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New issue of the FREE peer-reviewed Varoom! Lab available to download:

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Tate acquires painting attributed to woman thought though to be Britain's first professional oil painter

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Fascinating new display at the Tate from the IK 2016 award winners, using AI to link modern photojournalism with classic pieces of art

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1. Information for Entrants

2016 IK Prize Brief

Entrants will demonstrate originality and ingenuity in the application of artificial intelligence to the task of engaging the public with art on display at Tate Britain and on the Tate website.

IK Prize Objectives

The winning project will:

Engage diverse national and international audiences with art on display at Tate Britain and/or British art on the Tate website

Have an online and/or mobile manifestation (with a potential physical manifestation or mode of use at Tate Britain or another location)*

Offer a completely new and exciting way for the public to engage with art

Use a form of artificial intelligence** innovatively and appropriately in relation to art

Virtual vs. Physical delivery space

*The winning project can take place on any digital 'platform', whether online, on a mobile device or as part of a technological installation. In order to fulfil the core objectives, the project must have an integral online manifestation accessible to diverse international audiences.

Please note: Entrants should be aware that a permanent space or any other physical infrastructure requirements cannot be guaranteed at Tate Britain, therefore proposals should not be dependent on a physical space at the gallery. However, proposals featuring the public use of digital hardware in the galleries, or non-invasive/temporary installation of digital hardware more generally, are potentially welcomed. Projects that propose site-specific manifestations in other locations are potentially also welcomed but entrants are advised to be clear about how this could be achieved.

**Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the intelligence exhibited by machines or software. It is also the name of the academic field of study which researches how to create computers and computer software that are capable of intelligent behaviour, and what the use of this capability could be for mankind. For interesting examples of creative artificial intelligence related projects, download an entry pack.

2. IK Prize Rules

The IK Prize Rules comprise the Eligibility Criteria, Judging Criteria and the Terms. You should read each section carefully to ensure that you are eligible to enter, that you understand how your entry will be used and judged and that you understand the legally binding terms and conditions. When you submit your entry you will be asked to confirm that you understand and agree to abide by the IK Prize Rules.

Eligibility Criteria

Entrants may be based anywhere in the world. However, please note that if you are not based in the UK, you will need to factor travel, accommodation and all other costs and expenses into the overall production budget as you may be required to be physically present at Tate on a number of occasions.

Entrants must also ensure that they are legally able to travel to the UK. Please check for any visa requirements that may apply to you or your organisation. Tate cannot advise on or assist with UK visa applications.

Entrants may not be an employee of Tate, Microsoft Corporation, or a Microsoft subsidiary

Entrants may not be an immediate family member of (parent, sibling, spouse/domestic partner, child) or household member of a Tate employee, a Microsoft employee, a Microsoft subsidiary employee, or a person involved in any part of the administration and execution of the IK Prize.

Entrants may not be involved in any part of the execution or administration of this Competition

Entries must be submitted on or before the deadline of 23:59:59 GMT on Sunday 07 February to ikprize-entries@tate.org.uk. Entries submitted after this deadline or in any other format except via email will automatically be ineligible.

Previous winners of the IK Prize are not eligible to enter, but previously shortlisted candidates may enter the IK Prize.

Selection Process, Judging Criteria and Judging Panel

Each entry submitted on or before the deadline will first be assessed by Tate staff to ensure that:

It is eligible based on the Eligibility Criteria

It fits with Tate's mission to promote understanding and enjoyment of British art

It otherwise meets the Judging Criteria set out below.

The Judging Criteria for all Entries are as follows:

Entrants' abilities and skills in relation to the proposed project;

Demonstration of previous success in a related area;

The originality and quality of the idea and how well this relates to Tate's mission to promote understanding and enjoyment of British art;

How successful the user experience is likely to be;

How appropriate the proposed use of artificial intelligence is in relation to art and vice versa;

Tate staff will in their sole discretion select a longlist of up to 10 suitable entries to be submitted to the Judging Panel. The decision of Tate staff is final.

The Judging Panel (the "Panel") will comprise 5 people who are leaders in the digital innovation and technology sectors, including a representative from Tate and from Microsoft. All Entries selected for shortlisting will be judged on the basis of the Judging Criteria.

