"The public were forced to use their imagination'

When I left my mobile phone at home I noticed that it was way more exciting to meet my friend.

In fact I had to wonder where he was, if he'd come at all, if he had been run over by a truck etc ...

My imagination had to be active rather than my fingers typing a text message ...

Ménage à trois

He said YES!

Mr. Balka has agreed to be interviewed for my dissertation.

Very cryptic, he said to try at the start of next week.

My friend says he reminds her of a member of the Addams family gone missing and the black box at Tate Modern just gives her the creeps.

But I can only thank Mr. Balka for giving me this opportunity!

Art:21

Just sent another email to Miroslaw Balka asking if I can interview him.

Because I love him.

Is he ever going to reply, I wonder?

Meanwhile, I have found a cool website called art:21

“Art:21–Art in the Twenty-First Century” is the only series on television to focus exclusively on contemporary visual art and artists in the United States, and it uses the medium of television to provide an experience of the visual arts that goes far beyond a gallery visit.

Fascinating and intimate footage allows the viewer to observe the artists at work, watch their process as they transform inspiration into art, and hear their thoughts as they grapple with the physical and visual challenges of achieving their artistic visions."

There's lots and lots of people to get in touch with too.

Nothing, nothing, nothing!

I am just getting more and more frustrated at this ugly box and I am not going to give up and stalk Mr. Balka again and again until he will surrender.

Why don't you want to talk to me, Miroslaw?!

"But perhaps the void invoked by How It Is is another kind of emptiness—rather, the nothing described by Jean Baudrillard in his late art writing, where art is identified as "emptied out," as “nil.” Balka’s container is not just empty; it is empty, over scaled melodrama." ... "the work is a pretentious mimesis of nothing.''

If only Baudrillard was alive, I would stalk him then.

Too late.

full article here

Jonathan Jones I love you!

"When I realised a few years ago that people no longer had any reference to the history of modernism in mind when they said "modern art", I was shocked. I blamed it on Tate Modern for adopting such a grand name and then filling its opening displays with the brashly new back in the early noughties.

[...]

And this is the problem that dogs the art critic in the 21st century.

Our glibly high evaluation of today's art, casually calling it "modern art" as if it could ride roughshod over the achievements of the last century, and we could cherry pick modernism's history to find phoney lineages for whatever we want to plug, is a massive lie.

The arts in the period between 1880 and 1920 reached heights of achievement unseen since the Renaissance.

The avant garde in its prime was all greatness, all glory. With the best will in the world, and however much we find to admire and to hope for, our time is mannerist in comparison.

Modern art? I wish it would come back."

Jonathan Jones I love you!