26 September 2013, 6-7.30pm
Welcome back after the summer break. Our September Spin event will be hosted by the Talbot Rice Gallery where we will be discussing the summer’s very successful Edinburgh International Festival exhibition, Transmitted Live: Nam June Paik Resounds. Those who came along for the Edinburgh Art Festival Art Late in August had a brief preview of this exceptional exhibition. We will be joined for the discussion by Talbot Rice Gallery Curator James Clegg who will join us to discuss the first survey exhibition of Paik’s work in Scotland.
No other artist has had greater influence on the use of technology in art than Nam June Paik; he prophesied changes that would shape the contemporary world, exemplified in his pioneering ideas, ‘Participation TV’, ‘Random Access Information’ and ‘Video Commune’.
Transmitted Live: Nam June Paik Resounds celebrates the 50th anniversary of Paik’s first solo exhibition, Exposition of Music – Electronic Television (Wuppertal 1963), when the artist brought television into the realm of art for the first time, presenting it as a tactile and multisensory medium. As part of the counter-cultural movements of the 1960s, Paik believed that artists should humanize technology, get their ‘fingers in and tear away the walls’ of the establishment. Paik, a trained musician, treated technology as a material part of his repertoire, which later expanded to include video, satellite transmissions, robots and lasers.
24 September 2009 at 6pm
For this month’s Spin event, we will be visiting The Enlightenments at the Dean Gallery presented by the Edinburgh International Festival, to see works by acclaimed international contemporary artists Tacita Dean, Greg Creek, Gabrielle de Vietri, Lee Mingwei, Nathan Coley and Joshua Mosley.
Against the backdrop of Edinburgh and its philosophical history, the artworks that make up The Enlightenments offer contemporary observations on subjects including religion, philosophy, superstition, architecture, literature, natural history, the cosmos, scepticism, stoicism and social manners.
Highlights include a new commission by Glasgow-based, Turner Prize nominee Nathan Coley who has re-presented three gnarled tree trunks that supported the roof of a remote 19th century stone cottage in Perthshire. This new sculptural installation is described by curator Juliana Engberg as ‘like a forest but it’s not. It’s like a natural cathedral but it’s not. It’s like a sanctuary but perhaps it’s more spooky than that. It’s for the viewer to decide.’
Other highlights include Lee Mingwei’s Letter Writing Project which invites viewers to think about communicating with absent friends, family and loved ones by writing all the letters they always meant to. Joshua Mosley’s digital film of animated clay figures, presents a fictional encounter between two of history’s greatest thinkers, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Blaise Pascal as they journey through a forest and talk about God and nature. In The I Don’t Know Show: Philosophy for Kids, artist Gabrielle de Vietri has recorded interviews with eight to twelve-year-olds in which they answer fundamental philosophical questions about art and life.
Joining us in discussion will be art historian and curator, Bill Hare. Bill is an Honorary Fellow in Scottish art history at the University of Edinburgh and Honorary Curator of the Universitys Fine Art Collection. He has also been a lecturer in modern art history and contemporary critical theory with Edinburgh College of Art for the past 30 years and has recently been apppointed Exhibition Curator of the ECA Cast Collection. He has curated many exhibitions working with major artists incuding Alan Davie, Eduardo Paolozzi and Boyle Family. His most recent exhibitions included Divided Selves-The Scottish Self-Portrait from the 17th Century to the Present (2006) at the Talbot Rice Gallery and Beyond Appearances-Painting and Picturing in Scottish Modern and Contemporary Painting (2007) at the City Art Centre.
