Secret letters unravel Kahlo legend [Guardian arts and architecture blog] “It’s part of Frida Kahlo‘s considerable legend that she had a brief but passionate love affair with Trotsky shortly after his arrival in Mexico from Russia, where Stalin had ousted him from the government. Yet judging by a series of letters and documents that have only now come to light, it turns out the “affair” never took place. In the letters the painter talks down to the revolutionary and campaigns for her husband, fellow painter Diego Rivera, to assume a more prominent role in the communist party…”
The Glue Society’s Crucifixion from the God’s Eye View series.
The Bible According to Google Earth [Creative Review] “Scenes from the Bible have been imagined by countless artists over the centuries, but never quite like this. God’s Eye View portrays four key Biblical events as if captured by Google Earth. It’s the work of Sydney-based “creative collective The Glue Society. The project was commissioned by Eric Romano of Pulse Art, New York for its Miami art fair. Romano had seen the group’s Hot with a Chance of a Late Storm installation, a comment on global warming in which a melting ice cream van oozed across the promenade and onto the sand at Tamarama in Australia last year as part of Sydney’s Sculpture by the Sea event, and commissioned them to create this new work…”
The Visitors: Aliens and UFOs in Contemporary Art [Sydney Morning Herald] “In 1868 a floating ark, filled with paper and piloted by a neutral-coloured spirit, abducted surveyor Frederick Birmingham and took him to the highest point of Parramatta Park, kindly returning him to awake in his own home. Birmingham had another UFO sighting in 1873 and became so obsessed with the phenomenon he set down his experiences in a book…”
If the Copy Is an Artwork, Then What’s the Original? [New York Times, Art & Design] “Since the late 1970s, when Richard Prince became known as a pioneer of appropriation art — photographing other photographs, usually from magazine ads, then enlarging and exhibiting them in galleries — the question has always hovered just outside the frames: What do the photographers who took the original pictures think of these pictures of their pictures, apotheosized into art but without their names anywhere in sight?”
Art 2007 [Guardian Unlimited] “The Venice Biennale, the five-yearly Documenta in Kassel, Germany, and the once-a-decade Sculpture Project in Münster, Germany, all coincided in June. In Venice, Tracey Emin underwhelmed, upstaged by the French artist Sophie Calle, who took revenge on the boyfriend who dumped her with a show lampooning his break-up letter. Documenta 12 was universally derided, apart from by those who managed to eat at Ferran Adrià‘s three-star El Bulli restaurant in Catalonia, designated a Documenta pavilion for the duration. Münster was an oasis of intelligence, wit, hearty German food and, in a play by Nordic duo Elmgreen and Dragset, talking sculptures. The motorised cast included a flirtatious Barbara Hepworth, a miserable Giacometti and a wisecracking Jeff Koons bunny…”
