Wired for Wonder: John Kaldor – All Great Art is Contemporary
10 Sep 2013 by warrencammack, No Comments »
John is an inspiration to art lovers the world over and has brought some of the most amazing public exhibitions to Australia over the last 40 years. He started by reflecting on some of the changes over the last few hundred years jokingly referring to having moved from smoke signals to cloud computing and asked if museums and galleries have replaced cathedrals as places of “worship”
Art is incomplete until the audience experiences it.
John played the video which showed Kaldor project 1 back in 1969 where he helped Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrap part of Sydney’s coast near Prince Henry hospital. He had to beg for the authorities to allow him to do this and they used no safety equipment – it’s a miracle that nobody was hurt and there’s no way it would be allowed to happen today.
He then recalled Jeff Koons’ floral puppy in 1995 which brought a smile to everyone who saw it in Sydney. Gregor Schneider’s 21 Beach Cells was erected on the iconic Bondi Beach and Sydney-siders loved it setting up for a day at the beach inside the cells. John remembered one particular man who set himself up for the day inside a cell with his laptop and a young family who put their children in one cell while the parents relaxed in another. The same exhibition was setup on a beach in Israel but nobody went near the cells…
Finally John called out the amazing work of Hans-Ulrich Obrist who curated a piece called Stop and smile at a stranger. Go on, do it!
