The artist says: Thanks for reading my contemporary art blog! If you are involved in the art and culture industry in any way, and would like to syndicate content from or to this blog, or if you simply enjoy art and would like to get in touch, please leave a comment! This article has been kindly provided by: Contemporary Art Daily

Photographer who specialises in large-scale nude installations is asking for 1,000 volunteers to reinvigorate the spirit of LS Lowry. Cloth caps not needed

Just a week after coaxing 5,200 Australians to pose naked on the steps of Sydney Opera House, photographer Spencer Tunick has announced he will tackle an altogether chillier and more industrial location: Salford.

To mark its 10th anniversary, the city’s Lowry has commissioned Tunick to create a one-off response to the artist who gave the gallery its name. But where LS Lowry depicted the folk of Lancashire in cloth caps, bowler hats and workers’ clogs, Tunick is calling for 1,000 “everyday people” to leave their clothes behind and pose for a series of large-format photographs in eight different locations around Salford and Manchester in early May. The images that result will be exhibited at the gallery from 12 June.

Michael Simpson, the Lowry’s head of visual arts and engagement, said: “Tunick’s work not only reflects and records the landscape of an area, but also its people. This exhibition celebrates our achievements and signals our continuing ambition.”

Tunick has created nude installations featuring ever-larger groups of people in locations as varied as Sao Paulo, Barcelona, Cleveland, Ohio and Vienna. He said that working in Salford and Manchester was an “intriguing prospect”.

He added: “LS Lowry’s paintings, depicting the mass of everyday people who contributed to the industrial machine of the 20th century, also provide an interesting frame of reference in terms of the compositional possibilities of the installations.”

The press release reassures wannabe participants that they are taking steps to deal with the possibility of a chilly northern May bank holiday: participants will be ferried between the different locations in “heated buses”, it says.

Volunteers can now register their interest in participating at thelowry.com/tunick

From the slums of Kenya to the Paris banlieues, the guerilla photographer JR aims to put a human face to the most impoverished areas of the world. Just don’t ask him who he is

The Parisian photographer JR is a man routinely touted as the hippest street artist since Banksy. His work has sold at Sotheby’s and been plastered 100ft high on the wall of Tate Modern. His celebrity admirers include Trudie Styler and Damon Albarn. But regardless of his undoubted artistic pedigree, it seems inevitable, given his name, to ask him about Dallas.

So is his two-letter moniker a tribute to the fictional 80s oil baron JR Ewing?

“No,” he laughs when we meet in his Paris studio, a bright, airy space filled with video-game consoles and designer chairs. “It’s just my initials.”

And they stand for?

“I can’t say.”

The deliberately enigmatic reply is more than mere artistic pretension. In fact, JR’s anonymity is crucial to the integrity of his work: this is an artist who prides himself on operating under the radar, on creating dazzling installations in unexpected places through the force of his personality and vision.

As a teenager, he started out as a graffiti artist but began taking photographs when he found a camera on the Paris Métro. Now aged 26, he mixes the two forms and styles himself a “photograffeur”, pasting oversize black-and-white photographic canvases in surprising public locations. It is something of a point of honour never to ask permission from the authorities.

“The fact that I stay anonymous means I can exhibit wherever I want,” he explains with a broad grin, a plate of microwaved lamb tagine balanced precariously on his knees. “No one knows my name, so it’s easy for me to travel.”

In the aftermath of the 2004 riots in the Parisian suburbs, JR chose to exhibit in the grand central districts of his home town, pasting up photographs on the walls of the Marais. Portrait of a Generation featured close-up pictures of the young residents of the banlieues pulling funny faces through a fish-eye lens. Instead of the immigrant thugs of popular imagination, the Parisians who walked past JR’s photographs were confronted with a more human image. “Most of the media shots of the rioters were taken with a long lens,” explains JR, who comes from a mixed-race background with Tunisian and Eastern European heritage. “I used a 28mm lens to capture them really close up.”

The second phase of his 28 Millimètres project took JR to the Middle East, where he mounted what is believed to be the largest illegal photo exhibition in the world. Appropriating a border wall running the length of the disputed areas between Israel and Palestine, JR pasted a giant triptych of a rabbi, a priest and an imam wearing deliberately comic expressions. The message was simple but arresting: when you are mugging it up for the camera, what brings you together is more in evidence than what sets you apart. “It’s about breaking down barriers,” JR says. “With humour, there is life.”