Additional Judging Criteria for the Shortlisted Ideas

The Judging Panel will shortlist up to four Entries. Shortlisted Candidates will then work their Entry into a full Proposal. The winning Proposal will be based upon the above criteria and the following:

How well the original Entry has been communicated in a full Proposal

The level of creative and technical ingenuity involved in the overall design/development/ delivery of the project

The feasibility of the proposed project within the given financial and time-related constraints (based on the Shortlisted Candidates' draft project plan and budget set out in the Proposal)

Terms and conditions

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Entrants will demonstrate originality and ingenuity in the application of artificial intelligence to the task of engaging the public with art on display at Tate Britain and on the Tate website.

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Eyes on the prize: the must-see art and design of autumn 2016

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Elton John shares his photography collection, Tracey Emin gets into bed with William Blake and David Shrigley gives everyone a big thumb's-up

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An insight in to Niall McDiarmid's British Portraits.

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Niall McDiarmid has been photographing the people of Britain for five years now, though with the recent Brexit vote his work seems to have been given an extra edge. The work is far from political, but it's a real snapshot of a nation, with beautiful aesthetics thrown in. Here, McDiarmid speaks about the work.

The project began in early 2011, with a view to simply photographing interesting people I met on the street. After a couple of months, however, I started to focus on building a body of portraits that would be a celebration of British diversity, a social document of modern Britain.

I actively sought out people from different backgrounds and different ethnicities, often wearing attire that set them apart.

In each of us, there is a curiosity about the places we live, our cultural backgrounds, the clothes we wear, our family ties - ultimately our collective identity.

Visually, in film or photography, Britain has often been portrayed in subdued, monotone colours. This may partly have something to do with the weather, or maybe it's just traditional preconceptions coming into play.

By contrast, I've found inspiration in the bright colours and patterns that I encounter on every street of every town I've visited. They have shaped my stylistic approach, which often connects a subject's clothing to their surroundings, so weaving them into the scene they occupy.

Having crisscrossed the country as a photographer for almost six years, I see a nation visually enriched by cultural vibrancy and ethnic diversity.

Sadly, on my more recent travels I have encountered antagonism towards immigrants.

However, I firmly believe that most people in Britain welcome the more vibrant national identity that has emerged over the past 20 years.

My aim with British Portraits is to take the exhibition to different gallery spaces around Britain, each time adding new images taken locally to engage communities through portrait photography.
British Portraits by Niall McDiarmid can be seen at the Oriel Colwyn Gallery, Colwyn Bay, Conwy, from 1 September to 14 October 2016. All photographs © Niall McDiarmid Want more pictures? Check out and follow our Instagram feed

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Niall McDiarmid has been photographing the people of Britain for five years now, though with the recent Brexit vote his work seems to have been given an extra edge. The work is far from political, but it's a real snapshot of a nation, with beautiful aesthetics thrown in.

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Strolling around Switch House, the new building at Tate Modern, with its expanses of cold, smooth stone and the magnificent architectural crease-and-swivel effect in the brickwork, I had what felt like a breakthrough. It occurred on the lower floor, in the network of galleries devoted to live art and film and video installations, which lead off from the Turbine Hall. Like the rest of Tate Modern, the space itself is ideally suited to meandering and daydreaming. This is especially true of the largest gallery, which is currently home to Primitive 2009, a multi-screen work by the great Thai director and artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul (whose most recent film, Cemetery of Splendour, opened in June).

The space is steeped almost completely in darkness; visitors are greeted in a kind of reception area by a single screen on which one of Weerasethakul's films is playing. Round the corner, in the main area, small screens either stand or hang on opposite sides of the vast dark hall with films playing on these also. But the room is dominated by a red carpeted area with scatter cushions which invite us to sprawl in the centre of the gallery, sandwiched between the two giant screens on the main walls. Films are showing continuously here but, though they are all part of the same installation, it is impossible to watch them at the same time unless you happen to have brought with you a large mirror. Some people slump on the cushions, immersed in one or other of the pieces. Others turn their heads at regular intervals, as if following the ball in a slow-motion tennis match, to create in their heads a self-edited montage of the two films, so that the images on the far wall, of boys sleeping inside a red-lit pod, are interspersed with shots from the near one, of lightning and fireworks illuminating a darkened village.

