of several national flags.



A diagram describing the colour proportions of major world flags, interesting to note that the same colours appear over and over again, there is a predominance of red and blue and yellow.



Above and below flags produced by the Fante, a tribe from Ghana. The flags are particular and narrative in nature and all produced using the process of appliqué. Most of those preserved were produced during the period in their history when the British ruled [around the mid to late 19th Century]. It is interesting to note the bastardised versions of the Union Jack, possibly an act of interpretation / subversion.








pirates!



another example of the crossover from narrative and anecdotal imagery to symbolic and abstracted statement making! This is John Quelch's flag, a notorious pirate, scourge of the seven seas, ravager of man/woman/children/dog/cat/guinea pig ahaaargh!!! etc etc.



This time we have the flag of Captain Dulaien.

Mapping

This is the oldest 'extant' pre - Renaissance rectangular map of the world. Produced in Egypt in the first half of the 11th century and part of a collection of images known as the book of Curiosities. Some of the images contain [possibly] the first cartographic references to England [Angle terre]. But more/equally interesting is the mode of visual description, the ability to produce an image which relies on Euclidean observation converted in to 2D, abstraction of space, and an economy of articulation.




Another image form that book of curiosities [all courtesy of here, thank you very much. This image depicts the Indian Ocean, again a clean, efficient and abstracted 'graphic' representation of geographical space. There are liberties taken with information and a degree of imagination applied to fill in the gaps.



This time an image of the Indus.



The world map according to Ptolemy.



Satirical map depicting the state of Europe during the first World War.







Images from the Kyushu medical book.