I am starting this year on the topic of art, in the broad sense, thoughts that have come higgledy-piggledy to mind on this very rainy day when the dog is sleeping off a bath after playing in the mud this morning.

I’ll start off with a bust of Lenin, bang in the middle of Antarctica, presented by John Green in “the art assignment” YouTube channel.

Art you can’t get to:

Funnily enough I find that bust also kind of endearing, as a statue, as an object surviving storms and the cold; that is, not the person it represents, ie. Lenin. And I can think of other items one can’t get to. What of the flag left by the American astronauts on the moon? Is that art? or the lunar rover? Could that be art? And then there is all that art at the bottom of the sea, deposited there by shipwreck. There is also prehistoric paintings in caves waiting to be discovered or tombs of all kinds. Art deposited and left.

And then a structure by Ai Weiwei in Berlin. From 2016, this artist has taken to heart the plight of refugees arriving on the islands of Greece. Today of course the number of refugees from Syria have decreased because they are stopped from taking to the seas in Turkey, and also because the unrest in Syria has decreased for those citizens who are not labled as terrorists or dissidents of the regime. Refugees continue to arrive in Europe from Africa.
Here is a presentation of his life jacket (PFD) structure in Berlin, and another in Vienna. i have also linked to a video of a whole exhibition in Athens.

In Berlin:

In Vienna:

In Athens:

Ai Weiwei trying to understand the situation to be able to emphasize through art the refugee plight. This is a long documentary but worth the watching if the refugee problem interests you, or if political art is meaningful for you.

If you have got to the end of my new year musings, I hope you have two new ways of visualizing art work.

Note: higgledy-piggledy – late 16th century – rhyming jingle, probably with reference to the irregular herding together of pigs (New Oxford American Dictionary)