It was while watching these that I admitted to myself that I don't like films and videos playing in art galleries. Perhaps I should clarify this. I like the films and videos well enough but I have always had a problem (without ever quite realising it until now) with the easy-come-easy-go manner in which they must necessarily be viewed in a gallery space. My mind is trained by the habits of cinemagoing: I can only watch a film from the beginning and I cannot leave before the end.

So the nature of film and video in a gallery is an affront to me. People walk in, they stay for a few seconds or minutes, or longer if there is space on the benches and their feet are throbbing, and then they drift away. I've simply never been able to adapt to that way of watching. Even though I know that this is a gallery, and that the rules are different, I am too much a creature of the cinema to break with the habits I have learned there.

Each time I visit a gallery, I make the same gesture to change, and each time it is doomed. Within a minute or two of starting to watch, I feel my impatience mounting-how can this be when I happily revel in the expansiveness of Jacques Rivette's films Celine and Julie Go Boating (193 minutes) and La Belle Noiseuse (237 minutes)? It's my surroundings that make me impatient, the walk-ins and walk-outs, rather than whatever happens to be playing on the screen.

It's likely that the Weerasethakul provided me with my epiphany because this is a filmmaker whom I already love, and whose films I have watched from start to finish in cinemas, without the option of wandering away at the first dip in my attention, or because I had already arranged to meet a friend in the gallery gift-shop. Primitive 2009 looked every bit as ravishing as his cinema work, and the relaxed environment was a good fit for his languid filmmaking, but I could already feel that the images weren't taking root in me as deeply or as decisively as when they are the only focus in the room. Watching them unspool while people around me scroll through their mobile phones felt all wrong. The primacy of the image was undermined.

It may be that I need a great video installation to shock me out of my resistance. I long to see in its entirety Christian Marclay's The Clock, for instance, a 24-hour film pieced together from time-related images culled from cinema history, so that the whole work functions as an ongoing time-piece. (You can see an excerpt from it here and read about its creation here) Until then, I'm going to stick with the other sorts of pictures in the gallery. The ones that don't move.

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Strolling around Switch House, the new building at Tate Modern, with its expanses of cold, smooth stone and the magnificent architectural crease-and-swivel effect in the brickwork, I had what felt like a breakthrough. It occurred on the lower floor, in the network of galleries devoted to live art and film and video installations, which lead off from the Turbine Hall.

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The Rio Olympics is just days away. But trying to find out what cultural events are planned in the city during the Games is difficult, as I discovered.

Rio's Olympic organisers promised to follow London and organise a Cultural Olympiad - a series of arts events - organised around the Games.

There's no information online and no official programme. And it is thought that up to 50% of the events originally planned around Olympics have been cut due to Brazil's economic crisis.

Brazil is in economic meltdown and politics have been gridlocked since the impeachment of the left-wing President Dilma Rousseff. Her trial is scheduled to take place during the Games.

One of the first acts of the new centre right government was to abolish the Ministry of Culture in the name of austerity.

They later reinstated it after a huge public uproar - but not before hundreds of artists had occupied the ministry building in Rio, putting up tents in the atrium and turning the courtyard outside into a make-shift venue where they staged nightly agitprop shows for the public.

After two months of occupation, heavily armed police finally forced them out earlier this week, although some artists are still camping outside the building.

'Surprise events'

Carla Camurati, director of the Cultural Olympiad, is putting on a brave face. She admits they have had to scale down their plans because of the cuts - but says the events will still go ahead.

When I ask her why there is no information anywhere, she says: "There will be lots of surprise events, they're not advertised in advance.

"They will be spontaneous and outside in the streets."

When I press her for more details, she says there will be flash mobs, dancing, street theatre and literary events, adding: "We have the weather for it, unlike London, and we should make the most of that."

Under a circus top in the centre of the Rio, I find one of Brazil's top theatre directors Renato Rocha. In the background, a group of teenagers are swinging from trapezes or walking on stilts.

Rocha worked for a long time with the pioneering theatre group Nos do Morro - based in a Rio favela, as hillside shanty towns are known - which aims to transform young lives through the arts.

He also brought a group of youngsters to London 2012 to take part in the World Shakespeare Festival, organised to coincide with that Games.

But Rocha says when he applied to stage a circus show in Rio during the Cultural Olympiad, he was told there was no money to fund it.

