Pembroke Street, Oxford
Pembroke Street is in central Oxford, England. St Ebbes Street is to the west and major thoroughfare of St Aldate's is to the east. Modern Art Oxford is located on the north side of the street. Greene's Tutorial College is at 45 Pembroke Street and All Nations Language School is at No 40. Pembroke Square and Pembroke College are close by to the south. In November 2009, it was announced that the planned Story Museum would move to premises at Rochester House in Pembroke Street, using a gift of £2.5m from a private donor
Contemporary art gallery
A contemporary art gallery is a place where contemporary art is shown for exhibition and/or for sale. The term "art gallery" is used to mean art museum, the rooms displaying art in any museum, or in the original sense, of any large or long room. A contemporary gallery is commercial or funded and has a second-tier status positioned between the first-tier status of a national, state-run or corporate museum, the third-tier of minor galleries which include artist-run galleries, retail galleries, artist's co-operatives. Commercial galleries are for-profit owned businesses dealing in artworks by contemporary artists. Galleries run for the public good by cities, art collectives, not-for-profit organizations, local or national governments are termed Non-Profit Galleries. Many of these, such as the Tate Gallery have an aspect of charity and can be arranged around a Trust or estate. Galleries run by artists are sometimes known as Artist Run Initiatives, may be temporary or otherwise different from the traditional gallery format.
Contemporary art galleries are established together in urban centers such as the Chelsea district of New York considered to be the center of the American contemporary art world. Most large urban areas have several art galleries, most towns will be home to at least one. However, they may be found in small communities, remote areas where artists congregate, e.g. the Château de Montsoreau-Museum of Contemporary Art in France, the Chinati Foundation in United States, the Taos art colony in New Mexico and St Ives, Cornwall. Curators create group shows that say something about contemporary issues or a certain theme, trend in art, or group of associated artists. Galleries choose to represent artists giving them the opportunity to show regularly; some have a narrow focus. Although concerned with providing a space to show works of visual art, art galleries are sometimes used to host other artistic activities, such as music concerts, poetry readings, or performances, which are considered performance art and at other times theater.
While many galleries exhibit painting and sculpture of all types and movements like Abstract expressionism, Pop Art, Photo realism, Color Field, Lyrical Abstraction and Postminimalism etc. Conversely, some works of contemporary art are not shown in a gallery. Land art, performance art, internet art, mail art and installation art and other emerging forms often exist outside a gallery due to being site-specific. Documentation of these kinds of art such as photographic records, are shown and sold in galleries however, as are preliminary or process drawings and collages. British artist Richard Long manages to combine his core intentions by linking the materials used in his land art, to make gallery art. Andy Goldsworthy does so as well. There are many operational models; the most common business model is that of the for-profit owned gallery. This is an competitive market but one that may yield great profits; as a general rule, commercial galleries do not charge admission to the public in a nod to the egalitarian philosophies of many artists and critics and to encourage attendance, or in the interests of just good business.
Instead, they profit by taking a cut of the art's sales. Some galleries in cities like Tokyo and in New York charge the artists a flat rate per day or per week, though this is considered distasteful in some international art markets; the business of contemporary art has in recent decades become internationalized and commercialized. Commercial galleries choose to represent artists giving them the opportunity to have solo shows regularly, they promote the artist's shows by cultivating collectors, making press contacts, trying to get critical reviews. Most reputable galleries absorb the cost of printing invitations to the opening and other P. R. publications. Some galleries self-publish or help to arrange publishing for art books and monographs concerning their artists, they sometimes otherwise ensure the artist has enough money to make ends meet. One idiosyncrasy of contemporary art galleries is their aversion to signing business contracts, although this is changing due to artists taking more control of their output and saleability through professional practice information provided by artists' associations.
