I have always thought of art fairs as money events rather than art events as it’s all about selling and making commercial contacts. If I had to organize an art fair, I would first doubt the sanity of the person that put me in charge, but then I would try and put something together like Baby Tattooville.

It’s an annual event where a small selection of artists and art collectors spend the weekend together. 50 tickets are sold which gives you access to the event, the artists, accommodation for the weekend, talks, demonstrations, and “surprise collectible gifts.” There’s also art for sale, but it doesn’t seem to be the main reason to go to Baby Tattooville.

Some collectors may just want art to hang on the wall and have no desire to learn anything about the artist, but for those that want to get to know the artist behind the art, this is a good opportunity.

The 2008 artists include Ana Bagayan, Glenn Barr, Dave Cooper, Bob Dob, Joe Ledbetter, Brandi Milne, Daniel Peacock, Shag, Amy Sol and Michael Whelan.

Their blurb seems to explain it better than me.. “Baby Tattooville provides a unique opportunity for a small group of celebrated artists and serious collectors to spend time together in a relaxed yet creatively stimulating environment. Without the time constraints of a typical personal appearance, or the crowd control issues of a standing-room-only event, artists and collectors will have a weekend-long opportunity to discuss and explore their mutual interests. Original work will be created and celebrated around-the-clock. No one will leave empty handed. Only 50 event packages are being offered.”

Tickets are $2000 which also includes the hotel room and a goodies package. The Baby Tattooville art retreat is held on the weekend of October 3-5, 2008 at Mission Inn and Spa, Riverside, CA, USA. There’s currently 16 tickets still available. Find out more on their website here.

The CAPC museum of contemporary art is a museum of international reputation, at the heart of the Chartrons district of Bordeaux, in an old colonial warehouse. As it celebrates its 35th birthday, I thought it necessary to give people the rundown of this brilliant and inspirational museum.

All art: the CAPC is intent on showing all different forms of art, whether it be dance, music, visual art or architecture. While concentrating on visual arts, the idea is to present a panorama of all contemporary art to the public.

Building: the warehouse in which the CAPC is housed is as much a part of the history of the museum as the events that bring it to life: for an artist in the 80’s or 90’s, the CAPC was an incontrovertible stage in his career.

Charlotte Laubard: the new director of the CAPC since October 2006. Since her arrival, the pace has quickened and the museum has started to live once again, after several years of lost identity and questioning.

Daniel Buren: one of the most dazzling and well-remembered interventions in the great nave; by placing mirrors on the floor of the building, and adding his well-known black and white stripes around some of the archways, you completely lost your bearings when entering the museum.

Entrepôt Lainé: the name of this colonial warehouse in which the CAPC has its home since 1974. After its role of stocking vanilla, coffee and chocolate in the 19th century, the building was gradually abandoned and only barely saved from destruction in the 1960’s, to house the Festival Sigma.

Festival Sigma: Roger Lafosse’s beacon for contemporary art in Bordeaux in the 60’s and 70’s. An internationally renowned event that laid the way for the creation of the CAPC in 1973.

Galleries: around the central nave, the building is made up of several galleries and smaller areas which enable the museum to show more than one exhibition at the same time and to multiply the events.

Henri-Claude Cousseau: now director of the National School of Fine Arts in Paris. He directed the CAPC from 1996 to 2001, trying to follow in Jean-Louis Froment’s huge footsteps

Intelligence: one of the main qualities that comes from the CAPC’s exhibitions is the intelligence with which they are thought up and proposed to the public.

Jean-Louis Froment: the genial and visionary creator of the CAPC. After 23 years at the head of the museum, the growing tension with the municipal authority became too much and he left his “baby” to explore other lands.

Kounellis, Klein, Kiefer, Koons, Kawara, Kelley, Kosuth, Kapoor, Kienholz, Kingelez: some of the major artists from all over the world that have been shown in the CAPC.

Local: at the same time as displaying major international artists, the CAPC encourages local creation by providing space, time and support for young artists of the region.

Maurice Fréchuret: another name to know for this building. The director from 2001 to 2006, organising many landmark exhibitions, like Les Années 70 : l’art en cause, or Hors D’œuvre : ordres et désordres de la nourriture.

Nave: the most striking thing about the CAPC is the huge nave of 1000m2 in which many artists have worked and experimented: Gilbert & George, Richard Serra, Jim Dine, Mario Merz, Keith Haring amongst many others.

