Art and Travel

The Art of Travel – Alain de Botton’s The Art of Travel is not a guide to travelling but an exploration of the role of travel, broadly understood, in the lives and work of some eminent artists and writers. He writes “the most effective means of pursuing this conscious understanding [of beauty] was by attempting to describe beautiful places through art, by writing about or drawing them, irrespective of whether one happened to have any talent for doing so.”Mostly focuses on 19th century artists. Buy from Amazon The book was also made into a Television series

Non-Places of Travel in Visual Art – art created with “non-places” as a site for work especially when dealing with themes of lost identity/travel/anonynimity. ” These artists choose them as subjects because, despite their initial bleakness, these non-places have something to say to us. Although a non-place, a lack of place, may signify a loss of identity, it simultaneously creates its own unique experience of new and previously unexpected identities.” by Edita Marelic

Space is the Place – an exhibit in scottsdale, Az that gathers together artists interested in the ulitmate frontier: space travel

Franz Ackermann's, Untitled, 2005Franz Ackermann – “His work frequently deals with the double side of tourism- the glamour, speed and consumption of international travel but also the detritus, architectural scarring and garbage that it leaves behind, and his installations often take on the appearance of strange advertisements for a global tourism industry run amok.”

Angela Bulloch- a review of this Young British Artist’s show where she played a videotape, shot first from inside an airplane then from inside a car, recording the entire journey made by the artist to arrive at the gallery.

William Kentridge - William Kentridge uses drawing as a means for story-telling, often dealing with city life, and propelled by his conscience. He is “interested in…an art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures and uncertain endings.”
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Christine’s Links:

Christine’s photos from the trip.

The Drawing Center in New York City continues to be one of the foremost institutions in the world to promote experimentation and innovation in the medium of drawing.

On The Road Twelve years ago, this book saw the birth of my wanderlust. Kerouac blessed me with his visions of “the raw body of America itself.”

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Nicola Lopez A New York artist who confronts the chaos of urban/human-built landscape, travel and mobility, and information over-saturation. Her experiential mapping resonates with my own work.

An essay on William Least Heat Moon’s novel that led me right up to this trip.

Gordon Matta Clark was a seminal multi-media artist who confronted his own mortality in making enormous marks in the landscape and cityscape around him. Specifically, in cutting open warehouses left abandoned by the city of New York and empty suburban homes; in graceful drawings and photographs that brought to light a bleak reality of the socio-economic scene in America’s 1970s; and in performances- his training and his point of departure was architecture, but his use of materials elevated, reduced, and transformed the very concept of “building.”
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