Hasta La Ideas

The Glue Society recently created a new art installation for the Adelaide Festival of Ideas, which aimed to highlight the amount of food each Australian household wastes every year. The piece consisted of a fruit and veg store, where all the food inside was left to slowly rot over the course of the festival…

While several artists have utilised rotting fruit in their work (see works by Anya Gallaccio and Sam Taylor-Wood, for example), The Glue Society’s piece, titled More Than Ten Items Or Less, has a specific political message. “The purpose of the installation is to kickstart and foster a debate about the issue of food wastage, which is particularly endemic in Australia,” says artist James Dive. “More Than Ten Items Or Less is a purpose-built grocery store displaying the equivalent of the average household’s food waste in a year, which is then left to rot.”

The Adelaide Festival of Ideas took place over four days from October 17-20. The Glue Society’s installation was set up the day before the festival began so at the start, as the pictures above show, the food all looked pretty fresh. This rapidly changed though, as onions began to sprout and the fruit began to grow furry. The photos below show days four and five on the site.

The installation, which visitors could look into through the windows but not enter, unsurprisingly caused some controversy. “But that’s the point,” continues Dive. “Everyone hates seeing good food wasted, but we all still do it. The work sets out to confront us by reflecting our disgust back onto our own behaviour.

“As a nation, Australians waste $7.8 billion dollars worth of food a year. And we throw away one in every five shopping bags we buy, or enough to fill 450,000 garbage trucks. On a global scale one third of the food produced for human consumption gets lost or wasted.”

As well as shocking visitors with the sight of the rotting store, The Glue Society encouraged debate online during the course of the festival, asking householders to share images of the contents of their fridges, to debate use-by dates and swap recipes for leftovers.

Photographs by Hugh Fenton

The Glue Society, based in Sydney, is known as much for its art installations as its advertising work, with previous works including a giant sculpture of a melting ice cream van, a series of images that reimagined scenes from the Bible in Google Earth, and a house that rained on the inside. The collective’s most recent work, for the Sculpture By The Sea exhibition in Aarhus, Denmark, was a piece that saw an entire amusement park crushed into a cube. More info is available online at gluesociety.com; and more on the Adelaide Festival of Ideas is at adelaidefestivalofideas.com.au.

Focus sur l’artiste finlandais Pietari Posti qui a récemment imaginé une série d’illustrations très réussie réalisée pour un guide de shopping de la ville d’Istanbul. Colorées, joviales et d’une grande qualité, ces créations sont à découvrir sur son portfolio et en images dans la suite de l’article.

Charlotte Bracegirdle appropriates artworks by other artists or photographers, often in postcard form, and paints on them in oil to turn them into entirely different images. In a striking new body of work, she has reinvented a series of photographs of Penguin authors. CR talks to Bracegirdle about the new series, which is currently on show at the Louisville Photo Biennial…

The postcards that Bracegirdle is working with here come from a set released by Penguin in 2011 that features 100 images of Penguin authors (CR wrote about the set here). As she explains below, she first came upon the postcards by chance, but by working on them in oil she has transformed them into a set of artworks that are dramatic and surprising and just a little bit ghostly. The authors are almost unidentifiable in Bracegirdle’s works (though I bet some of you can still name them – go on, give it a go in the comments box below), despite being some of the most famous names in literary history.

CR: Where did you first come across the Penguin photos? What stood out about them for you?

CB: In a bookshop in Oxford. I frequently pop into bookshops in the hunt for pictures. I can’t tell you exactly what made them stand out. I just knew I had to buy them, and have now gone on to buy another five packs. I buy books or postcards if I like them, something in an image sets a spark off in my head but I never know what may happen to any of the images. Some lay dormant for years, others get worked on the very next day. I loved the amount of portraits in this box, all those clever yet slightly stern faces sat on top of each other. It was the history and the talent in one little box that initially attracted me.

CR: Do you always work with appropriated imagery?