Originality is another of the CAPC’s qualities. Not only does the art have to adapt to its magnificent premises, but the choice of artists, as well as the curating of the shows, are anything but banal.

Présence Panchounette: the Bordeaux collective (1969-1990) around which the summer exhibitions of 2008 are based. Humour and irony mixed with experimentation, kitsch and ready-mades: not to miss.

Quote in 1996 by Jean-Louis Froment: “the museum is putting itself forward as a rare place for experimentation – a sort of inter-human laboratory, a platform for proposals that actually risk undermining its status.”1

Returning, since the arrival of the Charlotte Laubard in 2006, to the roots of what made the success of the institution: informing and heightening the awareness of the public to contemporary art, while remaining in a position of the utmost quality and relevance.

Sensitisation: one of the main challenges of the CAPC is to bring art to the public, by helping them understand and appropriate the different artworks, thus contributing to the life and culture of Bordeaux and its surroundings.

Transverse: by mixing and combining, by dabbling and experimenting, the CAPC asserts itself as a major institution presenting transverse art and creation.

Unpredictable: for the choice of artists, for the risk-taking with young creators, for the presentation of eclectic and interesting events.

Vie, as the French for “life”. Indeed, the museum is starting to breathe again after a couple of difficult years, and the place is steadily being brought back to life, thanks to the dedication of the staff and the loyalty of the public.

Wood, brick and stone: the three main materials used to build this magnificent building. Wood of Oregon pine, clay brick and white stone from Bourg-sur-Gironde: a combination of simple materials that add to the magnificence of the place.

Xylophone: because you always put the word “xylophone” for one starting with the letter X…

Youth: the CAPC wishes to show young and interesting artists, helping them gain visibility, while placing a bet on the new generation.

Zany: not only are the exhibitions intelligent, original and unpredictable, there is also a slightly zany and colourful side to the events, that attracts more and more people into the Entrepôt Lainé.

Hoping I made you want to go and visit the CAPC…!
CAPC musée d’art contemporain, Entrepôt Lainé, 7 rue Ferrère, 33000 Bordeaux

Created by Alice Cavender On 08/25/08 At 09:20 AM

When I last left this subject, I had a studio on the property of a luxury hotel on the Greek island of Mykonos. Since then, a lot has changed. I always feel that the interest of someone in what I do is defined clearly in the moment they buy one of my pieces. The depth of that interest is made clear by the amount they are willing to spend, and the effort it will take them to accommodate what I’ve made.
Some have gone to the extent of re-engineering suspended floors to support not only the weight of a statue, but also the transport across open stretches of such a floor, as was the case with the Gewiss Corporation in Bergamo, Italy. Others, like Alabama Power, have constructed pedestals that may have cost more than the statues themselves. In both cases, I was offered a stay in a five star hotel and had only to submit receipts of my expenses in order to be compensated, no questions asked.

These two companies managed me with teams of paid employees, who did everything they were supposed to do, and saw to all my needs, but there was nothing personal between eventual buyer and me in these relationships. I felt outside of something, and knew I wouldn’t be going downtown to have a beer with the president of either of these companies. Both were among the easiest customers I’ve ever had in terms of money. They did what they said they’d do.
So did the owners of the Hotel Tharroe, albeit with some minor changes along the way. Last year, they bought ‘Amarilli and Corisca’ and in doing so, convinced me that they really were passionate about art. It’s one thing to talk about something, and quite another to commit to something this substantial in terms of money and the effort required to make the piece a vital part of the business under whose roof it sits.