Large commercial art fairs where galleries show their best artists and sell works over a period of a week or so have taken the art world by storm in recent years. The biggest of these is the Armory Show in New York; these fairs have been criticized by artists as over-commercializing contemporary art. There are many not-for-profit, artist-run spaces and art-collective galleries which follow different business models, as well as vanity galleries which prey on unsavvy artists. Galleries tend to cluster in certain neighborhoods within cosmopolitan cities for economic and practical reasons that it is possible for the buyers and general public to view more art if they can travel by foot. In the past galleries have tended to cluster in neighborhoods with affordable real-estate due to the unprofitable nat
Moderna Museet
Moderna Museet, Sweden, is a state museum for modern and contemporary art located on the island of Skeppsholmen in central Stockholm, opened in 1958. In 2009, the museum opened a new branch in Malmö in the south of Sweden, Moderna Museet Malmö; the museum was opened in 9 May 1958. Its first manager was Pontus Hultén. In May 2010, Daniel Birnbaum became the new director of the museum. In 2009, the museum opened a new branch in the building known as Rooseum in Malmö; the museum houses Swedish and international modern and contemporary art, including pieces by Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí and a model of the Tatlin's Tower. The museum's collection includes key works by artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Louise Bourgeois, Niki de Saint Phalle, Henri Matisse and Robert Rauschenberg, as well as ongoing acquisitions by contemporary artists. On 8 November 1993, six works by Picasso and two by Georges Braque totaling more than £40m were stolen from the museum in a renowned coup where the burglars came in through the roof by night, copying the method from the 1955 French movie Rififi.
All six of the Picasso paintings and one of the Braque paintings have been recovered. Visiting the permanent collection is free of charge, but some of the temporary exhibitions has entrance fees. In 2005, former museum director Pontus Hultén bequeathed over 700 works of art to Moderna Museet, along with his archive and library. A few works of the collection are on display with the museum's permanent collection; the museum has a sculpture park on the island with works by sculptors of diverse nationalities. The Four Elements, Alexander Calder, 1961 Le Paradis fantastique, Jean Tinguely and Niki de Saint Phalle, 1966 Déjeuner sur l'herbe, Pablo Picasso and Carl Nesjar, 1962 Monumentalfigur, Christian Berg, 1927 Monument över den sista cigaretten, Erik Dietman, 1975 Leninmonument 13 april 1917, Björn Lövin, 1977 Mannen på templet, Bjørn Nørgaard, 1980 Svart svensk granit, Ulrich Rückriem, 1981 Pavilion Sculpture II, Dan Graham, 1984 Louisa, Thomas M. Woodruff, 1987 Freedom and Belief, Joseph Kosuth, 1998 No title, Per Kirkeby, 1999–2000 Instabil, Lars Englund, 2005 Närkontakt, Gustav Kraitz, 2008 The museum was housed in Exercishuset on Skeppsholmen.
In 1994–98, it was temporarily moved to another location, the Spårvägshallarna, in Stockholm while the new building on Skeppsholmen, designed by the Spanish architect Rafael Moneo, was built. The Pontus Hultén Study Gallery was designed by Renzo Piano; the museum is a venue for temporary contemporary art exhibitions throughout the year. In 2005, the museum hosted the onedotzero festival bringing a new younger audience to the museum with screenings, installations and live VJ audio-visual events. Official website – in Swedish and English
Jake and Dinos Chapman
Iakovos "Jake" and Konstantinos "Dinos" are British visual artists known as the Chapman Brothers. Their subject matter tries to be deliberately shocking, including, in 2008, a series of works that appropriated original watercolours by Adolf Hitler. In the mid-1990s, their sculptures were included in the YBA showcase exhibitions Brilliant! and Sensation. In 2003, the two lost out to Grayson Perry. In 2013, their painting One Day You Will No Longer Be Loved III was the subject of Derren Brown's Channel 4 special, The Great Art Robbery. Jake Chapman was born in Dinos Chapman in London, their father was their mother an orthodox Greek Cypriot. They were moved to Hastings where they attended a local comprehensive. Dinos studied at the Ravensbourne College of Art, Jake at the North East London Polytechnic before both together enrolled at the Royal College of Art, when they worked as assistants to the artists Gilbert and George, they began their own collaboration in 1991. The brothers have made pieces with plastic models or fibreglass mannequins of people.
