# 20

jonathan yeo, jan svankmejer, camden arts center

weirdest start to the week ever! i was the only student who posted my postcard (i think i misread the brief!) but wendy applauded me for my efforts and congratulated me on having good time management...! i was then encouraged to make a second postcard. a tutor, sam introduced me to the artist jonathan yeo (photograph below). he is a british painter who also works a lot with collage. his images are all taken from porn magazines... sam and i then went to the corner shop to buy a magazine which i could get images from. i chose "filthy wives" magazine. i can't believe i did it.

above is a scan from my second post card "greetings from suburbia!" i wanted my postcard to be appear a lot more subtle than that of yeo's.

wednesday's movie screening brought us 3 shorts films by the surrealist czech artists/animator/film maker jan svankmajer and "fellini satryicon" by federico fellini (who also directed the critically acclaimed film "la dolce vita"). i need to put it out there that this was the weirdest movie session yet. half of the students left during "fellini satryicon". we saw half of the movie (it is originally a 2 hour film) and the dubbed version (it was originally in italian) which wasn't ideal. i thought that even if it was left in it's original italian, the subtitles would've distracted the audience from all of the visuals. it's a very disorientating and disturbing piece of film. "fellini satryicon" is a loose adaption of a book called "satyricon" written approximately 60AD in rome by petronius, emperor nero's personal advisor. the book, like the film has no form or shape... here is the trailer:

i much preferred the films of svankmajer. i had been introduced to his films at the beginning of the year, during the rotation period. we saw "the flat", "dimensions of a dialogue" and "food". he works a lot with stop-motion animation, and uses conventional, familiar objects in the most unfamiliar ways. here is the first part of "food":

our new project to be completed for next friday is entitled "shorts" (for short stories!) we have been given 3 short stories by the author j.g. ballard and we must choose one of them to then produce a series of images for. we have been told that we are not illustrating the story, but interpreting sections or sentences that we particularly like. i chose to focus on "the drowned giant". some of my favourite sentences from the text were "a hundred arms pointed towards the sea", "a dozen ladders swung in the wind" and "a flock of gulls wheeled down from the sky". i have chosen to start illustrating these ones. here are some of my ideas to work on for a final piece.

an interesting little article - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12308952

i also trekked all the way to camden arts centre. i don't know whether it was because it was raining, or the fact that it was hard to find, but i was quite disappointed. i think i need to give it a second chance another day. the exhibit that they were displaying was "never the same river (possible futures, possible pasts) which was made up of 30 artists and designers, who had previously exhibited that over the past 50 years. what i found interesting was that the pieces were reinstalled in the position they previously occupied. they were all sharing time as their common theme. some of the biggest names exhibited were francis alÿs, francis bacon, henry moore and christian boltanski.

it was also the vip art fair. it ran exclusively online from the 22nd of january to the 30th. im not too sure whether i was actually meant to be on it, but i registered because i was intrigued!  i understand that it was an oppurtunity for art collectors to access artworks by critically acclaimed  contemporary artists, and to have contact with galleries, but i used it to find out about galleries i haven't heard of yet.  just under 2000 works were exhibited by 140 galleries. the galleries were organized by their location, and then into "emerging" (limoncello, wallspace), "focus", "premier medium" and "premier large" (gagosian, hauser & wirth, miro). with a mass amount of people trying to log in over the first few days, the website temporarily shut down. one online critic labelled renamed vip as "very inactive page". even so, it's reported that on the 28th of january the site had been view 6.2 million times! i thought it was a very interesting, innovative way of trying to display works- almost as if you were visited an actual art fair, but from the comforts of your living room!