Most recently, JR’s ad-hoc exhibition space has included some of the most dangerous and poverty-stricken places in the world. Women Are Heroes is the third phase of the project and has seen him travelling to the slums of Kibera, Kenya, where he covered 2,000m² of rooftops with blown-up photographs of the women who lived there.

“I was interested in women because I realised in the projects I’d done before – most of the time in the kind of places I was going to – it was men on the street, but it’s actually the women who are the ones holding the community together.”

Then in 2008 he went to Morro da Providencia, the oldest and most perilous favela in Rio de Janeiro, to paste portraits of its female residents on the sides of the houses in which they lived. The distinctively monochrome eyes and faces were positioned looking towards the centre of Rio, a constant reminder of the grinding poverty that exists on the doorstep of one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world.

“I asked each woman to give me something real,” says JR, recalling the process. And it is true that, in contrast to the usual media images of grief and despair, the women project a pride in where they come from and a certainty about their own identity. “The photo is the story,” he says. “They all gave me really strong eyes because they knew they would be facing the city.”

It seems difficult to imagine JR in the heart of a drug-ridden favela. He is a slim and smiley young man, today wearing the casual uniform of the urban hipster: a Day-Glo sweatshirt, a black trilby and a pair of fashionable, thick-rimmed glasses. Was he scared? “Yeah of course,” he says, nodding his head vigorously. “You can’t even get a taxi to take you there… There are kids with guns and bulletproof jackets on the street. It’s like finding yourself in the middle of a war.”

In fact, the favela is so lawless that journalists are banned and no NGO operates there. Undeterred, JR simply drove himself to the centre of the shanty town and started chatting about what he wanted to do to anyone who approached him. He had been drawn to the favela by news reports concerning the murder of three innocent young men caught up in the brutal turf wars between drug traffickers and corrupt military police.

“Everything is about eye contact,” JR says. “The first thing they have to know is that there’s no brand behind it, that’s really important… I’m not trying to use the favela to advertise Red Bull or BMX bikes, and I’m not a journalist either.

“I could speak for hours about the origins of the poster technique, but out there, there is not the same frame of reference. You have to go straight to the point. There’s this person in front of you and there’s no fucking around. That’s how I test my projects: if they get it, it’s going to work.”

Almost immediately, the women of the favela understood what JR was trying to do. He asked anyone interested in participating to come along to an informal meeting. “The women who came were the ones related to the three kids who had been killed: the grandmother, the mother, the best friend. They reappropriated my project to tell their story.” The end result was startlingly beautiful: a faceless community with its humanity regained.

But however successfully JR’s installations work as art, they have a social conscience, too. In Kibera the photographs of women on the rooftops were printed on to vinyl so that their homes would be waterproof. The sheets of corrugated iron used in another part of the shanty town were distributed afterwards to those who had taken part. Last April JR returned to Rio to set up a cultural centre in the heart of the favela. All of the money he makes from the sale of his work – in 2009 a print of one of JR’s most famous photos, “Ladj Ly”, sold at auction for £26,250, and he has just sold an image to Damon Albarn for the cover of the forthcoming Africa Express album – is ploughed back into his projects so that JR can ensure his continued independence. “The finance is a key part,” he says. “You wouldn’t take it in the same way if I did it with L’Oréal.”

There is a sense, also, that if JR were to reveal his name or speak more about his background, this would somehow detract from his work. Most graffiti artists start out by tagging their name on empty walls and tube carriages. JR does something different: he takes those who live on the margins of mainstream society and he gives them back their individuality. Paradoxically, perhaps, the photographer without a name creates extraordinary art by restoring the identities of the nameless.

