In this new TateShots video, artist Ed Ruscha talks about the “cultural curiosities” — the gas stations, swimming pools and parking lots of Los Angeles — that he photographed for his books:
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Published September 13, 2013
Tag: tate
Published May 24, 2013
TateShots: Ed Ruscha
TateShots visits artist Ed Ruscha his studio in Los Angeles:
Published January 18, 2013
Something for the Weekend
Rubbish — Rachel Cooke on the artist Kurt Schwitters at The Guardian:
Merz doesn’t mean anything: it is a nonsense word (it comes from Commerzbank, an ad for which appears in one of his earliest collages). But after 1918 everything Schwitters made was Merz, whether it was periodical, painting or poem. He was a one-man movement. “The word denotes essentially the combination of all conceivable materials for artistic purposes,” he said. “And technically the principle of equal evaluation of the individual materials… A perambulator wheel, wire-netting, string and cotton wool are factors having equal rights with paint.” In other words, art could be made from the things most people regarded as rubbish. Almost overnight, he became a collagist.
There is a slide-show of Schwitters’ collages here.
Also: Merzman: The Art of Kurt Schwitters, is a fascinating 30-minute BBC Radio 4 documentary about the artist and his work in Britain.
The exhibition Kurt Schwitters in Britain opens at the Tate January 30, 2013.
Going Underground — The iconic London Underground typeface, designed by Edward Johnston in 1913, turns 100:
“Underground” — later known as “Johnston” — was circulated as a lettering guide for sign-painters and also made into wood and metal type for posters, signs, and other publicity materials used throughout London’s transport network.
Johnston himself only drew one weight of the typeface. He based its weight and proportions on seven diamond-shaped strokes of a pen stacked in a row. This gesture even shows up in the typeface itself, with the characteristic diamond used as the tittle of the “i” and “j”. He felt so strongly about the weight of the design that when another student of his agreed to create an accompanying set of bold capitals, Johnston wouldn’t speak to him for decades afterward.
And finally…
Fire Hose — James Gleick on the Library of Congress collecting and storage of Twitter messages, for the New York Review of Books:
Comments closedThis is an ocean of ephemera. A library of Babel. No one is under any illusions about the likely quality—seriousness, veracity, originality, wisdom—of any one tweet. The library will take the bad with the good: the rumors and lies, the prattle, puns, hoots, jeers, bluster, invective, bawdy probes, vile gossip, epigrams, anagrams, quips and jibes, hearsay and tittle-tattle, pleading, chicanery, jabbering, quibbling, block writing and ASCII art, self-promotion and humblebragging, grandiloquence and stultiloquence. New news every millisecond. A vast confusion of vows, wishes, actions, edicts, petitions, lawsuits, pleas, laws, proclamations, complaints, grievances. Now comical then tragical matters.
Call it what you will, the Twitter corpus now forms a piece of “the creative record of America” and therefore falls squarely within the library’s mission…
Published January 11, 2013
TateShots: Kurt Schwitters ‘Merz Barn’
I didn’t know that influential German artist Kurt Schwitters spent the last years of his life in exile in England’s Lake District creating something called the ‘Merz Barn’. Did you?
Schwitters started constructing the original ‘Merzbau’ (pictured above) inside his Hannover studio in the 1920’s and continued to work on it until he fled Nazi Germany in 1937. The Merzbau itself was later destroyed in an Allied bombing raid in World War II.
The uncompleted ‘Merz Barn’ that Schwitters began building near Elterwater in the Lake District is much less well-known. The latest TateShots video visits this only surviving example of Schwitters’ Merz environment:
(I’m not entirely sure how or why radio presenter Tom Ravenscroft (son of the late John Peel) is involved, but if you don’t listen to his weekly music show on BBC, you should probably take a listen… if you like that sort of thing.)
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Published November 23, 2012
Quentin Blake Beyond the Page
“I want everything I do to look spontaneous. It’s not that I think illustration should necessarily be like that, but this is what I can do.”
In this short interview for the Tate, illustrator Quentin Blake talks about his new book Beyond the Page. Written by Blake, it chronicles his projects over the past ten years, including his works for the walls of hospitals, galleries and other public spaces:
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Published November 3, 2012
William Klein: In Pictures
In this interview for Tate Media, William Klein, one of the 20th century’s most important artists, photographers and film-makers, discusses his experience photographing on the streets of New York, the challenges of publishing his first book and how he working with filmmaker Federico Fellini:
Klein’s work is featured in the exhibition William Klein + Daido Moriyama at Tate Modern, 10 October 2012–20 January 2013. You can watch a Tate interview with Daido Moriyama here.
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Published May 17, 2012
TateShots Bruce Davidson’s Subway
“I wanted to transform the subway from its dark, degrading, and impersonal reality into images that open up our experience again to the colour, sensuality, and vitality of the individual souls that ride it each day.”
Photographer Bruce Davidson talked to TateShots about Subway, the groundbreaking series of portraits he began taking in the New York subway system in the spring of 1980:
The series was collected into a book published by Aperture in 1986, and the 25th anniversary edition of Subway was published last year. The New York Review of Books ran excerpt of the introduction to that new edition here.
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Published October 25, 2011
Gerhard Richter at Tate Modern
With a major retrospective currently in London, artist Gerhard Richter talks about his life and work with Nicholas Serota, Director of Tate, on the eve of the show opening:
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