An early piece consisted of eighty-three scenes of torture and disfigurement derivative of those recorded by Francisco Goya in his series of etchings, The Disasters of War rendered into small three-dimensional plastic models. One of these was turned into a life-size work, Great Deeds Against the Dead, shown along with Zygotic Acceleration, Biogenetic, De-Sublimated Libidinal Model at the Sensation exhibition in 1997; the Chapman brothers continued the theme of anatomical and pornographic grotesque with a series of mannequins of children, sometimes fused together, with genitalia in place of facial features. Their sculpture Hell consisted of a large number of miniature figures of Nazis arranged in nine glass cases laid out in the shape of a swastika. In 2003, with a series of works named Insult to Injury, they altered a set of Goya's etchings by adding funny faces; as a protest against this piece, Aaron Barschak threw a pot of red paint over Jake Chapman during a talk he was giving in May 2003.
The Chapmans' oeuvre has referenced work by William Blake, Auguste Rodin and Nicolas Poussin. Jake Chapman has published a number of catalogue essays and pieces of art criticism in his own right, as well as a book, Meatphysics; the brothers have designed a label for Becks beer as part of a series of limited edition labels produced by contemporary artists. Using a title from the Tim Burton film, in 2004 they curated A Nightmare Before Christmas as part of the occasional All Tomorrow's Parties music festival at Camber Sands. In October 2013 the Chapman brothers took part in Art Wars at the Saatchi Gallery curated by Ben Moore; the artists were issued with a stormtrooper helmet. Proceeds went to the Missing Tom Fund set up by Moore to find his brother Tom, missing for over ten years; the work was shown on the Regents Park platform as part of Art Below Regents Park. From April–June 2003, the Chapmans held a solo show at Modern Art Oxford entitled The Rape of Creativity in which "the enfants terribles of Britart, bought a mint collection of Francisco Goya's most celebrated prints – and set about systematically defacing them".
The Goya prints referred to his Disasters of War set of 80 etchings. The duo named their newly defaced works Insult to Injury. BBC described more of the exhibition's art: "Drawings of mutant Ronald McDonalds, a bronze sculpture of a painting showing a sad-faced Hitler in clown make-up and a major installation featuring a knackered old caravan and fake dog turds." While The Daily Telegraph commented that the Chapman brothers had "managed to raise the hackles of art historians by violating something much more sacred to the art world than the human body – another work of art", they noted that the effect of their work was powerful. The Chapman brothers were nominated for the Turner Prize in 2003; as well as including Insult to Injury, their Turner Prize exhibit debuted two new works Sex and Death. Sex directly referenced their previous work Great Deeds against the Dead; the original work shows three dismembered corpses hanging from a tree, Sex shows the same scenario, but in a heightened state of decay.
Additionally clown's noses are now present on the skulls of the corpses. Death is two sex dolls, placed on top of each other, head-to-toe in the 69 sex position: despite appearing to be made of plastic it is in fact cast in bronze and painted to look like plastic; that year the prize was won by Grayson Perry. On 24 May 2004, a fire in a storage warehouse destroyed many works from the Saatchi collection including Hell; the brothers subsequently made a similar, though more extensive, work called Fucking Hell. In 2006, the journalist Lynn Barber claimed that she had received a death threat from the brothers, following conducting an interview with them. In 2007, they were criticised by journalist Johann Hari for adopting an anti-Enlightenment philosophy, for Jake Chapman saying that the boys who murdered Liverpool toddler James Bulger performed "a good social service"; this followed a public media brawl between Jake Chapman and journalist Carole Cadwalladr in The Observer and on the internet the previous year.
Cadwalladr told readers that Chapman threw her out of
Daniel Buren
Daniel Buren is a French conceptual artist. Sometimes classified as a Minimalist, Buren is known best for using regular, contrasting colored stripes in an effort to integrate visual surface and architectural space, notably on historical, landmark architecture. Among his chief concerns is the "scene of production" as a way of presenting art and highlighting facture; the work is site-specific installation, having a relation to its setting in contrast to prevailing ideas of an autonomous work of art. He graduated from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Métiers d'Art in Paris, in 1960, he began painting in the early 1960s. However, by 1965 – a year he spent in the Grapetree Bay Hotel on the Caribbean island of Saint Croix where he was contracted to make frescoes – he had abandoned traditional painting for the 8.7 cm-wide vertical stripes, which alternated between white and one color, which have become his signature. Working on-site, he strives to contextualise his artistic practice using the stripe – a popular French fabric motif – as a means of visually relating art to its situation, a form of language in space rather than a space in itself.