Jenny Holzer, Gateshead

The most extensive Holzer show ever in the UK presents a selection from the last two decades of text artworks in the form of LED installations, billboards, T-shirts, condom wrappers and paintings. Holzer infiltrates the mass media sloganeering signage of our city streets with pithy truisms, knowing cliches and enigmatic declamations: A Man Can’t Know What It’s Like To Be A Mother; Protect Me From What I Want; Abuse Of Power Comes As No Surprise; Alienation Produces Eccentrics Or Revolutionaries. Most recently there are suggestions of increasing alarm at the reporting of US foreign policy: It Takes A While Before You Can Step Over Inert Bodies And Go Ahead With What You Were Trying To Do. At its best, the affecting power of her work lies not so much in the sense of the texts themselves (they are almost all predictable), as in the near irresistible conviction of their immaculate presentation.

BALTIC, to 16 May

Robert Clark

Alex Katz, London

Chic people coolly enjoying the good life have long been the focus of Alex Katz’s suitably sophisticated paintings. A socially blessed class of Manhattanites, like artists, gallerists and their patrons, feature in spare, minimal portraits where colour planes are as intense as they are flat. Yet Katz’s images hover teasingly between pop’s emptiness and something more mysterious and uncertain, where emphasis on the surface might turn out to be a front. A contemporary of Jasper Johns and Ellsworth Kelly, Katz is one of America’s foremost artists. Now in his 80s, his latest body of work is a series of portraits of his intimate circle, including his wife and muse, Ada.

Timothy Taylor, W1, to 9 Apr

Skye Sherwin

Art Sheffield 2010, Sheffield

This contemporary art festival’s subtitle, Life: A User’s Manuel, is taken from Georges Perec’s 1978 novel in which inhabitants of a block of flats are evoked through the images – objects, photographs, reproductions – they keep in their rooms. The theme is broad enough to allow curators almost free rein, while also hinting at a framework on which to hang individual works. Artists selected range from the locally based yet internationally promising through to the long established. One-to-watch Maud Haya Baviera presents two video pieces that play on ambiguities of self-identity, and the renowned Susan Hiller is represented by her wonderful collection of 305 postcards of seas around British resorts.

Various venues, Sat to 1 May; visit artsheffield.org

Robert Clark

Vincent Fecteau, London

Walking around one of Vincent Fecteau’s sculptures is a curious adventure with space, tone, surface and form. What look like the pure abstractions of high modernism from one angle turn out to have a more playful underside. Small enough to share room on a tabletop, the San Francisco artist’s works are usually created by swathing objects in papier-mache which are then painted, creating strange composite forms. Surfaces might be temptingly textured with brush marks or smooth seducers of the eye, densely painted in deep purple, peach, greys or greens, or flash newsprint through thinner wash. On the one hand, their forms suggest a self-enclosed world of artistic reference, running from Boccioni to Caro. Rather than resign himself to the weight of the past, however, at every turn Fecteau speaks of sculpture’s possibility, and of how much fun you can have with it. His latest newly wall-based works are his largest to date.

Greengrassi, SE11, Thu to 17 Apr

Skye Sherwin

Meteor, Derby

Curator, art mag editor and writer Oliver Basciano presents this enticing and curatorially inventive show of seven contemporary artists’ works, based on factual and fictional biographies of inhabitants of the Derbyshire village of Repton where the gallery is situated. Its title is taken from Karel Capek’s 1934 novel in which a clairvoyant, a poet and a nun reflect on the life story of an unidentified and unconscious victim of a plane crash. Dan Coopey, Maria Georgoula and Paul Housley are among the artists playing with fragmentary indicators of cultural identity, ranging from names engraved on a local war memorial, through souvenirs of favourite pop groups to personal treasure hoards.

New Court Gallery & Gallery No 1, to 2 Apr

Robert Clark

Jyll Bradley, Penzance

Flowers abound in the recent work of Jyll Bradley. In her photographic lightboxes and installations, she has explored secret histories that bring out gardening’s political side. Her hit art book, Mr Roscoe’s Garden, for instance, evoked the famed 18th-century botanist’s battle against the slave trade. In this survey of her 20-year output, she’s

The Exchange, Sat to 5 Jun

Skye Sherwin

A Certain Distance, Endless Light, Middlesbrough

Two bodies of artworks come together as part of the current AV Festival to address its theme of energy. A conceptual minimalist and interactive cultural choreographer, the late Felix Gonzalez-Torres managed to conjure scenarios that were as strangely engaging as they were deceptively simple and throwaway. In a series of lightstrings and a paper stack from which viewers take a sheet, his art exists in the open-ended and thought-provoking interpersonal space he evokes. William McKeown’s accompanying installation The Daisy Field includes some 70 monochrome watercolours which add up en masse to an all-enveloping celebratory landscape.

Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, to 4 Jul

Robert Clark

Marc Camille Chaimowicz, London

How lives are written in the rooms we inhabit is something Marc Camille Chaimowicz is keenly attuned to. In the seminal performance artist’s work – which, since the 1970s, has also included installation, photography and design – interior decor becomes a gateway to the soul. What draws his eye is not the social aspiration dressed up in our choice of lampshade. Rather, he chases the ephemeral: memories stirred by a certain shade of wallpaper or the play of sunlight through a window. His exhibition at Bloomberg SPACE addresses the office block that houses the gallery with a series of “magic” carpets: decorative transportation for city workers to make an imaginative escape.

Bloomberg SPACE, EC2, to 20 Mar

Skye Sherwin

A passionately political artist equipped with a talent for mischief, Ai Weiwei is a fine choice for Tate’s Turbine Hall. I suspect the Chinese government won’t agree

The announcement that the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei is to be the next artist to take on Tate Modern’s annual Turbine Hall commission is unsurprising – though surprise, spectacle and a kind of art that is accessible to the widest possible public are what the Turbine Hall demands, even if the spectacle is of a quiet or understated sort. Subtlety and artistic sophistication are a bonus. The most successful Unilever commissions have not necessarily been the easiest, and the Turbine Hall is a tough testing ground for any artist. Subtlety and artistic sophistication are a bonus. But Ai Weiwei’s work is as often controversial as it is provocative. It is also – undeniably – fun. He fits the bill perfectly.

Most recent Chinese art has seemed at best secondary, at worst made cynically for the western art market, the kind of objects whose technical skill exceeds their interest. Much of the painting and sculpture one sees coming from China is mere product. Ai Weiwei is an exception, but how exceptional he is as an artist – he is also an architect, designer, curator and critic – is often obscured by his position in his homeland, where he is regarded as a sort of cultural irritant. He is an outspoken critic of government and officials, of state corruption and greed. His blog has been closed down, his bank accounts investigated, and last year he was beaten by the police for trying to testify in favour of a colleague with whom he was investigating casualties of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. He later suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. Having collaborated with Herzog and de Meuron – also the architects who transformed the Bankside power station into Tate Modern – on the Bird’s Nest stadium for the Beijing Olympics, he went on to boycott the event, and criticize western artistic involvement.

His art, too, questions the value of artefacts as well as events. He has dropped and shattered a valuable Han Dynasty urn, dipped other valuable antiquities in industrial paint, made sculptures from bicycles and from antique furniture. For the 2008 Documenta festival in Kassel, Germany, Ai bought 1001 Chinese citizens to the quiet German town during the exhibition, and scattered the same number of antique Chinese chairs throughout the city. For the recent show of his work at the Haus der Kunst in Munich – which he called So Sorry, after the handwringing apologies uttered by Chinese officials in reponse to everything from minor glitch to a major incident – Ai included an arrangement of 9000 backpacks on the exterior of the building, commemorating the children who died in the earthquake when their shoddily built schools collapsed.

He regards his own art as ephemeral, and it might be seen as a succession of gestures. In 1981 he moved to New York and lived there for 12 years, and his artistic formation was as influenced as much by Marcel Duchamp and the readymade, by institutional critique and discussions about commodity fetishism as it was by his Beijing background (his father, poet Ai Qing, was ostracised during the cultural revolution and the family spent a number of years in a labour camp). But Ai’s art often only makes sense in terms of its relationship to China. His presence in the Turbine Hall cannot be seen outside this context. The question is less what he will do at Tate Modern, perhaps, than how his work will be read.

