The Village by Gert Robijns

Belgian artist Gert Robijns has recreated part of the village he grew up in, shown in these images by photographer Tim Van de Velde. For his latest piece of art, Robijns has built a white church and a house using chipboard and metal frames, and sited it in a former military airfield in Belgium. The ghost town has two sides- the smooth white facade and the exposed structure behind. It is meant as a parallel world for Robijn's dead grandfather.

Images Tim Van de Velde via Dezeen

Antony Gormley at the White Cube Bermondsey

At the weekend I ventured south of the river (not my usual territory) to Maltby Street food market followed by a visit to the White Cube Bermondsey, where there was an exhibition of new works by Antony Gormley. The exhibition aims to challenge the physical possibilities of the gallery space with an ambitious larger-than-life model of his sculptures, which visitors can enter through a 'foot' and journey through its inter-connected internal chambers. Fabricated from 100 tonnes of weathering sheet steel, the work is both sculpture and building, human in form but at no point visible as a total figure. After seeing similar works of his at the White Cube in Hoxton, I was glad to see Gormley had taken it a step further and created more of an architectural intervention. The internal chambers demanded the visitor to adjust their pace and bend their bodies to its awkward heights, guided by fractions of light above. Another interesting room proved to be a space dedicated to Gormley's working models from 2002 to the present day.

The building itself is also worthy of a mention. White Cube Bermondsey is the largest of the gallery's three London sites and dates back to the 1970s when it was used as a warehouse. The building was converted into a gallery by London-based Casper Mueller Kneer Architects. The 70s dark brick block has been modernised by a white mesh canopy and a set of huge glass doors at the entrance. Inside, there are three main exhibition spaces, private viewing rooms, an auditorium, a bookshop as well as three smaller galleries, collectively known as the 'North Galleries. Internally, the gallery spaces live up to the name of 'White Cube', with white boxes and polished concrete floors. The variety of rooms proved ideal for Gormley's sculptures, the full effect of the human-proportioned silhouettes appearing as you look back down the long central corridor.

Images: White Cube

The long-awaited Address Book by Sophie Calle is finally published in English

I found an address book on the Rue des Martyrs . . . I will contact the people whose names are noted down. I will tell them, “I found an address book on the street by chance. Your number was in it. I’d like to meet you.” . . . Thus, I will get to know this man through his friends and acquaintances. I will try to discover who he is without ever meeting him.

—from The Address Book by Sophie Calle

Based on an address book that French artist Sophie Calle found in the streets of Paris in the early 1980s, this controversial book has finally been released in English. Perhaps Calle's best known work is her 2007 Venice Biennale French Pavillion installation Please Take Care of Yourself, which has been exhibited worldwide. In 2009, Whitechapel Gallery in London organized a retrospective of her work.

Having found a lost address book on the street in Paris, Calle copied the pages before returning it anonymously to its owner. She then embarked on a search to come to know this stranger by contacting listed individuals. Her written accounts of these encounters with friends, family and colleagues—juxtaposed with Calle’s photographs—originally appeared as serial in the newspaper Libération over the course of one month in 1983. When Pierre D., the original owner of the address book, learned about the work and its appearance in the newspaper, he threatened to sue. Calle agreed not to republish the work until after his death. Now it has been almost thirty years since its original publication in France and it is ready for the first time in English.

Source: Siglio Press

Talk: Grayson Perry at the RCA

The Peter Dormer Lecture is the UK’s major annual applied arts lecture, held in memory of Peter Dormer, the writer and critic who died in 1996. The 2012 lecture entitled 'Turn up on time, be nice and put in the hours' was led by artist Grayson Perry.

From his crafty upbringing with an electrical engineer father, Perry talked the audience through his artistic development from sloppily-made plates to intricate Turner Prize-winning pots and vast tapestries for famous art galleries. The focus on the talk was on the handmade and craft, an artistic term which can often have naff connotations (One of Perry's slides showed a scrapbook magazine- surely scrapbooks are impromtu and shouldn't need an accompanying manual?! Another showed a typical craftshop with tacky felt bags). Perry says that he came out of art college with a jaundiced view of craft, but that hasn't hindered his 'unembarrassing' venture "into the naffest of territories". With some advice for the RCA students in the audience, he said: "the one thing you learn at art college is to hate art".

