Category Archives: Uncategorized

David Clement Davies

The Global hurt from ‘Covid 19′ to people’s lives encompasses museums, Art fairs and so many artists’ experiences too. If ‘shared’ isolation has an unexpected potential to unite, and perhaps inspire new directions. The strange bonus for many Italians, in a country still under Lockdown, is that Venice’s Grand Canal now runs clearer, the air is cleaner, no crowds swarm to take Selfies in front of great works and often unbearably long queues have evaporated. It carries both melancholy and a threat, yet in Florence, that great city of Italian Art, the French photographic artist ‘JR’ has just made a virtue of an open wound.

‘La Farita’, ‘The Wound’, is ‘JR”s 33 Metre high, black and white photographic collage on aluminum that currently decks the front of one of Italy’s most celebrated but also innovative museums, the Fifteenth Century Palazzo Strozzi. Unveiled on 19th March this year, it also marks the beginning of a new initiative, the Strozzi’s ‘Future Art Program’. Heralded as a means of celebrating and supporting contemporary art and artists, also encouraging public accessibility. In a city of so many centuries of public art, and private patronage too, it includes a new annual public art commission.

‘JR’, a hip, bearded 38 year old Parisian, is no stranger to today’s rather classic mix of political poignancy and eye grabbing showmanship. With the bravura of the British Street Artist Banksy, and more than a cedilla of the late Christo, that greatest lover of wrapping up public buildings, ‘JR’ was the man who made the Louvre’s glass pyramid disappear, in a technique he describes as anamorphosis, placed an image of a dignified old lady on the stair of one of Brazil’s poorest favela’s, in his ‘Women are Heroes’ project, and had a huge, adorable child peer longingly over a US-Mexican border wall. Eye catching it certainly is, if anyone is strolling by these days.

There is a difference here in emphasis, and style too, if not the obvious ambition. Banksy, the arch ironist of the Art world in paint, and all the money and pretention involved, remains more or less anonymous and engages in a kind of independent, commando creativity. ‘JR’ is a pseudonym, yet much more is known of the high profile French artist, who has a photo of himself climbing the Strozzi, found a major role at the Rio Olympics and back in 2011 won the $100,000 Ted prize. Christo’s scope in gift wrapping something like Berlin’s Reichstag building was on a graver scale. ‘The Wound’ then comes from within the Italian Art world itself, seeming to expose or share the guts of the old, yet vaunted as a platform for brave new initiatives. Perhaps that is when you pause to ask if the new has become the establishment, or the medium the message, as the Museum world tries to reinvent itself, online or off.

Italy is often accused of being stuck in the past artistically, if quite a past to be stuck in. ‘The Wound’ certainly takes its place in a growing tradition of contemporary Art taking back the streets and the palaces of Culture, or at least appearing to. In a Trompe L’Oeil effect centuries old, which took two months to create, using a team of 11 and a structure that had no impact on the building itself, ‘JR”s giant collage seems to tear open a hole in the Strozzi’s front, for any passerby, or arm chair art lover too. Especially meaningful in times of Lockdown, suggest the Strozzi. Thus apparently allowing us all free and vital access to such iconic works as Botticelli’s “Primavera” and “Birth of Venus”, or sculpturally Giambologna’s “The Abduction of the Sabine Women”. Along with part of an internal colonnade and Italy’s Library of Renaissance Studies. At least pointing our longing eyes in a very interesting direction, perhaps fortuitously too, with so many unable to travel, or buy museum tickets, let alone make safe border crossings.

“Palazzo Strozzi is unique for its determination to forge a dialogue between the classic and the contemporary, through the involvement of artists capable of interpreting the present” says Strozzi Director General Arturo Galasino. Sponsored by the Italian businessman Andy Bianchedi, among others, and in “a long term collaboration”, you must ask about staging. Also if this carries the same intention, even authenticity, as noted iconoclasts, or, since ‘JR’ began on the Paris streets himself, the work of so many worldwide, from pavement artists to graffitists. ‘JR’ has protested against art as marketing, while Mr Bianchedi’s Milan based firm is involved with real estate, shares and yachting. Described by the Strozzi as a philanthropist too, he helped initiate the Future Art program, in part in honour of his late mother. Beautifully achieved meanwhile, ‘The Wound’ serves an exciting purpose in beginning the Strozzi’s new initiative, including an annual City commission. Also pointing to a series of virtual events, interactions and lectures, in that search for mid-Covid accessibility, as perhaps the entire world appears to have moved online.

In fact it is not the Pandemic that has refigured whatever Art or the Art world are, more the internet itself, post the days of Saatchi and Saatchi, and long involved in the very power of the image and photograph. While, perhaps protectively, the Strozzi reference the 18th century tradition of ‘Ruinism’, in the use of public buildings as wider metaphors by artists, in a long tradition. Not an especially new story then, like Art, marketing or money. Just as you might conclude from Banksy’s own copyright battles recently that iconoclasts have often become the establishment, while not only such large projects require the backing of real funds, public or private. These things often take a great deal of front too. When the performance and direct interaction driven artist Marina Obramovic appeared at the Strozzi, at the end of 2018, you could not lose yourself in the once healthy crowds without encountering her image on the back of Florentine a bus.