This teasing faux documentary about Banksy and his fellow street artists is priceless – and hilarious, says Peter Bradshaw

He is Britain’s newest national treasure: but he presumably won’t be accepting a TV viewers’ award from Ant and Dec any time soon, or making libertarian interventions in the smoking debate, or writing an annual Christmas Diary for the London Review of Books or posing alongside his mum with his CBE outside Buckingham Palace in his grey topper and chimp mask. Perhaps his mum would have to wear a chimp mask as well. Street artist, situationist and public-space japester Banksy is famed for his snogging coppers, simpering apes and for debunking Israel’s new West Bank barrier with graffiti. Now he takes his career of radical cheek into the cinema with a wacky new “documentary”, being shown this week in the director’s own pop-up cinema in an underpass in London’s Waterloo before moving on to more conventional locations.

Like many of his graffitoed images, it’s a kind of cinematic trompe l’oeil. There have been notable hoax-oriented films in the recent past: such as The Blair Witch Project, Borat and the complete works of Lars von Trier. Exit Through the Gift Shop is in this genial tradition. Orson Welles made F for Fake; Banksy has made W for Windup. As a documentary, Exit Through the Gift Shop is as about as reliable and structurally sound as that house-front with the strategically placed window that falls on top of Buster Keaton. As entertainment, though, it works very well.

Introducing it at the Berlin film festival last month – he appeared on video with his face in darkness – the artist himself cheerfully declared he hoped that it would do for street art what The Karate Kid did for martial arts. Like karate, street art is more difficult than it looks, particularly the trick of making a living from it, maintaining a combat-ready crew of studio assistants, and all the time persuading an ever-widening circle of professional acquaintance to keep the secret of your anonymity.

What the film does, or purports to do, is take a sideways look at Banksy and the new explosion of street artists, particularly in Los Angeles. The practitioners, at the outset of their careers at least, were unpaid graffiti-outlaws, pulling off daring and often dangerous visual stunts for the sheer hell of it: people like Shepard Fairey, who incessantly replicated his Andre   the Giant image on the sides of buildings, a fat staring man over the single word “Obey”. Fairey became conventionally celebrated for his Barack Obama Hope poster.

At the centre of the film is the apparent friendship between Banksy and one of his biggest fans, one Thierry Guetta, an LA-based Frenchman with a lucrative retro clothing business and a passion for making videos. Guetta got fascinated in the LA street art scene, followed the artists around and shot miles of unusable video in the hope of making a documentary. Eventually he seems to have made the acquaintance of Banksy himself, filming his “Guantánamo” stunt in the precincts of Disneyland: propping up an orange-jumpsuited life-sized doll near a ride.

With pixelated tongue in blanked-out cheek, Banksy claims that he persuaded Guetta not to make his own film, but to be the star of this one, and then to be an artist himself. In no time, Guetta is somehow producing hundreds of suspiciously accomplished Warhol-Banksy pop art-style knockoffs for a colossal Los Angeles show under his new street-art name “Mr Brainwash”. Well, Thierry Guetta may well exist – but at the mention of his Mr Brainwash output, you may feel a strange tugging sensation on your leg. This could be the most startling debutant in the art scene since novelist William Boyd told us all about the neglected genius Nat Tate – but Mr Brainwash’s works are available for purchase, which is more than I can say for Nat Tate.

You’re under no compunction to take the film seriously: but it does offer an insight, of a teasingly incomplete and semi-fictionalised sort, into Banksy’s working life. We see his helpers carry away a London telephone box, take it to pieces in his workshop, replace the wackily twisted result in its original position and film the response from passersby. Nobody scratches their head or strokes their chin and wonders if it is “art” or if its creator might have “sold out”. They just laugh their heads off. They enjoy it: it is absolutely hilarious and this, to my perhaps naive and untutored eye, is the most compelling argument in favour of Banksy and in favour of this chaotic film.

The same goes for Banksy’s Diana tenners: he shows a cardboard box full of real-looking £10 notes with Princess Diana’s face on instead of the Queen’s. These things could get him arrested for forgery. Like Mr Brainwash, they are inspired counterfeits. Perhaps the point of Banksy’s art is that it inhales the wild spirit of forgery: his work makes free with brand identities and the symbols of authority, it replicates them, debunks and devalues them, it is a form of benign subversion. And he could be an important artist or just a silly fad – either way, in the street and with this film, he’s providing pleasure while he lasts.

