Monday 5 April 2010

Karsten Holler quoted:

"When you are a young artist you want to become somebody who is able to show his work outside of the studio. Often it takes a while before one of these works gets out. But when get some kind of public approval for what you're doing it's actually very hard to stop doing that. It's not only art magazines and journalists who are branding you; in some ways you are branding yourself. You say: 'Oh, well I did so many other things before and nobody really showed an interest in that, but suddenly I have something that people get interested in, which also means that the art magazines are writing about it, so I will have a very hard time trying to change that into something else.' So I think a lot of branding is a secondary effect of a more psychological difficulty of the artist to overcome this problem."
(art review)

Saturday 3 April 2010

Ritual:

Akha swing festival!

Swing and back to play!


I have been wanting to make a swing for about 6months now and have always been a big fan of 'the swing'. Its a standard thing to find in your local park - and even in the parks that aren't dedicated to kids - come summer and there's never a swing free. Everyone loves them.

I am trying to find the history of the swing. I imagine them to have been around forever, being simple and such fun (although I dont understand what it is that we love so much). I think there is something meditative about swinging and swings themselves are associated with such a diverse range of people. Children in parks, teenagers, love and romance, the garden swing for the Grannies, sex, monkeys and apes ... and I'm sure more that I'm going to discover. Not only that, but I think that they fit into any situation - prehaps not a court room... but they can bring something to a space. A bedroom, sitting room, garden. park, bus stop (!) and how about guerrilla swing sets - swings that appear all over the city in public places. Engage-able street art!