TateShots

Issue 14: Performance: Monty Python meets art with ‘football on stilts’ and more

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 12:00:00 BST

Football on stilts, the flipper race, invisible hurdling... just some of the sports that took place at Tate's very own Flux Olympiad, part of a three-day festival of art and performance at Tate Modern. The Olympiad was first conceived by founding Fluxus artist George Maciunas in the 1960s, though never realised until now. The aim of the Fluxus group was to instill artistic values into every part of life, and they went about it with a good dose of Dadaistic humour. TateShots asked artist, sportsman and Fluxus expert Tom Russotti to commentate on the day's activities and tell us about the history of the event.

Filmed during UBS Openings: The Long Weekend 2008, Tate Modern, 24-26 May 2008

Issue 14: Performance: Crowds gather for lettuce-chopping spectacular

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 12:00:00 BST

American artist Alison Knowles first made a salad in the name of art at London's ICA Gallery in 1962. Make a Salad is what the Flux artists termed an ‘event score’: a written instruction that can be acted out and changed according to the context in which it is performed. In Tate Modern's giant Turbine Hall, Knowles has given the work a mammoth new dimension. TateShots followed her as she went on a huge salad shopping spree then, with the help of a team of chefs, prepared a meal for hundreds of visitors to the gallery's Long Weekend festival.

Filmed as part of UBS Openings: The Long Weekend 2008, Tate Modern, 24-26 May 2008

Issue 14: Meet the Artist: Sunil Gupta on 'Mr Malhotra’s Party'

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 12:00:00 BST

Indian-born artist Sunil Gupta is showing two photographs from his series Mr Malhotra’s Party at Tate Modern’s Street & Studio exhibition. The pictures depict gay men on the streets of Delhi where homosexuality is still illegal and nightclubs for gay men have to masquerade as private parties, hence the title for these photographs. In this interview, Gupta talks about the politics and theatre behind his work.

Street & Studio: An Urban History of Photography, Tate Modern, until 31 August 2008

Issue 14: Current Exhibition: Adam Chodzko takes us around his new show at Tate St Ives

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 12:00:00 BST

Adam Chodzko takes us on a tour of his new show at Tate St Ives. Amongst the pieces on show are a pair of hiker’s walking sticks containing a hidden compartment for vials of ecstasy (bringing new meaning to the notion of nature and the sublime), and a slide-show about one of his poetic interventions into everyday life in which he bought up all the green clothes from a charity shop in his home town in Kent and swapped them for all the red clothes at a thrift store in New York. His work is as much about the imaginative narratives it conjures in the viewer’s mind as it is about physical objects in a gallery space.

Adam Chodzko: Proxigean Tide, Tate St Ives, until 21 September 2008

Issue 14: Current Exhibition: Graffiti grows up at Tate Modern

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 12:00:00 BST

Tate Modern invited a group of Madrid-based street artists to make work in the streets surrounding the gallery. In this film we follow the artists as they respond to the challenge. With inflatable tongues, modified shop signs and photorealistic spray painting, Banksy it isn’t. You can take a walking tour of the project by picking up a map from the gallery, or downloading a pdf. The tour is part of a bigger exhibition of Street Art at Tate Modern this summer.

Street Art, Tate Modern, until 25 August 2008 Sponsored by Nissan Qashqai

Issue 14: Meet the Artist: Juergen Teller on shooting models

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 12:00:00 BST

Photographer Juergen Teller turned his lens on the fashion industry with his Go-Sees series in 1999. Weary of the hype generated by model agencies desperate to sell him the ‘next big thing’, he decided to take the picture of every girl that came to see him – on the doorstep of his studio. In this interview for TateShots, Teller tells us how the resulting photographs expose the troubling power of the male photographer. He also challenges us to a game of table tennis.

Street & Studio: An Urban History of Photography, Tate Modern, until 31 August 2008

Issue 13: Tate Tracks: New Young Pony Club inspired by a work by Martin Creed

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 12:00:00 BST

Tate invited the band New Young Pony Club to walk around the gallery and find a work of art that would inspire them to write a track. They picked a neon light sculpture by British artist Martin Creed. The band’s founding members Tahita Bulmer and Andy Spence talked to TateShots about turning art into music.