Rating: 4/5

Interactive art is gaining ground – but whether it’s Spencer Tunick’s nudes or Antony Gormley’s plinth, no masterpiece was ever created by committee

The rise of interactive art seems to make sense in our digital age. It seems only right that art, too, should twitter. And so the noughties saw the rise of art that involves real people – as many of them as possible. Spencer Tunick and Antony Gormley led the way in persuading volunteers to strip off or be cast in plaster, or stand on a plinth and be webcammed.

Some forms of interactivity are obviously good for art, as they are good for society. The more democratically ideas and information are shared, the more accessible art will be. Sites that allow artists to promote themselves without going through the rituals of the art world are great because for every dud who gets publicity through alternative channels, there is also the chance of raw genius sidestepping the institutions that force art and artists to conform to fashion and supposed good taste. In theory.

So democracy is great – except when it shapes the actual work of art. I do not believe a great work of art has ever been created by communal consensus, let alone by multiple editors. There will never be a wiki-masterpiece. This is because art, if it has any value at all, is the product of deep and often rationally incommunicable perceptions, and to try and explain or share those perceptions in a communally created artwork will negotiate and re-edit them to banality.

But, I hear you roar, there are obvious objections to that claim. What about devised theatre and the films of Mike Leigh? But the reason Leigh’s pieces work so well is that talented actors are doing the interaction: what you are seeing is not a democratic free-for-all but an elite. Good art is the product of talent. All the forces in our culture that weaken our belief in talent deny this fundamental fact, but it always returns to haunt us.

Participatory art is a denial of talent. It panders to a cosy lie, that everyone is equally able to create worthwhile art. What chance have we of nurturing those rare wonders in our midst, the born artists, if we claim this infantile right to put on a badge that says “artist”?

Behind the enigmatic smile: National Portrait Gallery to display 16th century work which has given up its secret after 400 years

The queen wears a magnificent gown and a faint, enigmatic smile ‑ but then she knows what she really holds in her hands, a secret revealed again to the world after more than 400 years.

Many portraits of Elizabeth I show her holding a posy, a conventional symbol of virginity or virtue. The National Portrait Gallery has discovered that in this portrait Gloriana originally held a far more disturbing object ‑ a serpent twined around her fingers.

A serpent can sometimes represent wisdom and judgment, as in the serpent and staff symbol of medicine, but in Christian iconography it is more often a symbol of sin or even the devil.

The unknown artist, painting around the late 1580s, clearly had a last-minute panic about the ambiguity of the image: the scaly blue-green and black serpent was painted out, and replaced with the safe ‑ if slightly oddly shaped ‑ posy.

Tarnya Cooper, curator of 16th century paintings at the gallery, who has led the research into several Tudor portraits about to be redisplayed, says the serpent is a unique attribute in portraits of the queen. “The portrait of Elizabeth I with a hidden serpent is a really unusual survival. Yet it is difficult to know exactly why the serpent may have been originally included, or how common this motif might have been. The queen certainly owned jewellery and costume including emblems of serpents, which were probably understood as a symbol of wisdom. However, no other portrait of Elizabeth appears to depict her holding a snake.”

The gallery has owned the portrait for a century, but its condition is poor and it has not been on display since 1921. It will now be included in an exhibition opening later this month, Concealed and Revealed: The Changing Faces of Elizabeth I, of paintings made from the 1560s until just after the queen’s death in 1603, which have all been altered in some way.

The x-rays that drove the serpent out of its lair also revealed another secret: the queen’s exceptionally bumpy forehead is because of the inner woman trying to get out. The portrait was painted over an earlier, unfinished painting of another woman, probably by a different artist: the eyes and nose of the lost woman can just be seen in the queen’s forehead.

Cooper said: “The recent technical analysis on these remarkable portraits has been critical to our understanding of Tudor painting.”

The artist may never have seen the queen in the flesh ‑ and certainly, the art historians believe, never saw the serpent. 

Concealed and Revealed, National Portrait Gallery London, 13 March

The artist says: Thanks for reading my contemporary art blog! If you are involved in the art and culture industry in any way, and would like to syndicate content from or to this blog, or if you simply enjoy art and would like to get in touch, please leave a comment! This article has been kindly provided by: Contemporary Art Daily