In speaking about our next round last year, this summer that has just started, we worked together on deciding what kind of a new piece should be roughed out in Italy, and brought to Mykonos for me to finish. We agreed on a female Minotauress, and probably they knew more about this subject than I did. It seems that in one account, the labyrinth represents the subconscious, and therefore the Minotaur is metaphorical. It could be anything. I only learned this as I began to study the subject and its origins, much as I had done with earlier figures, and as with them, the profound and multifaceted nature of it only emerged after I had started.
My original idea was to have Theseus, whose worth as a warrior was without question, meet something that would challenge him in a way that he was not used to. I gave my Minotauress a roll of string with which to confuse him during his exit from the maze, and designed her so that if seen from the back, it isn’t apparent that she has a cows head. I imagined Theseus finding her lying nude on her pedestal, approaching from her back side, and going weak in the knees.
This morphed into Theseus being challenged by himself, by his own subconscious, and his feelings about matriarchal power, another theme that emerges in discussions of the Minotaur that I have read. Think about doing something, anything, and knowing that each thing has some part which makes it dangerous, something unexpected, like the string, which is a thing we carry within ourselves. We may be the most dangerous part of anything we try to do.
In an active life, we are constantly challenged by the decision to turn left, or right. We live, in that sense, within the contours of a labyrinth.
We decided I would work near the pool, where guests could see what I was doing, and talk to me about it if they felt like it. The Tharroe maintenance people constructed a roofed over area at one end of the pool, and a platform in cement on which the statue would be placed.
I started the piece in February, going up to the La Cappella, or, the chapel, quarry, and choosing a piece of dark grey Bardiglio. As I worked it, I heard that as I chipped it, a crystal ringing came out of the stone, much like a chapel bell. Perhaps this was the reason why the quarry had been called the chapel, and not because of any nearby churches as I had always believed.

As luck would have it, the quarry was closed just after I got the block out, as some townspeople below had complained about the risk of an avalanche. So now I had seven tons of something that you just couldn’t get any more. I had the bottom cut smooth and flat at a saw mill, and removed the top just above the statue by drilling holes through it and using stone splitting wedges. I wasn’t about to waste any. I worked six days a week straight for three months, and when I saw that it was down to two tons and far enough along that I could do the rest without using power tools, I arranged the shipment to Mykonos.
Once there, I had the piece unloaded as far up the hill alongside the hotel as the crane’s reach would allow. The pool is behind the building, and getting there was over rough ground. Laying fourteen foot beams down as a sort of railway, with log rollers we were able to go over rocks, gullies, and up the incline using a chain hoist and three men.
And past the tomb. Tharroe, the Mycenaean queen who had given her name to the hotel, had been buried here nearly four thousand years before. The tomb is in surprisingly good shape, a sort of large underground igloo made only of dry stone wall, rocks that had been found and not shaped. When the hotel was to be constructed, the tomb was discovered during the groundbreaking, and the owners called the cultural authorities and moved the site of the building significantly so as not to disturb it.
Today I find myself with just the stone wall behind the statue between me and the tomb. The sculpture and me are the same distance from the edge of the igloo as the center section is, where the grave was. The figure looks, in its setting, alarmingly like an idol in a pagan temple. When I started to research the origins of the Minotaur in Crete, I found out that it had its roots in more ancient cultures, like those of the Phoenicians, and the Carthaginians. These cultures may or may not have practiced child sacrifice, but the figure that blood was given to was a ‘golden calf’ as mentioned in the Bible. There is also a relationship with figures coming from other cultures, such as Baal and Moloch. The Egyptians have some human figures with animal heads, most notably birds of prey, but also bulls. In their culture these sometimes represent the Sun god. Crete traded with all three of these populations, and never had a war with anyone until after their decline. The final crushing blow came when the volcano that today is Santorini erupted, sending a tsunami wave four hundred fifty feet high against the shores of Crete, and wiping its culture out. We saw what happened with a thirty foot wave.
I am in no way superstitious, but during the past few weeks, am often struck by the thought that this theme may not have been just my own doing. Maybe this ancient queen from a culture with no written language that we know of had some influence? They say that the ancients were in touch with timeless powers we no longer have access to. I have seen first hand how animals know about earthquakes and tornados before they happen, and can’t help but compare that to how we’re no longer able to do much anything without technical and electronic aid, and despite that still do not know the way they do in advance. I suppose that if I don’t die minutes after completing this piece, then I can rest easy for a while longer.
Carving this sculpture with so many stories intertwining, while gazing at the Greek islands and the sea from a perch so high above everything, is a sensation that inspires me. I don’t have any plans for this piece, I have no idea who I’m going to sell it to, or if I even can sell it. That a hotel gave me the opportunity to do what I’m doing, using their pool area as if it were my own studio, is remarkable, and sets the Tharroe of Mykonos apart from any hotel I’ve ever been in. It truly is exceptional, in every sense of the word, because the passion of the owners overpowers what might be called good sense. Passion is that special something that makes everything possible. And in being passionate about the carving, the polishing, and the detailing, forgetting about everything else if I can, perhaps I can make this piece as exceptional as the setting in which it was made.

Created by Andrew Wielawski On 07/18/08 At 01:07 PM