CB: Yes. I can’t remember the last time I invented my own entire picture. I have always used other people’s images, when I made sculptures I collaged objects together that already existed.

CR: Has this ever created any difficulties?

CB: Oh yes, but I don’t let this bother me anymore. When I worked on Old Masters there was never an issue with copyright, then as I started to work on photographs I realised that I may be heading into troubled waters. However, I decided to carry on as I relish what I do, it challenges me constantly and I believe that what I do is transformative. When people realise that I hand paint the works and that they are not Photoshopped this seems to make a difference. I did get a phone call from Henri Cartier-Bresson’s family enquiring about my work and questioning it. I then met with Eric Franck, Bresson’s brother-in-law, who was incredibly lovely and ended up buying three of the Bresson pieces I had made. Franck took the work to AIPAD New York and enjoyed the confusion that my pieces caused for many Bresson fans. He understood my work, and knew I was working on Bresson’s works because I love them, not to undermine or dismiss them. I want people to rediscover the originals, to remind them of what has been. When my work is exhibited I always give the details of the original piece.

CR: What interests you about working with other people’s work?

CB: It is a challenge. Looking at an already existing, well-known image and altering it and still coming up with an interesting, arresting picture. I imagine it’s a bit like making a decent remix. Also I never know what may happen, I never know where my work is going, and this not knowing excites me. I get bored very easily, which is a little bit of a paradox as the process of my work is incredibly time consuming and repetitive.

CR: Most people who manipulate existing imagery, do it digitally, but you work with oil, why is that? What difference do you think that makes to the finished work?

CB: It makes a huge difference to the finished work. (I work in acrylic mostly). When you see the pieces in the flesh there is a shadow where the paint has been placed which forms the shape of the part of the picture that is missing. In this age of technology we must not forget what the hand and eye can achieve. People assume my work is Photoshopped, and are pleasantly surprised when they realise they are painted.

CR: With the Penguin images, does the actual author affect how you paint them or is it just how they look in the photo?

CB: No, they are all very automatically and instantly worked on. I may spend ages looking through the postcards deciding what to do but I don’t research the image until afterwards as I find this just makes me think too much, and adds confusion. I enjoy finding out more once I have finished a piece; the postcard of Kafka, for example, turned out to be rather fitting.

Bracegirdle’s work forms part of the Louisville Photo Biennial, currently taking place in Louisville, USA until November 10. More info on the Biennial is at louisvillephotobiennial.com. More of Bracegirdle’s work can be viewed online at charlottebracegirdle.co.uk.

(Photos courtesy Studio Olafur Eliasson and Keystone/Christian Beutler)

Rolex’s Arts Initiative gives new meaning to the phrase “ones to watch.” For the past decade, the luxury watchmaker has paired mentors and protégés in dance, film, literature, music, theatre, visual arts, and—beginning last year—architecture for year-long creative collaborations. The program, which encourages dialogue between artists of different generations, cultures, and disciplines, has devised dynamic duos such as Anish Kapoor and Nicholas Hlobo, Zhang Yimou and Annemarie Jacir, and SANAA’s Kazuyo Sejima and Yang Zhao.

Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice was the setting for a festive gathering held earlier today to announce the seven creative wizards who will serve as mentors for the 2014-15 program: Olafur Eliasson (visual arts), Alejandro González Iñárritu (film), Michael Ondaatje (literature), Alexei Ratmansky (dance), Kaija Saariaho (music), Jennifer Tipton (theater), and Peter Zumthor (architecture). As for the emerging talents, it’s pick-your-own-protégé. Each of the mentors will choose a talented young artist to join them for a year of creative collaboration—and a grant of 25,000 Swiss francs (approximately $28,000, at current exchange rates).

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Né à Tokyo et vivant à Dusseldorf, Ramon Todo imagine de magnifiques créations en insérant des blocs de verre dans divers objets. Des oeuvres splendides et surréalistes, utilisant des roches volcaniques, des livres ou encore des fragments du mur de Berlin que l’on peut retrouver au Art Front Gallery.