My Festival of Ideas talk: Power and Resistance in Sculpture After World War One

  Festival of Ideas 2015 Power and Resistance After Ww1

Three October art things in Cambridge

What art to see in Cambridge this month:  My quirky picks

1)  Shaggy Dog Stories, by Tom Hackett.  Yellow dogs in wheelbarrows.  On a balcony in the Lord Ashcroft Business building at Anglia Ruskin University on East Road.  More about them on the surrounding walls.  You can touch them!  They feel sort of slimy, like dry soap.  

2)  Kerstin Hacker's haunting photographs of births, babies, midwives and mothers on a Czech maternity ward.  Strange, beautiful, sad, wrenching.  At Changing Spaces, that little gallery next to CB2 on Norfolk Street.

 More here:  http://changing-spaces.org/2015/10/kerstin-hacker-maternity-ward/

Ends 1 Nov.

3)  Oh, and my own talk at the Festival of Ideas on Saturday, 24 Oct, at 2 pm.  :-)  Come along to the Fitz and join me for Power and Resistance in Sculpture in the Aftermath of World War One.




http://www.festivalofideas.cam.ac.uk/events/power-and-resistance-sculpture-aftermath-world-war-one

Month: October 2015
Place: Cambridge, Cambridgeshire

Visions and dreams in painting: Fitzwilliam lecture

Slide lecture

Last month, I gave a lecture at the Fitzwilliam Museum as part of the Festival of Ideas.

I've finally uploaded a shortened version of the slide presentation.  So here it is for you to read (and view). 

Click on the arrows under the picture to move forwards (and backwards).

For a scroll-down version  or if you can't see the image below, go here:  Visions and Dreams at scribd.


Contents:

Visions and dreams in painting
• Representing dreams:  Three challenges

• Before the 19th century

• Gregory the Great

• How can we recognise a dream vision in an image?

• Dream of Pope Innocent III by Giotto

• Modern dreams

• The privacy of dreaming

• Dream by Max Beckmann

• The dream without the dreamer

Includes pictures by:
Giotto, Taddeo Gaddi, Benozzo Gozzoli, Paul Klee, Salvador Dalí, Remedios Varo, Frida Kahlo, Leonora Carrington, Karel Appel

Plus:
Stained glass windows at Chartres and Bourges, mosaics in San Marco in Venice, book illustration from the Vienna Genesis, and more

I hope you enjoy it.  Please let me know if there are technical difficulties with watching it.


Permalink:  http://artincambridge.blogspot.com/2012/11/visions-and-dreams-in-painting.html

15 things I learned from 15 Cambridge street pianos

Autumnal piano hunting:

My piano photos

When I first wrote about the painted Cambridge street pianos  I had yet to visit them.  Well, since then I've been on my bike and I have now seen all 15 pianos!  Here is what I learned:


1. They are found objects, destined for the scrap heap and then revived and painted by artists and street artists.

Midsummer Common

2. But the pianos are also not objects. When nobody is playing the piano, it is 'dead'. Here is a 'dead' piano, looking forlorn in its plastic raincoat.

Cambridge 'Leisure Centre', outside Cineworld

3. And here is a 'live' piano.

Christ's Pieces

This is 'art in use'. I like art in use very much. I think it is the raison d'être of all public art.

4. As Luke Jerram, the artist, said in an interview:  "Recently, I've been making artwork out in the public domain. I think with an art gallery ... it's usually only a specific section of society that will go into an art gallery to have a kind of experience so I quite like delivering art into the public domain."

(Listen to the interview on Sydney radio, Australia 2009.)

Arbury Court

5. I've learned that there are a whole lot of people who are fantastic pianists! They play classical pieces, jazz, folk tunes -- everything. And they play it beautifully. I'd like to be able to recognise all the beautiful pieces they play; my knowledge of piano tunes is woeful.

Sussex Street (now in Cherry Hinton)

6. Half of Cambridge's children seem to be able to play the piano! Or be prepared to give it a go! Their parents hover fondly.

Jesus Green

7. 'Piano in use' is not only playing the piano, but also listening to it. Some pianos had a cluster of onlookers, a mini-audience who clapped enthusiastically.

Grand Arcade, second floor

8. Musicians and audience were not the only 'users'. Hello, fellow photographer.

Under the Elizabeth Way Bridge

9. Coming upon the pianos is done via sound. Armed with the piano map, I knew roughly where each piano was. At first, in the open space of a park, you don't see where the piano is. You look and look -- and then you hear it. You listen out for it more than you look out for it.

Parker's Piece

10. It's surprising how not loud a piano is. I estimate that in the open air I first heard each piano when I was about 10 meters away. Piano sound does not carry. It is quite intimate.

Ditchburn Place (former maternity hospital, Mill Road)

11. Street pianos are not busking. Street pianists don't play for money. Here are some buskers:

Here is busker-in-a-bin Charlie Caver, outside King's College:

And here are some street pianists:

King's Parade, outside Senate House

In the background:  Gonville and Caius College

In the background:  King's College and tree

In the background: Senate House
(urns)

12. I realised that the piano as object was not as important as the piano as catalyst for interaction. So I stopped photographing details of the object.

Silver Street bridge

I started taking photos of the piano in its surroundings.

13. I not only discovered pianos but also some lovely sites for pianos.

Garret Hostel Lane, the Backs (near public footbridge)

14. One street piano is not the work. The work is all the street pianos put together. Each piano is connected to the others by invisible threads and people's knowledge that there is an overarching 'installation' that animates all of Cambridge. I wonder what those who don't know this think?

Newnham Park

15. I learned that one way of getting to know Cambridge was cycling all over it on a piano hunt!

Sometimes finding the piano took me quite a while. Prime example: Cherry Hinton Park.

Can you spot the piano?

Cherry Hinton Park
No piano here.

Nor here.

Still no piano. But look: I found some art!

Then I rounded a corner and:

Pianos!

Two of them! One had migrated here from Sussex St (where people complained of 'noise pollution'...)

Pianos... and ducks!  There were many nature sounds here: ducks quacking, water plashing down the weir, birdwings flapping. 

My favourite piano photo:  White piano, white birds, green background

Read my earlier post about the pianos here.
See other people's pictures and videos at the Street Piano website (and upload your own).

Permalink:  http://artincambridge.blogspot.com/2012/11/15-things-i-learned-from-15-cambridge.html