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Index: Art & Architecture

Blasting beyond Britain.

Andrew Thacker: Vorticism has been understood as the only significant avant-garde art movement that emerged in Britain in the years immediately prior to the First World War, a period when many artistic ‘-isms’ emerged across continental Europe, including Cubism, Futurism, and Post-Impressionism. It was only with the publication of the modernist little magazine BLAST, in 1914, and the First Vorticist Exhibition at the Doré Galleries in London in 1915, that a similarly aggressive and confrontational art movement appeared on British shores, led by the self-styled ‘enemy’ painter and writer, Percy Wyndham Lewis. With Vorticism abstract modern art had arrived in Britain.

• A long island: Manhattan – 3000 feet by six feet.

Over the course of the work’s seventeen-year career, during which time it was seen by hundreds of thousands of Americans, Bullard’s panorama was never exhibited anywhere in or near New York City itself.

• Is Britain’s civic life flourishing in villages, but dying in cities?

Having lived in the capital since birth, village life was alien to McCabe. “I found the community down there to be really special, especially coming from London, where I don’t even know my neighbours.”

• Lucian Freud’s collection of ‘melancholy similarities’.

o early was [Lucian] Freud’s reputation established – while he was still a teenager – that for almost all of his career he was able to paint on his own terms, and only what he was interested in.

· Event: ‘Abstraction’ at The Room in London N17, from 3 July 2011.

‘ABSTRACTION’, a group exhibit at The Room, 33 Holcombe Road, Tottenham Hale, N17, opens 3 July and continues through 2 November 2011.

· To an old dog, every day’s a brand new trick.

I saw how the dog does it; how, without the human’s painful ability to project ahead and fear the inevitable, the dog simply wakes to each day as a new step in the journey.

Ruskin and the distinction between Aesthesis and Theoria.

Anthony O’Hear: Vain, yet not all in vain… from the lips of the Sea Sybil men shall learn for ages yet to come what is most noble and most fair. So long as we are able to learn this (maybe guided by Ruskin himself), the distinction between Aesthesis and Theoria remains. From Ruskin’s point of view, the distinction is necessarily timeless.

· Event: Smile! You’re on candid kino. Vertov at the MOMA. (And here.)

Dziga Vertov, of course, considered his films to be documentaries, records of actuality, but all his work reflected his very personal, highly poetic vision of Soviet ‘reality,’ a vision he maintained throughout his life, long after the dustbin of soviet history had claimed him, too.

New York in the ’70s: the pioneers head downtown.

Michelene Wandor: From the very beginning there is a stark contrast between materials, form and content: the process which makes art history is ironically very visible. Videos and sound, recreation, give a flavour of the original chaos and vigour, out of which a genuinely new ‘found’ and ‘made’ series of artistic experiments developed.

Experts stare at the floor and try to make sense of it all.

We simply don’t know whether it was part of a residence or an official building, and we can’t even say whether the owner or owners were Jewish, Christian, or pagan. The date is not secure either, although the excavator proposes about AD 300…

Peter Milton: the satisfaction of elaboration in a digital world.

By PETER MILTON [from his website] – Tracking Shot, named after the filming technique of tracking alongside the subject of a scene while it is being filmed, is the first of three prints in a new series of 23″ x 36” etchings, to be part of a set I am calling Sight Lines. With Tracking […]

Enter Vivian Maier, finally out of the shadows.

‘Vivian Maier, proud native of France and Chicago resident for the last 50 years died peacefully on Monday. Second mother to John, Lane and Matthew. A free and kindred spirit who magically touched the lives of all who knew her.’

Arcimboldo: three centuries of ‘weird!’ and ‘cool!’

For at least three centuries, the critical response to Arcimboldo has been of much the same tenor. Though he found a few champions among the Surrealists, his paintings have been admired mostly as clever oddities, products of a courtly taste for the fantastic in the Age of Exploration.

Europeans don’t make Arabs like this any more.

As this exhibition persuasively argues, mounting interest in non-European culture in the long 19th century helped push forward art’s formal agenda, until, in the 1900s, “the Orient germinated the modernist revolution”.