You can hear the full track on the Tate Tracks website.

Issue 13: Meet the Artist: Dorothy Cross tells us about her iconic 'Virgin Shroud'

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 12:00:00 BST

Irish artist Dorothy Cross explains how she made ‘Virgin Shroud’, by stitching together a cow-hide, complete with udders, and her grandmother's old wedding dress. The extraordinary sculpture that resulted is a favourite in Tate’s Collection and is currently on show at Tate Liverpool.

Issue 13: Meet the Artist: Bob and Roberta Smith on slogans for life

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 12:00:00 BST

Bob and Roberta Smith is in fact just one person, otherwise known as British artist Patrick Brill. His paintings look like signboards, featuring slogans in brightly coloured lettering. They have the air of revolutionary statements, riffing on life, politics and art, though with a tinge of absurdity that leaves you wondering just what the message really is. He introduces the paintings that the Tate now has in its Collection.

Issue 13: Meet the Artist: Michael Craig-Martin looks back at some of his key works

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 12:00:00 BST

In the early 1970s Michael Craig-Martin created his famous sculpture An Oak Tree. The work consists of a glass of water standing on a shelf. On the wall next to it a text by the artist argues that, despite what your eyes tell you, the glass of water is in fact an oak tree. In the spirit of Duchamp, Craig-Martin provokes questions about what we understand to be art and unpicks the relationship between a real object and its depiction. Looking back over his long career he explains why the same ideas drive him today as when he first started out.

Issue 13: In the Studio: A kaleidoscope of colour in Fiona Rae's studio

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 12:00:00 BST

Fiona Rae invited us into her London studio where she was putting the finishing touches to works for her new exhibition at the Timothy Taylor Gallery. Her abstract canvases are an exuberant collision of painting styles: encrusted surfaces, brushy swathes and watery pools, along with kitsch cartoon elements, which somehow coalesce despite their differences. She talked to TateShots about her enduring passion for paint.

Issue 13: Performance: Santiago Sierra stages a provocative work at Tate Modern

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 12:00:00 BST

Whether casting sculptures from human excrement or paying junkie prostitutes to have a line tattooed on their backs, Spanish artist Santiago Sierra is a provocateur whose art raise headlines. We filmed his latest performance piece at Tate Modern and asked him about this and other controversial works.

Contains some strong language.

Issue 12: Current Exhibition: Stanley Spencer's uniquely British vision

Fri, 7 Mar 2008 12:00:00 GMT

Stanley Spencer (1891–1959) is best known for his huge paintings that treat British village life in the manner of Renaissance frescoes, such as his masterpiece The Resurrection, Cookham, in which the lives (and deaths) of ordinary folk are tenderly offered up to our gaze. Author and Spencer fan Sîan Pattendon visits the current exhibition at Tate Liverpool.

Stanley Spencer, Tate Liverpool, until 27 April 2008

Issue 12: Performance: Why David Lamelas has Time on his hands

Fri, 7 Mar 2008 12:00:00 GMT

In this performance at Tate Modern, Argentinian artist David Lamelas sets out to capture the essence of time. Though the project was created in 1970, it was only recently acquired for the Tate Collection, one of the first examples of Tate buying a performance in the form of set of instructions explaining how to restage it, rather than a physical object.

Performed at UBS Openings: Live: The Living Currency 26-27 January 2008

Issue 12: Performance: A Man in a Room, Gambling, by Gavin Bryars and Juan Muñoz

Fri, 7 Mar 2008 12:00:00 GMT

Composer Gavin Bryars introduces A Man in a Room, Gambling, his musical collaboration with the artist Juan Muñoz. The project mixes Bryars’ score with the recorded voice of the artist as he reads texts on strategies for manipulating cards when gambling.

The exhibition Juan Muñoz: A Retrospective is at Tate Modern until 27 April 2008

Issue 12: Current Exhibition: Peter Doig shows us around his exhibition

Fri, 7 Mar 2008 12:00:00 GMT

Peter Doig’s retrospective at Tate Britain has been called ‘the most enthralling show in town’. He took us behind the scenes as he finalised the hang just before it opened, and showed us his private collection of photographs that provide the starting point for his mesmerising paintings.