'Changed lives'

The artistic director of Rio's opening ceremony, taking place next Friday, says it will cost 90% less than Danny Boyle's critically acclaimed extravaganza which kicked off London 2012.

Brazil's answer to Boyle is Fernando Meirelles who directed the Oscar-nominated film City of God, set in Rio's slums.

Meirelles famously cast his actors from the inhabitants of a real favela - using Rocha's theatre group to help him.

It changed their lives and many went on to have successful careers.

Despite the secrecy surrounding the opening ceremony, Meirelles is thought to be doing the same with the actors, dancers and musicians taking part in his Olympic show.

I've been told passinho - a new dance craze sweeping through favelas which combines breakdancing with funk and samba - will be a key feature of the opening ceremony, but other details are scarce.

Meanwhile, the artists who are occupying the Ministry of Culture have vowed to stage a series of "spontaneous protests" during the Olympics.

But they won't give out any details of their plans - just like the Cultural Olympiad, "it's secret".
Front Row from Rio is on BBC Radio 4 on 29 July at 19:15 BST.

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The Rio Olympics is just days away. But trying to find out what cultural events are planned in the city during the Games is difficult, as I discovered. Rio's Olympic organisers promised to follow London and organise a Cultural Olympiad - a series of arts events - organised around the Games.

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'I turned the Olympic torch into an ice cream': British artists reveal their Rio 2016 posters

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Tracey Emin, David Shrigley, Sam Taylor-Johnson and more talk us through the posters they've made for Team GB - and what the Olympics mean to them

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How Georgia O'Keeffe influenced feminist styling

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How Georgia O'Keeffe influenced feminist styling

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If the gender bias surrounding modernist artist Georgia O'Keeffe has begun to peter out, thanks to a new exhibition at Tate Modern, then it might seem jarring to look at her clothes. But her sharp, stark, androgynous style was representative of a woman who was ahead of her time not only in art but also in fashion.

Minimalism and flats have been the Céline template for a decade. Calvin Klein, too. Even Victoria Beckham has dipped her toe in, with all three designers making clear references to the 'feminist' designer. So it makes sense for the high street to follow suit. A Jigsaw collection - on sale from Thursday - comprises 40 pieces inspired by O'Keeffe's wardrobe and her expressionist work.

Georgia O'Keeffe and one of her skull paintings, 1931. Photograph: Everett/CSU Archives/Alamy Stock Photo

O'Keeffe (1887-1986) spent much of her career (which spanned the best part of the 20th century, from 1916 to the late 70s) rallying against the persistent gender divide in the avant-garde art world. Men were considered better artists, or at least more profitable, and although she is now considered one of the most prominent modernists of her peer group, at the time there was little she could do little to dispel the status quo. This might explain why she started dressing like a man, or at least adopting a more masculine aesthetic via tailored suits, a bowler hat, tennis shoes and brogues. Sometimes, she went for deep Vs and flats and, while her look was probably more feminine than masculine in retrospect, some of the details (no waist, little colour) were staggering, given that this was 1920.

O'Keeffe at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC in 1977. Photograph: Gallo Images/Rex/Shutterstock

The Tate Modern exhibition, which opens on Wednesday, aims to exorcise the Freudian (and frankly entry-level) readings of her flower paintings (flowers painted by women are vaginas) pushed by male critics and, it seems, at the behest of her husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz. Stieglitz was a great photographer but was equally well-versed in the world of art dealership and knew what would sell. O'Keeffe was torn, sometimes siding with Stieglitz, but often not; in 1976, she refused to be part of an exhibition celebrating women in art in Los Angeles because she didn't want to be seen through a gendered lens - like Louise Bourgeois, she reacted to a legacy that had been outlined by men. But she knew she was good. Her work sold; in 2014 one of her works became the most expensive painting by a female artist ever sold at auction.

O'Keeffe at her home in Abiquiu, New Mexico in 1974.
Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

Eventually, her style morphed into more of a uniform: hyper-minimal kimonos, wide-lapelled shirts and cigarette trousers for the most part in black or white. If Stieglitz acted like some sort of career svengali, then at least O'Keeffe had creative control over her styling - the contrast between her monochrome look and the bright, explosive canvases acted as a sort of billboard. It was a move not dissimilar to the French artist Niki de Saint Phalle, who adopted a similar get-up in the 1950s and 60s: all white polonecks and tight trousers. These women were the black crows of the art world: blank and undistracting, focused on promoting their work rather than their gender. It is worth noting that much of O'Keeffe's inspiration came from feminist writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who advocated "social and domestic reform", which included reformation of gendered clothing - that boys and girls should dress the same.