Denoting the trademark stripes as a visual instrument or "seeing tool," he invites viewers to take up his critical standpoint challenging traditional ideas about art. He began producing unsolicited public art works using striped awning canvas common in France: he started by setting up hundreds of striped posters, so-called affichages sauvages, around Paris and in more than 100 Metro stations, drawing public attention through these unauthorised bandit-style acts. In June 1970 he put stripes on the back of Los Angeles bus benches without permission. In another controversial gesture he blocked the entrance of the gallery with stripes of his first solo exhibition. Expanding on this idea, in 1971 he created a six-foot banner, Peinture-Sculpture, to divide the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum's rotunda in New York. For his first New York City solo show in 1973, Buren suspended a set of nineteen black and white striped squares of canvas on a cable that ran from one end of the John Weber Gallery to the other, out the window to a building on the other side of West Broadway and back.
Nine pieces were inside nine outside. In 1977 Buren cut up one of his artworks from 1969 and made a new work, designating that the sections should hang in the corners of a wall, whether that wall was empty, had doors or windows, or had other artworks hanging on it; as a conceptual artist, Buren was regarded as visually and spatially audacious, objecting to traditional ways of presenting art through the museum-gallery system while at the same time growing in hot demand to show via the same system. In the late 1960s he connected to the ideas of space and presentation arising through deconstructionist philosophies that had as their background the May 1968 student demonstrations in France. Between 1966 and 1967, he joined forces with fellow artists Olivier Mosset, Michel Parmentier, Niele Toroni to form the BMPT, whose intention was to reduce paintings to the most basic physical and visual elements through the systematic repetition of motifs. Referred to as "the stripe guy," Buren expresses his theme in paint, laser cut fabric, light boxes, transparent fabrics and ceramic cup sets.
His stripes are displayed in private homes, public places, museums worldwide. Since the 1950s he has amassed some 400,000 of what he calls photos-souvenirs, documenting his work and travels around the globe. From 1960 on, Buren designed a number of permanent site-specific installations in the United States, Belgium and Germany. In 1986 he created a 3,000-square-meter sculpture in the great courtyard of the Palais Royal, in Paris: Les Deux Plateaux, more referred to as the Colonnes de Buren; this provoked an intense debate over the integration of historic buildings. In 1993, Buren was commissioned to design the work in situ, Poser/Déposer/Exposer, for the Café Richelieu at the Louvre in collaboration with Jean-Pierre Raynaud. Since the 1990s, Buren's work has become more architectural, he creates new spaces within existing environments such as city centers, public parks, entire museums, beaches. For Green and White Fence Buren installed a functional fence sculpture, consisting of fence posts at four-meter intervals, painted green and white 87-millimeter stripes along a single ridge line: Since the first part's installation, the artist’s theme has been extended until, over time, it will become the only form of fence on Gibbs Farm in New Zealand.
In 2004, for the occasion of the opening of the French cultural year in China, Buren exhibited in his in situ installation De l'azur au Temple du Ciel at Temple of Heaven in Beijing. A Rainbow in the Sky consisted of thousands of colorful pennant flags hovering over a busy pedestrian square in Pasadena, California for two months. Buren collaborated with Hermès on a number of occasions; the artist inaugurated Hermès' contemporary art gallery La Verrière in Brussels in 2000 by transforming its walls with bold graphics and his trademark stripes, opened the Atelier Hermès in Dosan Park, Seoul with his Filtres colorés, coloured panels that diffused the light to dramatic effect. In 2010, he created "Photo souvenirs
Germaine Greer
Germaine Greer is an Australian writer and public intellectual, regarded as one of the major voices of the second-wave feminist movement in the latter half of the 20th century. Specializing in English and women's literature, she has held academic positions in England at the University of Warwick and Newnham College, in the United States at the University of Tulsa. Based in England since 1964, she has divided her time since the 1990s between Australia and her home in Essex. Greer's ideas have created controversy since her first book, The Female Eunuch, made her a household name. An international bestseller and a watershed text in the feminist movement, the book offered a systematic deconstruction of ideas such as womanhood and femininity, arguing that women are forced to assume submissive roles in society to fulfil male fantasies of what being a woman entails, her work since has focused on literature and the environment. She has written over 20 books, including Sex and Destiny, The Change, The Whole Woman, Shakespeare's Wife.