Peter Doig,Tate Britain, until 27 April 2008

Issue 12: In the Studio: Welcome to the dead-pan world of Harrison and Wood

Fri, 7 Mar 2008 12:00:00 GMT

Bristol-based duo Paul Harrison and John Wood could be described as an art-world equivalent to Laurel and Hardy. Their videos, showing their dead-pan antics as they dangle precariously from a ladder, slide on office chairs around the back of a moving van, and submit themselves to a drenching from dozens of watering cans, are both hilarious and thought provoking. They invited TateShots to meet them at their studio.

Issue 12: Work in Focus: John Squire on why he loves Cy Twombly's paintings

Fri, 7 Mar 2008 12:00:00 GMT

John Squire of the Stone Roses is both a musician and an artist. He gets up close to Cy Twombly’s epic canvases ‘The Four Seasons’ to explain why the American painter is one of his all-time heroes. A retrospective of Twombly’s work will be at Tate Modern this summer.

Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons, Tate Modern, 19 June - 14 September 2008

Issue 11: Story of a Masterpiece: The hidden emotion behind a masterpiece of war

Mon, 4 Feb 2008 12:00:00 GMT

Paul Nash served as an official artist in the Second World War. His painting Totes Meer, German for ‘dead sea’, was inspired by a graveyard for wrecked aircraft at Cowley in Oxfordshire. Journalist Simon Grant visits the site to explore the origins of this work and discovers that as well as being a compelling memorial to the ravages of war, it may symbolise a more personal history of lost love.

Totes Meer is currently on display at Tate Britain.

Issue 11: Current Exhibition: A tour of Niki de Saint Phalle's first UK exhibition

Mon, 4 Feb 2008 12:00:00 GMT

We preview the first UK exhibition of the French artist Niki de Saint Phalle, which opens this month at Tate Liverpool. Beautiful, flamboyant, daring, provocative and fiercely independent, she emerged in the 1960s as a powerful and original figure in the highly masculine international arts world. The exhibition includes her acclaimed Shooting Pictures, made by firing a .22 rifle into bags of paint strapped to a canvas, as well as her brightly coloured, exuberant sculptures of enormous women, which she christened the ‘Nanas’.

Niki de Saint Phalle, Tate Liverpool, 1 February - 5 May 2008

Issue 11: Performance: Crowd control in force at Tate Modern

Mon, 4 Feb 2008 12:00:00 GMT

Recently at Tate Modern, unwitting gallery-goers were confronted by mounted police who rode back and forth, corralling people and controlling their movements. Cuban artist Tania Bruguera talks about her latest performance work and explains why she’s not interested in presenting images that can be viewed at a safe distance, but instead wants people to personally experience the dynamics of power.

UBS Openings: Live: The Living Currency, took place at Tate Modern, 26-27 January 2008

Issue 11: Meet the Artist: Lida Abdul describes a 'beautiful encounter with chance'

Mon, 4 Feb 2008 12:00:00 GMT

Afghan artist Lida Abdul describes the chance encounter that became the basis for her elegiac film Dome. Abdul calls her pieces ‘anti-monuments’, and in Dome we see a small boy dancing alone in the centre of a bombed-out building in Kabul. The boy’s circling movements trace the shape of the roofless dome as he looks up at the sky, then comes the sinister throbbing of whirling rotor blades as a helicopter passes overhead.

Illuminations, Tate Modern, until 24 February 2008

Issue 11: Meet the Artist: Sanford Biggers presents his homage to Hip hop

Mon, 4 Feb 2008 12:00:00 GMT

Sanford Biggers’ video features the artist and friends taking part in an improvised bell-ringing ceremony at a Zen temple in Japan. As Biggers explains, a number of the metal bells used in the video were fabricated from melted-down hip-hop jewellery. He talks to TateShots about making this work, and the connections he sees between the traditions of African-American hip-hop and Buddhism.

Illuminations, Tate Modern, until 24 February 2008

Issue 11: Current Exhibition: The grand illusions of Juan Muñoz

Mon, 4 Feb 2008 12:00:00 GMT

Muñoz described himself as a storyteller, and often arranged his figures and objects in carefully staged configurations that hint at unsettling and ambiguous scenarios. One of the last things he made before his untimely death in 2001 at the age of 48 was a vast stage-set-like installation for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. Now Tate Modern is presenting the first major retrospective of his work in the UK. Curator Sheena Wagstaff offers an overview of the exhibition.

