aaronbroadhurst.org

Ach well … she didn’t last long.
But I’ve been meaning to do this for ages and, you may have noticed, I’ve been a leetle preoccupied of late.
You can keep up with things, chez moi, at my shiny new blog: aaronbroadhurst.org.
Bye bye.

“I entered into this deal in good faith” said Devil, 45, “how was I supposed to know he didn’t have one? I mean, I feel violated. The thieving, lying, neo-con, megalomaniac imperialist, brutal, bent, bullying, greedy little bastard never had a soul to sell in the first place … it’s a disgrace — ‘They’ should do something about this sort of thing.”

Devil, weeping openly, went on to describe Murdoch’s outrageous offer of shares in lieu of a bona-fide soul: “what would I want with something like News Corp … I mean, you can’t sow lies and fear, cause untold suffering, start wars with Fox N … Ah … Urmmm … just a minute …”

Suddenly, I was alone, in the bar, choking on a cheap smoke bomb.

Subsequent enquiries were fruitless — it was as though he had never existed, his identity had been erased.

I looked up and Fox News was on the big screen in the corner, rolling news ticker telling it big, keeping it simple and saying it over and over again. Now, who said something like that? Some German bloke … Anton, Adolf, something like that.

And the Lord Rupert looked at his work, and even he saw that it was a load of crap, but this was the enterprise culture and it sold millions so it was good. And on the same basis he decided to take over the television too, and the earth itself wept, and little robins vomited, and cuddly furry animals threw themselves under trains, and the whole thing was filmed by Sky Channel for a horror nature programme, and the most awful thing of all was that this was just the beginning.Attila the Stockbroker

All of which is to say: Happy Birthday Rupert — I really, really, really hope it’s your last.

Mirroring my mention of Richter, I should note that the other colossal pillar of German art, Anselm Kiefer, was born on 8th March, 1945, in Donaueschingen in the Black Forest of Baden-Württemberg.

“Aperiatur terra” comes from the Book of Isaiah: “let the earth be opened”. It goes on: “… and bud forth a saviour and let justice spring up at the same time”.

I’m not sure I can say anything interesting about him or his work. I wanted to link to Simon Schama’s, almost ecstatic, and, it turned out, absolutely true, piece in the Guardian last year prompted by Kiefer’s Aperiatur Terra show at White Cube but the vagaries of copyright seem to preclude that. I am just glad I saw those magnificent paintings in the flesh.
How anyone can see the world so clearly and still have hope, astonishes me and kills despair.

… read the rest of this post →

Kazimir Severinovich Malevich was born near Kiev in the Ukraine on 23rd February, 1878, first born of catholic ethnic Poles, Seweryn and Ludwika Malewicz. Eventually there were to be 14 little Maleviches although only nine of the children survived into adulthood.
Although he had a comfortable middle class childhood, his father was the manager of a sugar factory, he grew up far from the centres of “high” culture but, surrounded by the rich colourful peasant art of the Ukraine which he always loved, it was hardly a cultural desert.

But by 1910 he had a comfortable career, in Moscow, absorbing all the latest trends in art. Then, apparently out of the blue, in 1915, he suddenly came up with the idea of Suprematism, publishing his manifesto From Cubism to Suprematism.

By “Suprematism” I mean the supremacy of pure feeling in creative art. To the Suprematist the visual phenomena of the objective world are, in themselves, meaningless; the significant thing is feeling.Malevich

After his White on White of 1918 and Rodchenko’s Pure Red Color, Pure Yellow Color, Pure Blue Color of 1921, where could any artist go?

But painting refused to die.

I meant to spend a little time every morning looking at what happened “on this day” and then posting something — I’ve always found those time-lines fascinating: at the same time as Henry VIII was crowned in England, bronze foundries in Benin were … all that.

… read the rest of this post →

Jonathan Jones has written a really interesting article in the Guardian today on our apparent embrace of Public Art. He’s a provincial boy and definitely not a social snob, he wants to be fair and open but I think he goes too far, and goes with one eye shut tight.

I have to admit that I have a few problems with public art.

It is often presented as a panacea for areas of social and economic deprivation. But it doesn’t address those issues — it can’t. And the people who enthusiastically promote it as a solution believe sincerely and nihilistically that they can’t solve them either — well, they could try.

Cynically (is that me looking at them or them, or both?), the proponents of much of this shit often seem to see it as a way of adorning, decorating their new, private developments at public expense. Or sweetening the bitter pill of some controversial schemes.

It is true that our landscape has been formed by such things as picturesque landscaping and the enclosures. Capability Brown worked on private property but there is a closer relationship with enclosures or the flooding of valleys in North Wales to provide drinking water for Manchester, when public space is regenerated, repurposed and ends up being controlled, monitored and patrolled, effectively appropriated, made private.

And the thing that, ridiculously, troubles me the most is the way that public art steals our personal, mental space, remaps our psychic geography. A bench with a plaque in memory of a dead loved one is one thing but a monument is very much another. It says: this can no longer be your place — it was her special place and you must acknowledge that and respect our right to invade your space.
… read the rest of this post →

An International Exhibition of Modern Art, organised by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, opened in New York City’s 69th Regiment Armory, on Lexington Avenue, on 17th February 1913, and ran until March 15th.

And passed into legend.

The Armory Show.

Shelley Staples has created an amazing virtual tour of the show for the American Studies Program at the University of Virginia.

The mother of all blockbusters.