Her 2013 book, White Beech: The Rainforest Years, describes her efforts to restore an area of rainforest in the Numinbah Valley in Australia. In addition to her academic work and activism, she has been a prolific columnist for The Sunday Times, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, The Independent, The Oldie, among others. Greer is a liberation rather than equality feminist, her goal is not equality with men, which she sees as assimilation and "agreeing to live the lives of unfree men". "Women's liberation", she wrote in The Whole Woman, "did not see the female's potential in terms of the male's actual." She argues instead that liberation is about asserting difference and "insisting on it as a condition of self-definition and self-determination". It is a struggle for the freedom of women to "define their own values, order their own priorities and decide their own fate". Greer was born in Melbourne to the elder of two girls followed by a boy, her father, Eric Reginald Greer, told her he had been born in South Africa, but she learned after his death that he was born Robert Hamilton King in Launceston, Tasmania.
He and her mother, Margaret May Lafrank, had married in March 1937. Peggy was Reg a newspaper-advertising salesman; the family lived in the Melbourne suburb of Elwood, at first in a rented flat in Docker Street, near the beach in another rented flat on the Esplanade. In January 1942 Greer's father joined the Second Australian Imperial Force. Greer attended St Columba's Catholic Primary School in Elwood from February 1943—the family was by living at 57 Ormond Road, Elwood—followed by Sacred Heart Parish School and Holy Redeemer School, Ripponlea. In 1952 Greer won a scholarship to Star of the Sea College in Gardenvale, a convent school run by the Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, she abandoned the Catholic faith a year after leaving school, as a result of finding the nuns' arguments for the existence of God unconvincing, left home when she was 18. She had a difficult relationship with her mother who, according to Greer had Asperger syndrome. In 2012 she said that her brother might have forgiven her for "abandoning" them, but she was not so sure about her sister, "whom I love more than anyone else on earth".
From 1956 Greer studied English and French language and literature at the University of Melbourne on a Teacher's College Scholarship, living at home for the first two years on an allowance of £8 a week. Six feet tall by the age of 16, she was a striking figure. "Tall, loose-limbed and good-humoured, she strode around the campus, aware that she was much talked about," according to the journalist Peter Blazey, a contemporary at Melbourne. During her first year she had some kind of breakdown as a result of depression and was treated in hospital, she told Playboy magazine in an interview published in 1972 that she had been raped during her second year at Melbourne, an experience she described in detail in The Guardian in March 1995. Just before she graduated from Melbourne in 1959 with an upper second, she moved to Sydney, where she became involved with the Sydney Push and the anarchist Sydney Libertarians. "hese people talked about truth and only truth," she said, "insisting that most of what we were exposed to during the day was ideology, a synonym for lies—or bullshit, as they called it."
They would meet in a back room of the Royal George Hotel on Sussex Street. Clive James was involved with the group at the time. One of Greer's biographers, Christine Wallace, wrote that Greer "walked into the Royal George Hotel, into the throng talking themselves hoarse in a room stinking of stale beer and thick with cigarette smoke, set out to follow the Push way of life,'an intolerably difficult discipline which I forced myself to learn'". Greer thought of herself as an anarchist without knowing why she was drawn to it, she had significant relationships in the group with Harry Hooton and Roelof Smilde, both prominent members. She shared an apartment with Smilde on Glebe Point Road; when the relationship with Smilde ended, Greer enrolled at the University of Sydney to stud
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was a socialist state in Eurasia that existed from 1922 to 1991. Nominally a union of multiple national Soviet republics, its government and economy were centralized; the country was a one-party state, governed by the Communist Party with Moscow as its capital in its largest republic, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Other major urban centres were Leningrad, Minsk, Alma-Ata, Novosibirsk, it spanned over 10,000 kilometres east to west across 11 time zones, over 7,200 kilometres north to south. It had five climate zones: tundra, steppes and mountains; the Soviet Union had its roots in the 1917 October Revolution, when the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, overthrew the Russian Provisional Government which had replaced Tsar Nicholas II during World War I. In 1922, the Soviet Union was formed by a treaty which legalized the unification of the Russian, Transcaucasian and Byelorussian republics that had occurred from 1918. Following Lenin's death in 1924 and a brief power struggle, Joseph Stalin came to power in the mid-1920s.