You might ask then if ‘The Wound’ is any cure for the virtual world, and the reach of accessible art, or a symptom of a global marketing disease, now literally reflected in the questions raised by a pandemic too. As everyone attempts to break out, or find a voice by going ‘viral’. Perhaps all has become the search for platforms, and ‘JR’ has a million followers on Instagram. It makes ‘The Wound’ no less imaginative, indeed poignant, as contemporary cultural and certainly very Italian metaphor. Interesting, and hopefully important too, in terms of the future works and artists it might inspire, find financial backing for too. Details of future commissions and projects are to be announced.

Heralded by one French critic as the new Cartier-Bresson, in work often involving film makers too and in 2017 winning the Golden Eye at Cannes for best documentary, co-directed by Agnès Varda, ‘JR”s journeys have brought him a long way. He has staged shows in museums from San Francisco to Baden-Baden, Hong Kong to Brooklyn, and worked with the New York City ballet. He now has representation with the prominent Pace and Perrotin galleries, and Nara Roesler. In 2019 he had a rolling project in Italy with film maker Alice Rohrwacher, driven by a concern for farmers and the environment on the Alfina plateau, “Omelai Contadina”, picked up last year by Gallery Continua. ‘JR’ can be frank about setting out to make a splash long ago, yet describes how the TED award 10 years ago fueled his desire to “change the World”. When he made the Louvres’ hyper modern glass pyramid apparently vanish in 2016 it seemed he might like to change the world back in time, yet many projects have served a serious social purpose. Now you wonder what such a highly imaginative artist will do next.

‘The Wound’ will run until 22 August, 2021

David Clement Davies is an author, journalist and artist – http://www.dcdsculpture.com

Visit the Strozzi at https://www.palazzostrozzi.org/

Bolivian granite / Sodalite

 

ENJOY MICHELANGELO’S MOUSE RIGHT THROUGH, AND MUCH MORE, FROM THE DESKTOP DECAMERON BY CLICKING HERE

 

CLICK HERE FOR AMAZON RAT AND MUCH MORE WITH THE DESKTOP DECAMERON

We are extremely proud to announce the publication of a ‘Master of fantasy’s’ hard fought and much awaited epic SCREAM OF THE WHITE BEAR and just in time for Christmas.

 

For current time limited Christmas Ebook promotions or to purchase the paperback please CLICK HERE

 

Dear fans, readers and friends,

I wanted to apologise for the rather fantastical delay to the publication Scream of The White Bear. I don’t want to replay an old story, about fights with publishers, or the seismic shift in the whole publishing culture and industry.  In real life it was a difficult true story, but all I hope is that you enjoy a fictional tale.

Scream of the White Bear is also, I think, much a story for our very challenged times.  It is inevitable that my books, so much about animals and nature, should have always carried the implicit themes of conservation, but no more so than in this novel. A problem with that is I think over didactic books rarely make for great storytelling, which I certainly hope is not true in this case. Yet in the more than ten years of Scream’s delay, the genre of environmental fantasy, in the US at least, has even spawned University courses and degrees and many are waking up to the need to act, worldwide,  especially those extinction rebels of our times. While of course all writers, especially of fiction, attempt to speak to the whole world and anyone that can read or listen. I do not pretend to know the solutions, but where I am in tune with that environmental genre, I think anything that helps us explore the issues, deepen our thoughts and understanding and find a voice too, some depth of response at least, the very essence of the search for meaning and value,  a good thing.

But a writer’s first job is to enertain their readers and in that vein Scream also contains many of the terms and some of the characters from my three favourie books Fire Bringer, The Sight and Fell. I hope it expresses that love of animals I have always felt.   It has been a long road, but the greatest recompense for that is that you the reader take pleasure in it. I hope you do.

Warmest wishes,

David Clement Davies

ONE – SLAYERS AND STORYTELLERS

“God created man in order to tell stories.”—Hasidic saying

The scurrying arctic blizzard was done and in the enormous white silences settling like a sigh across the huge expanses of frozen sea ice, up here, high above the Arctic Circle, a savage cry cut the winter night—“Aooooooow”. It was the lonely song of the wild wolf. The searching call seemed to quiver into form on the air, as if the cry itself had suddenly turned into the eerie coloured lights, flickering brilliantly across the great black canvas of moon-clad night.

The glowing astral pathway rose through the winter cold like billowing curls of blue-green smoke, sweeping up off the ice sheets and into the air in a drifting arc around the moon, the single Pole Star, and the great constellation hanging there in the heavens, men in more wondering days knew as Arktus, the Greek word for a bear.

The Aurora Borealis the modern language of science calls these strange astral lights, although the Sioux Indians traditionally believed they are the spirits of unborn children, and some Inuit tribesmen, the ghosts of their dead ancestors: phantoms, swirling in the darkened skies. Closer to their freezing earth world, the Eskimo claim the famous Northern Lights as favourite beasts instead: like caribou, whale, or dancing salmon. But the Lera, the wild animals of the earth, truly know what they really are, and so they call them The Beqorn – “Those that bite with their teeth.”

If the language of science is to classify them, in truth the magical display of Northern Lights is really caused by the sun’s superheated flares, bursting in outer space, sending out the solar winds through the void, that charge unseen particles in our upper atmosphere, making them swirl and flow toward Magnetic North. Yet, as the wolf howl came again, calling out in nature’s most primitive tongue, the ice itself seemed alive with a real magic this deep winter night—a storyteller’s magic.