Saatchi lastest / Culture Night XL (Thursday 9 October 2008)

Saatchi's new gallery opens

compiled by Mélanie Vinet

Cang Xin: Communication, 2006; image held here

The new Saatchi Gallery has opened to the public in London today (see here for last item on the subject). The first show is of contemporary Chinese art, called The Revolution continues. The new gallery - which has taken three years to get right -  show the artwork of 24 chinese artists, taken from Saatchi's vast collection of contemporary art. It fills thirteen galleries over four floors. "The aim is not to give a message," according Rebecca Wlison, the Gallery director, to the Guardian. "We just want to show really interesting artists from China". For example, in one room there is model city made from dog chews, by Liu Wei. Elsewhere, fifteen life-size resin sculptures hang upside-down, in a work called Chinese offspring by Zhang Dali; it’s about migrants construction workers and the uncertainty of their lives. A donkey with an impressive erection climbs a building, a miniature of Shangai's tallest building, in Donkey by Zhang Huan. There is also political pop, in the style of communist propaganda. Enormous droppings. A humorous portrait of Mao with a cat's head - since ‘mao’ can mean cat in chinese. A gigantic naked girl sitting open-legged on a giant stool. And more...

Or there’s Communication by Cang Xin. It is an artwork that commenced in 1996. Cang’s procedure is to lie down on the floor, and put his tongue on it, eg in Tiananmen Square and the Colliseum. Unfortunately, he does not do this in person in the Saatchi Gallery: he has recreated his performance in the form of a very life-like sculpture.

Entry is free, and the gallery is at the Duke of York’s HQ, King’s Road, Chelsea.

Sources: http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/charlottehigginsblog/2008/oct/06/art.museums and elsewhere

Culture night carte blanche?

compiled by Elaine Reynolds

While in Ireland we are familiar with the ‘all night crawl’, this concept is been taken to a new level in cities around the globe. Lange Nacht der Museen ('the long night of the museums') was launched in Berlin 1997, with twelve cultural instuitions opening their doors to the public for free. This initiative proved to be hugely popular; it has taken place annually and grown substantially since then. Lange Nacht... provided a working model for similar endeavours in many other cities

The inaugral Nuit blanche took place in Paris in 2002. The phrase translates as 'white night' or 'all nighter', as one might expect, the event lasts from dusk to dawn, and possibly stems originally from St Petersburg. What began with museums, galleries and cultural institutions offering free admission to all has extended into the streets with art installations, music and performances to be found in unusual locations throughout the city. It is customary that shops and food vendors stay open throughout the night and that free public transport is made available.

On 4 / 5 October this year, Toronto hosted Nuit blanche for the third year running. It is a visual-arts event and is a particularly interesting prototype, with a large emphasis on ‘living art’ and pushing beyond the standard muesuem / gallery stronghold. More than 750,000 Torontonians reclaimed every imaginable public space from car parks to warehouses, train stations to libraries and street corners to subways. What resulted was, apparently, an enormously successful event - one that was extremely progressive in terms of content and very well mediated to the public.

This may all seem like familiar territory to those who attended the Irish variation, Culture night on 19 September. More than 100 institutions were involved and an estimated 100,000 attended in Dublin alone. Similar to its international counterparts, Culture night achieved what it set out to do in opening up the sometimes exclusive world of the arts to the public, but was the experience lessened so that everyone could make it home to bed by a reasonable hour? With most cities reporting general good behaviour and less ‘incidents’ than for a normal weekend, the question is whether it could work to transform Culture night into a ‘nuit blanche’, all-night event?

www.culturenight.ie; www.scotiabanknuitblanche.ca; www.cbc.ca/canada/toronto/story/2008/10/03/nuit-blanche.html; www.artsjournal.com

Most recent news items:
• Culture Ireland autumn grant round (Friday 3 October 2008)
• Sims for Context / ev+a selectors (Thursday 2 October 2008)
• Circa at Culture Night (Monday 22 September 2008)
• Sculpturing disappointment: cancellation of the Lempriere Prize (Wednesday 17 September 2008)

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