Stalin committed the state's ideology to Marxism–Leninism and constructed a command economy which led to a period of rapid industrialization and collectivization. During his rule, political paranoia fermented and the Great Purge removed Stalin's opponents within and outside of the party via arbitrary arrests and persecutions of many people, resulting in at least 600,000 deaths. In 1933, a major famine struck the country. Before the start of World War II in 1939, the Soviets signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, agreeing to non-aggression with Nazi Germany, after which the USSR invaded Poland on 17 September 1939. In June 1941, Germany broke the pact and invaded the Soviet Union, opening the largest and bloodiest theatre of war in history. Soviet war casualties accounted for the highest proportion of the conflict in the effort of acquiring the upper hand over Axis forces at intense battles such as Stalingrad and Kursk; the territories overtaken by the Red Army became satellite states of the Soviet Union.
The post-war division of Europe into capitalist and communist halves would lead to increased tensions with the United States-led Western Bloc, known as the Cold War. Stalin died in 1953 and was succeeded by Nikita Khrushchev, who in 1956 denounced Stalin and began the de-Stalinization; the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred during Khrushchev's rule, among the many factors that led to his downfall in 1964. In the early 1970s, there was a brief détente of relations with the United States, but tensions resumed with the Soviet–Afghan War in 1979. In 1985, the last Soviet premier, Mikhail Gorbachev, sought to reform and liberalize the economy through his policies of glasnost and perestroika, which caused political instability. In 1989, Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe overthrew their respective communist governments; as part of an attempt to prevent the country's dissolution due to rising nationalist and separatist movements, a referendum was held in March 1991, boycotted by some republics, that resulted in a majority of participating citizens voting in favor of preserving the union as a renewed federation.
Gorbachev's power was diminished after Russian President Boris Yeltsin's high-profile role in facing down a coup d'état attempted by Communist Party hardliners. In late 1991, Gorbachev resigned and the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union met and formally dissolved the Soviet Union; the remaining 12 constituent republics emerged as independent post-Soviet states, with the Russian Federation—formerly the Russian SFSR—assuming the Soviet Union's rights and obligations and being recognized as the successor state. The Soviet Union was a powerhouse of many significant technological achievements and innovations of the 20th century, including the world's first human-made satellite, the first humans in space and the first probe to land on another planet, Venus; the country had the largest standing military in the world. The Soviet Union was recognized as one of the five nuclear weapons states and possessed the largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction, it was a founding permanent member of the United Nations Security Council as well as a member of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the World Federation of Trade Unions and the leading member of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance and the Warsaw Pact.
The word "Soviet" is derived from a Russian word сове́т meaning council, advice, harmony and all deriving from the proto-Slavic verbal stem of vět-iti, related to Slavic věst, English "wise", the root in "ad-vis-or", or the Dutch weten. The word sovietnik means "councillor". A number of organizations in Russian history were called "council". For example, in the Russian Empire the State Council, which functioned from 1810 to 1917, was referred to as a Council of Ministers after the revolt of 1905. During the Georgian Affair, Vladimir Lenin envisioned an expression of Great Russian ethnic chauvinism by Joseph Stalin and his supporters, calling for these nation-states to join Russia as semi-independent parts of a greater union, which he named as the Union of Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia. Stalin resisted the proposal, but accepted it, although with Lenin's agreement changed the name of the newly proposed sta