Juan Muñoz: a Retrospective, Tate Modern, until 27 April 2008

Issue 10: New Work: Peace on Earth (2007): The Tate Britain Christmas tree

Tue, 18 Dec 2007 12:00:00 GMT

Every year Tate Britain commissions a contemporary artist to design its Christmas Tree. This year Fiona Banner decorated the tree with 123 handmade kit models of all the world’s fighter planes currently in service, anywhere in the world. She showed us around her studio, where she has been making model planes for the last 20 years, as she explained her alternative Christmas message.

Issue 10: Meet the Artist: Grenville Davey at the Turner Prize Retrospective

Thu, 13 Dec 2007 12:00:00 GMT

Grenville Davey was considered the outsider when he won the £20,000 Turner Prize back in 1992, beating Alison Wilding, Damien Hirst, and David Tremlett. Fifteen years on, we filmed Davey as he installed his sculptures for the Turner Prize Retrospective at Tate Britain, and asked him how winning the prize had affected him.

The Turner Prize: a Retrospective, until 6 January 2008, Tate Britain

Issue 10: Performance: Mario Ybarra Jr and the art of the barbershop

Thu, 13 Dec 2007 12:00:00 GMT

In amongst the galleries at Tate Modern you might come across a barbershop, complete with barber’s chairs, checkerboard floor and striped red and white pole at the entrance. This is Sweeney Tate (2007), an art installation named in homage to the legendary demon barber, and modelled on a real barbershop in Los Angeles’ Chinatown. We filmed artist Mario Ybarra Jr as he launched a one-day barber’s competition at Sweeney Tate.

Sweeney Tate is one of the works in the exhibition The World as a Stage, at Tate Modern until 1 January 2008

Issue 10: Meet the Artist: Jeremy Deller at the Turner Prize Retrospective

Thu, 13 Dec 2007 12:00:00 GMT

Jeremy Deller talks about the two works that helped him win the Turner Prize in 2004, a wall drawing called The History of the World, a sort of mad-professor’s mind-map of the history of Britain through music; and a film called Memory Bucket that he made during a visit to Texas and which explores American paranoia.

The Turner Prize: a Retrospective, until 6 January 2008, Tate Britain

Issue 10: Meet the Artist: Linder Sterling on art and punk rock

Thu, 13 Dec 2007 12:00:00 GMT

British artist Linder Sterling is probably best known for the record sleeve she designed for Orgasm Addict by the Buzzcocks (1977), showing a naked woman with an iron for a head and grinning mouths instead of nipples. Her photo-montages, combining images from pornographic magazines with pictures from women’s magazines, make a powerful feminist statement. A group of these works have just been bought for Tate’s Collection and are now on show at Tate Britain, where Linder met us to talk about art and punk rock.

Issue 10: Performance: Jude Law stars in a film that doesn't exist

Thu, 13 Dec 2007 12:00:00 GMT

One morning in November Jude Law walked through Borough Market, just down the road from Tate Modern, and bought some fish. It was a performance for a ‘real-time movie’, in which Law and a cast of extras mingled with the market crowds, following a carefully plotted script. But the movie will never be made. Pawel Althamer, the artist behind the project, is interested in the way real life and the fictional world of cinema intersect. In preparation for Jude’s real life performance he commissioned a genuine movie trailer that was shown in cinemas to advertise the event. The idea was that the trailer you saw on the screens would be re-enacted live by Jude Law at Borough Market. TateShots was there to follow the action.

Real Time Movie was commissioned for the exhibition The World as a Stage, Tate Modern, until 1 January 2008

Issue 9: Meet the Artist: Nathan Coley, Turner Prize nominee

Mon, 5 Nov 2007 12:00:00 GMT

‘There will be no miracles here’, reads the illuminated signboard in Nathan Coley’s section of the Turner Prize exhibition. It’s one of a number of works Coley is presenting that explore the idea of faith in an era of moral uncertainty. He talks us through his show.