Georgia Illustration Dress, £279, from Jigsaw's new collection.

Jigsaw's new collection feels contemporary and wearable: kimonos, wide lapels, simple waistless dresses, the sort of thing O'Keeffe wore to paint in. Then there are the more conceptual additions, as Sally Graveling, Jigsaw's head of woven design, explained when describing a wraparound shirt: "We were thinking of the wrapping of the petals on a flower." Images of the artist, designed by Rob Phillips, are printed on silk, while O'Keeffe's hands - Stieglitz was fixated by her hands, and the way their movement gestured towards the movement in her abstracts - have been captured by tessellation artist Sam Kerr.

O'Keeffe's style shifted towards something more feminised towards the end of her life - it's reported that she had 26 wraparound dresses hanging in her wardrobe, above rows of Salvatore Ferragamo shoes. This was the public O'Keeffe who realised she probably had to kowtow to social mores on one level by wearing a skirt. Jigsaw nods to the lesser seen side of the artist with a dress illustrated by Phillips. In truth, the real O'Keeffe was nothing short of a proto-Phoebe Philo, the designer who reinvented minimalism for the modern women. Except O'Keeffe didn't wear Stan Smiths.

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Tate Modernist: How Georgia O'Keeffe shaped feminist style

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The American artist was one of the most prominent of her generation. Yet despite her seemingly 'gendered' paintings, she resisted sexist stereotypes and expressed this most dominantly through her wardrobe

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Artist to stock a NYC convenience store with items made entirely from felt:

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London artist Lucy Sparrow to create a classic New York corner store - in felt

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Sparrow hopes to fill a shop, Eight Till Late, with 8,000 items, all hand sewn and available to buy, after a similar project in London caused a frenzy

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A look at Paul Nash's Eclipse of the Sunflower

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A look at Paul Nash's Eclipse of the Sunflower

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Paul Nash's The Eclipse Of The Sunflower, 1945

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This war artist became one of British modernism's great romantics

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The UK now owns the infamous ELizabeth I Armada painting:

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A portrait of Elizabeth I has become public property, after an appeal helped raise £10.3m to buy it.

The Armada portrait, thought to have been painted in 1590, was being sold by descendants of Sir Francis Drake.

An Art Fund appeal generated £1.5m from 8,000 donations. The Heritage Lottery Fund gave £7.4m; the Art Fund and Royal Museums Greenwich were major donors.

The picture will go on show at the Queen's House in Greenwich, near the site of Elizabeth's birth, in October.

'Inspiring female leadership'

The painting, considered to be a masterpiece of the English Renaissance, commemorates one of the most famous moments of Elizabeth's reign, the failed invasion of England by the Spanish Armada in 1588.

Sir Francis was the vice admiral of the English fleet at the time and it is believed he may even have commissioned the painting, which is unusual for its large size - 3ft 7ins by 4ft 1in (1.1m by 1.25m) - and horizontal format.

The Art Fund donated £1m to the cost of the painting, while Royal Museums Greenwich supplied £400,000.

The remaining funds came from the Linbury Trust, the Garfield Weston Foundation and the Headley Trust.

Stephen Deuchar, director of The Art Fund, said the campaign to save the painting had been "a triumph of popular will".

"Record numbers of donors, large and small, stepped forward with determination and generosity, creating an irresistible momentum that has brought this great work into public ownership at last," he said.

HLF chairman Sir Peter Luff said the painting was "a compelling historic icon, illustrating as it does a decisive conflict, inspiring female leadership, maritime power and the emergence of the Elizabethan 'Golden Age'".

"This image has shaped our understanding of the Virgin Queen for over 400 years and I am delighted that it will now have such an appropriate permanent home in Greenwich," he added.

The painting will be the centrepiece for the reopening of the Queen's House on 11 October.

It will then undergo a conservation process to "restore its fragile painted surfaces" before becoming part of an exhibition and outreach programme, an Art Fund spokeswoman said.