Craft for Perry is always at its best when it is a bit rough around the edges. He said: "When craft becomes the headline it gets in the way of the art. It must be in our DNA that we like the handmade, we like to see the presence of a human." You don't want a piece of art to be perfect, because "perfection often results in a work of art that is a bit dead" he said. Perry then started to talk about scale and the way artists have started to use other people's labour. Art galleries are getting bigger and bigger, resulting in gargantuan works, for example, the Tate's Turbine Hall or Anish Kapoor's sculptures. Indeed, Perry described the Tate Modern as the 'Cult Entertainment Megastore', i.e. art has become a normal part of culture, one you don't have to be an art expert to consume. Thus the number of art galleries and the amount of artwork has increased over the years, but the amount of good art has remained steadily the same.

You can also read a previous post on this blog about Grayson Perry's Channel 4 series All in the Best Possible Taste. During three programmes Perry went on 'safari' through three tribes; the working class, middle class and upper class, to discover our aesthetic taste and the emotional investment in the objects within our homes. The people he met along the way inspired a series of tapestries depicting the story of Perry's protagonist Tim Rakewell.

Images: Richard Kelly Photography

In Praise of Doubt at Punta Della Dogana gallery renovated by Tadao Ando

Tadao Ando first met art collector Francois Pinault- France's own Charles Saatchi- in 2001 when he was selected in an international competition to design the Foundation Francois Pinault pour l'art contemporain, on the bank of the River Seine in Paris. When the project fell through, Pinault again approached Ando to renovate the 18th century Palazzo Grassi on the Grand Canal of Venice. Though the Palazzo Grassi is beautiful, there were severe preservation guidelines that prevented Pinault creating the contemporary art gallery he so wanted. Beating a proposal to expand their own collection by the Guggenheim Foundation, Pinault and Ando won the proposal to renovate the Punta Della Dogana, further down the canal near Accademia. Ando said of the building, which was completed in 2009: "We were again faced with the theme of how to produce a modern space while drawing out the latent power of the original building. By exposing the bricks of hidden walls and the wooden roof trusses that had been concealed during the frequent renovations, I wanted to further emphasise the charm of the spaces by adding just a few new architectural elements, while highlighting the individuality of the building."

Sited on the furthest tip of the Dorsoduro, the original building takes on the shape of the triangular volume of the land. The old building of the Punta Della Dogana is brought into the present by a concrete cube inserted into the full height of the museum from which all routes are brought together. Ando's renovation strips back the building to its original form, showing off its classic Venetian traits, while at the same time juxtaposing them with monolithic, smooth, grey concrete. You can also see echoes of the Italian master Carlo Scarpa, with the twenty water gates that perforate the ground floor designed by Ando. The building remains distinctly Venetian- with glimpses out to the Grand Canal through the semi-circle windows- but the success of the project has been the subtlety Ando has employed in the renovation: in other words, he has let the original building do the talking, and not his own architecture.

Caroline Bourgeois has curated an exhibition at the Punta Della Dogana titled In Praise of Doubt, that discusses our certainties about our identity, our relation with personal space and the space of Art. As Bourgeois says: "in Praise of Doubt we are referring to intimacy... The artists presented in this exhibition are interested in what is perceptible, what we can do, who we are, the clichés which we- as they- must deal with, and how in one's interior life one must wonder about and question oneself." Each room is dedicated to one artist, most of which have never been exhibited in Venice, apart from a few staple pieces, such as Cattelan's horse, which has become a virtual symbol of Punta Della Dogana. Artist Julie Mehretu was specially commissioned for Ando's central concrete cube, taking inspiration from the architecture and history of Venice, Mehretu has created two large canvases full of expressive squiggles and line drawings. One is horizontal, and one is vertical, to reference the tradition of Renaissance painting, where horizontal painting represented everyday life, and vertical painting represented religious themes. In many ways, this exhibition, along with it's sister gallery Palazzo Grassi's exhibition Voice of Images, could be seen in the same vein as Saatchi's Sensation exhibition in 1997.

Images my own