The Turner Prize 2007, Tate Liverpool, 19 October 2007 – 13 January 2008

Issue 9: Meet the Artist: Mark Wallinger, Turner Prize nominee

Mon, 5 Nov 2007 12:00:00 GMT

Mark Wallinger’s contribution to this year’s Turner Prize is Sleeper (2004-05), a film of a performance in which, over a period of 10 nights, he dressed in a bear suit and wandered aimlessly around an art gallery in Berlin, startling unsuspecting passers-by. He relives the long nights for TateShots.

The Turner Prize 2007, Tate Liverpool, 19 October 2007 - 13 January 2008

Issue 9: Performance: A living picture by Ulla von Brandenburg

Mon, 5 Nov 2007 12:00:00 GMT

Ulla von Brandenburg is interested in the idea of the tableau vivant, or 'living picture'. Popular in the nineteenth century, the tableau vivant was a combination of fine art and theatre, with live models carefully posed and lit in a composition like that of a painting or photograph. In this performance, a group of actors present a tableau vivant, while miming a song sung in German by the artist herself, to disconcerting effect. More of von Brandenburg’s work can be seen in The World as a Stage at Tate Modern.

The World as a Stage, Tate Modern, 24 October 2007 - 1 January 2008

Issue 9: Current Exhibition: Curator Frances Morris on meeting Louise Bourgeois

Mon, 5 Nov 2007 12:00:00 GMT

Louise Bourgeois is one of the world’s most respected sculptors. Over a long career she has worked through most of the twentieth century’s avant-garde artistic movements from abstraction to realism, yet has remained uniquely individual and powerfully inventive. Curator Frances Morris presents an overview of this retrospective and introduces archive footage showing Bourgeois at home in New York as she discusses plans for the giant spider and towers that were the very first Turbine Hall commission for Tate Modern in 2000.

Louise Bourgeois, Tate Modern, 10 October 2007 - 20 January 2008

Issue 9: New Work: I'm only acting in it (2007) by Roman Ondák

Mon, 5 Nov 2007 12:00:00 GMT

In this film, we follow what happened when Slovakian artist Roman Ondák asked people who had never seen him to draw his portrait based on a verbal description. Like a game of Chinese whispers, the resulting portraits reveal the curious distortions of language and memory. The drawings are on show in the exhibition The World as a Stage at Tate Modern.

The World as a Stage, Tate Modern, 24 October 2007 - 1 January 2008

Issue 9: Meet the Artist: Mike Nelson, Turner Prize nominee

Mon, 5 Nov 2007 12:00:00 GMT

Mike Nelson’s labyrinthine installations, made of interconnecting corridors and chambers, are intentionally disorientating. In his new work for the Turner Prize, the corridors contain peepholes through which we spy four, mirrored rooms. Each offers the same illusory vista of desert sand dunes and infinitely reflecting lights. Nelson talks about this and other projects.

The Turner Prize 2007, Tate Liverpool, 19 October 2007 - 13 January 2008

Issue 8: Meet the Artist: Mika Rottenberg on her installation Mary's Cherries

Fri, 5 Oct 2007 12:00:00 BST

Mika Rottenberg’s mesmerising video installations are humorous and surrealistic. In Mary’s Cherries (2005) three female wrestlers take part in a bizarre production line, turning red painted fingernails into maraschino cherries. The video is showing as part of The Irresistible Force, in Tate Modern’s Level 2 Gallery, a dedicated space for emerging international artists. Rottenberg talks about her ideas and the process of making the video.

The Irresistible Force, Tate Modern, 20 September - 25 November 2007

Issue 8: Meet the Artist: Keith Tyson at the Turner Prize Retrospective

Fri, 5 Oct 2007 12:00:00 BST

Keith Tyson won the Turner Prize in 2002, the year the then culture minister Kim Howells caused a media storm by describing the entries as ‘cold, mechanical, conceptual, bullshit’. Tyson talks about the effect winning had on him, and discusses the works he’s currently showing in the Turner Prize Retrospective, including The Thinker (After Rodin), a black hexagonal column containing a bank of computers that emit a constant hum, first shown in the 2002 exhibition.

The Turner Prize: A Retrospective, Tate Britain, 2 October 2007 - 6 January 2008