Among those who donated to the appeal were a seven-year-old Wakefield girl, who sold Elizabeth I cupcakes whilst dressed in a costume inspired by the painting, and pupils at St Paul's Girl School in London, who held a bake sale to raise funds.

St Paul's history teacher Blanche Girouard said the girls "study the portrait when we teach Elizabeth I and the Armada, so [they were] very keen to help save it for the nation".
Follow us on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts, on Instagram at bbcnewsents, or email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk .

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A portrait of Elizabeth I has become public property, after an appeal helped raise £10.3m to buy it. The Armada portrait, thought to have been painted in 1590, was being sold by descendants of Sir Francis Drake. An Art Fund appeal generated £1.5m from 8,000 donations.

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Pitmen Painters' art reimagined as modern photos

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Pitmen Painters' art reimagined as modern photos

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The Pitmen Painters created art in the 1930s based on their lives in a coalmining town. Their work has now been re-imagined as photographs of the modern-day town

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The Pitmen Painters, a celebrated group of miners-turned-artists, rose to prominence in the 1930s with their work chronicling life in the coal-mining town of Ashington, Northumberland. Now, inspired by their example, photographers are capturing the spirit of a community decimated by that industry's decline.

"The dole office was packed out. Nightlife turned into a ghost town as pubs became empty. Drugs began to thrive. I remember being scared of the glue-sniffers.

"Then it just became part of the local culture to smoke cannabis, and class A drugs were easy to find as drug dealers were everywhere."

Myrle Howard, the daughter of a miner, was 13 when Ashington Colliery shut in 1988, four years after the miners' strike came to an end.

Her father Ron would later lose his job at nearby Lynemouth Colliery, which closed in 1994. He became depressed, "which was hard for us five kids to understand - why Mam and Dad were fighting over bills not being paid, living off economy burgers and dry mash potato".

Howard, along with photographer Julian Germain, is now using her camera to record life in a one-industry town that has little in the way of any industry left.

The project, which produces the Ashington District Star newspaper, was commissioned through the bait programme at Woodhorn with investment from Arts Council England.

The Pitmen Painters

-Founded in Northumberland in the early 1930s as a Workers' Educational Association class giving mining families access to the arts

-The Pitmen paintings were inspired by the artists' own lives

-The group held its first exhibition in 1936 at the Hatton Gallery in Newcastle and many of the paintings are on permanent display at Woodhorn Museum in Ashington.

-Written by Billy Elliot creator Lee Hall, their story was turned into a play that was performed at the Royal National Theatre in London and on Broadway

A spokeswoman for development company Arch said reviving Ashington remained an uphill struggle.

"The town has been in a state of decline for many years," she said.

"The loss of coal mining and associated industries created a fundamental imbalance between the need for jobs and the supply of them."

For Myrle Howard, who moved to Greece for several years, some of the problems associated with the town are rooted in a pessimism born of the gradual decline of the coal-mining industry.

"My parents had very little hopes for my future and so I felt they didn't drive me to do well in my education as they felt there would be no jobs at the end of it," she recalls.

"I find now on social media sites, the majority of my friends have terrible grammar."

But she remains hopeful: "I finally moved back and now feel more jobs have been created and money is being invested wisely in our local community.

"If people really want to find work, they can. However, many people just don't have the education and drive."

Ashington

-One of the largest towns in Northumberland with a population of 28,000, it grew from a few farms in the early 19th Century

-Its colliery opened in 1867 and shut in 1988

-At one point, Ashington was the largest mining village in the world, according to Ashington Tourist Information

- Famous sons of the town include World Cup-winning footballers Sir Bobby and Jack Charlton, England fast bowler Steve Harmison and Newcastle United legend Jackie Milburn

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The Pitmen Painters, a celebrated group of miners-turned-artists, rose to prominence in the 1930s with their work chronicling life in the coal-mining town of Ashington, Northumberland. Now, inspired by their example, photographers are capturing the spirit of a community decimated by that industry's decline. "The dole office was packed out.

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Clara Drummond has won for 'Girl in a Liberty Dress'.

