Riusuke Fukahori

深堀隆介 - Riusuke Fukahori

Japanese artist Riusuke Fukahori paints layers of acrylic on resin to create incredibly realistic sculptural/3D paintings of goldfish in water

More from Lernert & Sander

"Ever since they began collaborating in 2007, the artists and filmmakers Lernert & Sander have been known for their high-conceptual art films, eye-catching installations and keen fashion aesthetic. Driven by their cheeky sense of humour, Lernert & Sander’s simple yet stunning approach has earned the duo numerous awards, international accolades and industry-wide recognition. They live and work in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. "

From the film "Chocolate Bunny":

Another film: "Revenge"... pop!

Video: The Art of Making a Book

All I can think is, what a waste of honey!!

Preservation has many meanings, from the physical to the spiritual. At the most basic – and perhaps the most important – level it can denote survival. Hence the idea of protection, inherent in the term. But while the word often implies a kind of stability, or even stasis, preservation also comes about through transformation: wild animal preserves come to exist only by being separated from hunting grounds; fruit preserves are made from hours and hours of boiling, creating a sweet, lasting essence.
Blake Little’s series of photographs presented here combine the old and the new in a bold way. His vivid images startle the viewer. They freeze the human form, preserving it not in proverbial amber, but rather – and unexpectedly – in honey, another natural substance millions of years old. (For honey bees date back some 25-50 million years, preserved in the fossil record of the Eocene–Oligocene boundary.) Just when and where humans first braved the sharp sting of bees to steal their honey we do not know. Cave paintings in Spain depict human honey-gatherers, and from the time of the Egyptian pyramids, about 2575–2150 BC, what scientists now call the “honey-bearing” bee (Apis mellifera) appears to have been domesticated.
As there was no cane sugar in the Old World, honey was highly valued for its sweetness, but for other qualities as well. It can function as a medicine as well as a preservative, for under the right conditions does not spoil. Honey sealed in ancient tombs can remain safe to eat to this day. In Egypt and other early cultures around the world it was offered to the gods both in its semi-liquid state and in the form of honey-cakes. Greek and Roman poets wrote of pouring libations of honey mixed with milk or wine, and it plays a significant role in several ancient myths. It was honey’s viscosity, as well as its color, transparency, and luminosity that compelled Blake to experiment with the material. Innovatively, he applied the substance to the human body, first in drips, then in sheets, creating gleaming, vibrant forms, which, though far from imitative, recall, in different ways those made by Auguste Rodin, Francis Bacon, and Jeff Koons.
Blake saw – and was intrigued by – the juxtaposition of the timeless, pure substance and human flesh, so prone to decay. He was amazed by honey’s transformations when dripped, dribbled, and poured over the human body, and how it can distort and amplify forms, highlight physical perfection, engender repulsion, and suggest both immortality and death. For Blake, gleaming, golden honey has a way of diffusing the personal qualities of his subjects, often making them unrecognizable, democratizing their individual traits into something altogether different and universal. Sometimes terrifying, it can seem to encase his subjects, almost larvae-like in a primordial ooze, as in Ouriel, front, 2012. At other times it is dynamic, its lively motion captured and frozen, in a very different sense, through stop-action imaging, its tendrils – almost electric – spinning forth (Clayton, 2013). Powerfully muscular bodies, like Devion, back 2012, and gracefully balanced poses, such as Tala, standing up, 2013, evoke works of classical art, such as the famous Discus-thrower of the ancient Greek sculptor Myron. Other images recall sober portraits of the Renaissance (Dylan, 2012; Brad, 2012 and Zayden, 2013), or the dainty ballerinas of Degas in Lindsay, 2013.
Whether thick or thin, the substantiality of the honey is ever present, and because the experience of being covered in it is far from natural – indeed, can be suffocating – many of the subjects seem to struggle, while others surrender themselves to it. In this, and in other ways, the images in these pages recall those (made familiar by photographers of a very different era) of the plaster casts of the victims of Vesuvius, whose bodies have disappeared, but whose evocative forms remained in hollows in the ash that buried them during the disaster that destroyed the ancient cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum during the eruption of A.D. 79, which, paradoxically, simultaneously destroyed and preserved them and have become something of a byword for the fleetingness and unpredictability of human life.
Howsoever intense, grueling, and frightening it may be to be covered by cascading sheets of honey, all of Blake’s subjects fortunately remain very much alive – thanks both to the marvellous properties of this age-old material and the evocative power of his evolving art.
Kenneth Lapatin, Associate Curator of Antiquities, J. Paul Getty Museum

Beehives at my local reserve, Waitaramoa. I love the (inadvertent?) colour schemes of beehive boxes, and how precariously these are stacked!

David Shrigley

Opening last week at Two Rooms. There was an article in the herald in the weekend about his residency. 

“What I do is meant to communicate very directly as it uses the same language as the advertising and posters that plaster your visual environment all the time,” he says. “It’s using a language that already exists in a way, albeit it’s my take on that.”