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Clara Drummond's Girl in a Liberty Dress wins BP portrait award

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Third time lucky for Edinburgh-born artist, who picks up £30,000 prize for latest portrayal of fellow painter Kirsty Buchanan

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Interesting link between a 1748 Hogarth painting & 2016's Brexit campaigns

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How a William Hogarth painting predicted Brexit 250 years ago

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Britain's feelings of isolationism, anger and complacency are nothing new - Hogarth was busy skewering them in 1748. He also understood what today's Brexiters do not: the country's power relies on an international economy

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Poo installation art at the 11th Manifesta art biennial

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I am standing in a room full of shit. Nothing new there, I hear you say. Deposited by the population of Zurich, an entire day's worth of processed human faeces stand in a gridded arrangement of compressed cubic blocks. Californian artist Mike Bouchet's The Zurich Load was made not just by the inhabitants of clean, well-ordered Zurich, but in collaboration with the Werdhölzi Wastewater Treatment Plant, where the day's worth of sludge was collected and mixed with concrete.

Bouchet's 80,000 kilos of excremental minimalism is installed in the Löwenbräukunst, one of the main sites of the 11th Manifesta art biennial. This converted brewery is also home to both the Migros Museum and many of Zurich's most prestigious commercial galleries. Good thing the extractor fans are working.

There is a heavy door at the entrance, along with a warning sign. Some visitors back out even as they're going in. The space reeks of ammonia, and there is a back-taste as psychological as it is physical. "A unique fragrance has been developed to transform the viewer's experience," the guidebook tells us. Consider me transformed. If you resist the urge to heave and leave, you do get used to it, only to spend the rest of the day wondering if the whiff is still with you.

Bouchet's work, as any Freudian could tell you, must have something to do with money. Titled "What People Do For Money - Some Joint Ventures", and devised by the biennial's guest curator, multimedia artist Christian Jankowski, the latest incarnation of Manifesta involves collaborations between artists and more than 30 professions in the city. The previous two editions - in St Petersburg and a former mining town in Belgium - both dealt with the social situations of their respective venues.

So, fitfully, does this. Maurizio Cattelan, who had announced he was giving up art on the eve of his Guggenheim Museum retrospective in 2012, has been working with wheelchair racer Edith Wolf-Hunkeler. If Jesus could walk on water, why not an athlete in a wheelchair? The Paralympic champion glided, or perhaps churned, across Lake Zurich, her wheelchair mounted on a raft powered by the wheels of the chair itself - but after I left Zurich. Some things work just as well as rumour.

I did visit Belgian artist Guillaume Bijl's fully functioning dog grooming parlour, Hundesalon Bobby, where local mutts can get the latest in canine coiffure from dog stylist Jacqueline Meier. I can't speak of the artistry of the doggy hairdos, but the kitschy, tongue-in-cheek parlour is amusing enough. Normally this place is part of a commercial gallery. If only others diversified so usefully.

As well as the Löwenbräukunst and the Helmhaus museum, Manifesta 11 takes us to more than 30 outlying venues and collaborations around the city, including a cemetery, a public hospital, a school, a tourist office, a Swiss clockmaker's shop, and out on to a floating Pavilion of Reflection on the lake. Designed and built by the studio of London and Zurich-based architect Tom Emerson, the skeletal wooden structure doubles as outdoor cinema and swimming pool, complete with changing rooms, lockers and hairdryers. It's like a spa, but with ashtrays, a barbecue and a bar, the perfect place to get Bouchet out of my system.

Is Michel Houellebecq OK, readers of the troubling French novelist often ask. Well, Houellebecq has checked himself in to one of Zurich's leading private clinics - so upscale the row of clocks behind the main desk are set to the time-zones in Dubai and Stellenbosch, South Africa as well as Switzerland - and had a bunch of scans and blood tests. His charts are printed up in great piles for visitors to take away, though you have to edge round anxious patients in the lobby to get at them. I can't make head nor tail of the novelist's haemoglobin levels. Nor does he offer us copies of the bill for his check-up, probably a heart-attack inducing sum.

Back at the Helmhaus, disturbing scans of Houellebecq's head are on display. There's the skull beneath the skin, and some squirmy stuff that looks as if parasitic worms have invaded his brain. They probably write his books. On my visit, artist Santiago Sierra, who has also worked in the past with human excrement, had just begun barricading the entrance to the Helmhaus with the help of a local security consultant, who advised the artist how best to ensure the building would be safe from any possible car bombs, snipers and other attacks. Sandbags were on the way, but no razor-wire as yet uncoiled.