A look into his studio (youtube video)

In this interview (Time Out) he talks about the book as a medium / a mode of distribution: 

Do you think that the book medium sort of gets around some of the exclusivity that’s inherent in the art world?’
DS: ‘I think it does. Everybody knows how to read a book, but not everybody knows how to walk around an art gallery. When you’re in Chelsea in New York, when you’re walking around Phillips auction house, it’s an intimidating experience for people who might like art, but don’t feel very welcomed there.  Whereas, if you take a book off of a bookshelf in a bookstore then obviously you know what to do with it. You’re not really sure whether you should smile or laugh in the art gallery, or whether you’re allowed to rub your chin, or scratch your head, or whatever. For the likes of my sister, for example, she wouldn’t feel very comfortable at some fancy gallery in New York, and wouldn’t really know what to do. She’d sort of look around and look at her watch and fiddle with her Blackberry. But books are accessible.’

And his process:

DS: ‘I throw a lot away. My attitude towards it is very free, because I know there’s only a one in four chance that I’ll keep the drawing in question. And at that point you’re not really worried too much about making a mess of it.’

Also mentioned in this interview on his website:

I draw them very quickly and then I think about them for a long time to try to figure out if they’re any good. I have a box that I put drawings into when they’re finished. It is called my ‘artistic distance’ box. I leave the drawings in the box for weeks or months (sometimes years) and then I have a look at them again. If they’re still no good after 2 years I throw them away. If they’re no good in the first place I don’t even put them in the box, they go straight in the bin.

I think what I’m interested in is that, if you choose to read into them at all, his drawings are cynical and totally uninhibited, and this completely shapes your approach as the viewer. Since they are so offhand and bizarre you instinctively know you’re not meant to take them seriously. His style offsets any seriousness you could possibly read into his drawings, so even when they are dark or morbid, they aren’t heavy with it. If they seem at all philosophical, you know it’s more likely he’s just taking the piss out of philosophy. I think there’s a lot of power in that. Leigh Clarke said something in his artist talk about how humour always has a shadow, and I think that idea is clear in Shrigley’s drawings.

DE: ‘In your last few books, though, there’s a real clear mix of the outright funny stuff and there’s a lot of stuff that’s I think much more pained and political. Humour that I like comes from a place of anger, exasperation. I was re-reading a lot of Vonnegut recently, and then I was looking through your drawings and there was a similar sense of humour — a very dark humour that comes from a place of frustration, of wanting better for humanity.’
DS: ‘Well, I suppose it’s a cathartic thing. It enables you to say what you want to say, and vent your anger about just the lunatic, idiot world we live in. I think I’m a much saner person because I’m able to make work about how horrible people are, and how unacceptable it is that they are so horrible and how unacceptable it is that people accept how horrible these people are. I kind of assume that’s a given for everybody, that everybody feels that there are aspects of contemporary life in an advanced capitalist society that are really unacceptable, but what can we do to change it? Make stupid drawings I suppose.’

Amen.

Groupe F’s show in the domain last night got me thinking about Peter Shand’s lecture in first year critical studies about ‘spectacle’ in art. Spectacular as a quality, referring to massive installations like Ai Weiwei’s sunflower seeds, Cai Guo-Qiang’s cascading wolves and neon-exploding cars; the sort of works that are exhibited in the Turbine Room at Tate Modern, which are massive, impressive, and have immediate impact. Things that make the public exclaim 'whoa!’ when they walk past. 

This is not to suggest that their conceptual value is compromised by their appeal. In that sense I’m not sure what to think, and I'm currently listening to this video series: The Tate Modern conference, 'Rethinking Spectacle’ & trying to get my head around both sides of that debate.

Performance, video projection, lights and pyrotechnics: there’s no doubt that Groupe F’s performance is 'spectacular’ art. Inherently, no single person can create something on that scale. Like other spectacular artworks there is an army of workers and an enormous budget required to create a piece (could it be called a performance piece when there’s so much more to it?) like 'Skin of Fire.’ Just like how there’s an army and an enormous budget to create a theatre production, or a feature length film.

And yet, a single person can write a book, which occupies & entertains its audience for just as much time if not far longer. And a single person can make an artwork, or a body of art, yet there is no way to know how much time or appreciation anyone will (or ought to) lend to it, as no viewer can ever quantifiably finish reading art the way they can digest a book.

I guess I’m just thinking about this contrast of responsibility over the variety of creative works produced for the same 'public.’ Unlike theatre and film and whatever you’d like to call whatever it is that Groupe F does, books, and most artworks, usually have just one sole person - a writer, an artist - behind their creation. This is not to discount the editors, publishers and curators who distribute them: I’m only referring here to their production. After all you can still read a book that hasn’t been published or look at an artwork that hasn’t publicly displayed, it’s just less likely that you’ll encounter these in the first place.

Nonetheless, bestselling books and publicly displayed artworks can be accessed by an audience of the same scale as, say, Skin of Fire. Does this put a lot of pressure on the artist/writer? I’m not sure how to address this question - this is just something I’ve started thinking about. Perhaps I’m just trying to compare art to other creative fields to analyse what it can do most effectively. Fireworks are fun, narrative film is fantasy, books are a private conversation, and art does something else entirely.