Everywhere is a war zone now, Sierra is saying. Next stop, the dentist. To tell the truth I ran away from the surgery, having already seen enough of Torbjørn Rødland'sgraphic photographs of open mouths and dental procedures in the Löwenbräukunst. There are even pictures of teeth embedded in sugary foodstuffs, grinning through the patisserie. There's more photos in the waiting room.

Unfolding through both the Helmhaus and Löwenbräukunst, a parallel "Historical Exhibition", curated by Francesca Gavin, is a trove of photographs, paintings, sculpture and conceptual works organised by theme, paralleling Jankowski's "collaborative ventures". Very often it upstages the new commissions. In the section Break Hour is an installation of Duane Hanson's 1989 Lunchbreak, a group of life-sized, lifelike construction workers, lounging, smoking, staring blankly, hanging around. That's builders for you.

In Portraits of Professions, August Sander's photographs of labourers and singers, artists and seamen, sit next to the film of astronaut Chris Hadfield singing David Bowie's Space Oddity while orbiting in the International Space Station. This is fun, and though Hadfield has released an album, his artistic career has probably peaked. In Professions in the Art World, I came across oversized hollow papier-mâché heads of curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist and New York art critics Roberta Smith and Jerry Saltz. The cartoonish heads grin knowingly. But what do they know? I feel like snatching one up and inserting my own head, to get some inside knowledge.

At once playful and serious, and providing both context and counterpoint, Gavin's show rambles through both main venues, with dozens of historical and recent works arranged on freestanding open structures that sidle through the galleries. Without it, much of the current Manifesta would look a bit thin. But there are high-points, including the riotous, scrabbly drawings that cover a huge wall in the Löwenbräukunst, the result of a collaboration between Andrea Éva Györi, a "sexpert" and a psychologist in clinical sexology.

Györi's drawings are a bacchanalia of masturbating women and explosive fantasies, a ribald affirmation of female sexuality. Nearby, there is a vicious gouge in the wall. It looks like an injury, and was made by Sonja Victoria Vera Bohorquez, a Zurich-based transgender prostitute. Bohorquez is working with Mexican artist Teresa Margolles, who last month organised and filmed a poker game in a hotel basement in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, with a group of transsexual sex workers. We watch them discuss their dangerous lives, and the unsolved murder of their friend and colleague Karlita in the city in December last year. Margolles has also organised a further Poker de Damas, including Bohorquez, in a Zurich hotel, where Manifesta visitors to ask questions and chat. An insight into other lives, Margolles' project is one of the best, and toughest, here.

Over at Cabaret Voltaire, original home of the Dada movement, there is an open call for anyone to submit performance proposals. "A performance could consist of an artist kissing a clown or a real estate agent selling an artist's studio," suggest Jankowski and the cabaret's guildmaster. One artist has already proposed a collaboration with a contract killer, while Viennese performance group Gelitin have provided a drawing of the performance group engaging with various professions, including an alien, in a Sadean coprophagic orgy. Where are the sewage men when you need them most? Get me to the clinic. Take me to the spa.

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Wake up and smell the Manifesta: piles of poo and a look inside Houellebecq's head

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The art biennial known for pushing boundaries of taste has outdone itself in Zurich, sculpting a day's worth of excrement, medically exhibiting the French author and making a Paralympic champion wheelchair on water

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A lot of the links found under the 'E-resources' button will have newsletters you can sign up to. Make sure to do this to stay up to date in the areas of Art & Design you love!

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The Guardian website has a great Art & Design section to help you stay up to date with current A&D news:
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Any thoughts on the nominees for this years Turner prize?
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/may/12/turner-prize-shortlist-anthea-hamilton-michael-dean-helen-marten-josephine-pryde

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The Guardian's Art Weekly:

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New street art in Bristol of Trump & Boris johnson kissing highlights the British Value of democracy: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-36366705

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Art project bringing award winning art to a secure psychiatric  ward:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/disability-36071186

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Are you voting 23rd June? Do you think we should be in or out? These artists all think we're better off in & have created posters showing this:

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From Antony Gormley to Eva Rothschild, artists take a stance against Brexit - in pictures

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The sculptor Antony Gormley, children's illustrator Axel Scheffler and photographer Rankin are among 14 internationally-renowned artists to unveil posters in support of keeping Britain in the EU