Glasgow gears up for 2010 International Festival of Visual Art

The entire city of Glasgow is preparing for the 2010 International Festival of Visual Art with not only museums and art galleries, but streets, bridges and even the River Clyde providing locations for this year’s ambitious celebration of the arts.

Building on the huge success of 2008, an impressive and diverse list of 50 artist has been announced. They range from Glasgow based sculptor, David Shrigley and Susan Philipsz whose first outdoor sound work will premier on the banks of the Clyde to the Croatian David Maljkovic, one of the most exciting artists to emerge from Europe in recent years.

As well as sculpture, drawings, film, video, sound works, performance and music the festival will include a re-enactment of a 1960’s eco-action by releasing 50 white bicycles on the streets of the city.

Under the artistic direction of Katrina Brow, this year’s inspiration is the relationship between past, present and future. It's a theme that will be tackled by a range of participating galleries including Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, The Hunterian Art Gallery, The Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA), and Tramway.

For more information on the 2010 International Festival of Visual Art taking place between April 16 and May 3 go to the website www.glasgowinternational.org.

Art gallery hosts underground sex club

VIENNA (Reuters Life!) - A Vienna art gallery has opened a nightly swingers club as part of a two-month project aimed at provoking debate about scandal in art.

The club, housed in the cellar of The Secession art gallery in central Vienna, offers visitors the chance to act out their sexual fantasies in leather and latex and includes a dance floor, body painting and an S&M chamber.
The club opens only after the main exhibits have shut but curious visitors over 18 years of age can walk through the empty, scarlet rooms with black sofas during the day.
Vienna Mayor Michael Haeupl said he did not approve of the club, but noted that outraged politicians and newspapers were playing into the artist's hands.
"An artist's goal is to provoke, and you are all playing along with it," he told a news conference.
The project is the work of Swiss artist Christoph Buechel, who wanted to draw a parallel with the controversy over Gustav Klimt's "Beethoven Frieze" painting, a spokeswoman for the gallery told the Austria Press Agency.
The Klimt painting, which hangs next to the swingers exhibit, provoked uproar at the turn of the last century for the way it depicted nude women. It cannot be viewed when the swingers' club is open.

Vienna museum hosts swingers club to expose sexual inhibitions

A renowned Vienna art museum has asked a "swingers" group to move into a Gustav Klimt exhibition to help gallery visitors confront their sexual inhibitions. 

An interior view of the swingers club at the Secession. Photo: AP

The Secession building. Photo: AP

Artist Gustav Klimt. Photo: Alamy

During the day visitors to the Secession contemporary art museum walk among the mattresses and erotic paraphernalia of the "Element6" sex club to view masterpieces by Klimt, who once scandalised Edwardian Europe with his sexually explicit art.

By night, the "swingers" return to carry out orgies among the artworks.
"Group sex in the Secession – has our society completely lost it?" Austria's far-Right Freedom Party has asked.
 A spokesman for the sex club said it was participating in the exhibition "to give as many people as possible the opportunity to overcome their inhibitions".
"In the framework of this exhibition at the Secession, each individual can test for himself or herself whether this opens up new dimensions for his or her own sexuality," he said.
The sex club was invited into the museum as part of a project by Christoph Buechel, a Swiss artist.
While sex acts are not allowed during day, gallery visitors wander among the club's king-size beds, erotic pictures, bar and whirlpool baths to view the art.
"It's not my thing but why not?" said Ute Wegscheider, a young mother pushing her pram outside the museum. "Maybe I should go check it out with my husband."
The museum is hoping to reignite the original controversy that surrounded Klimt's 1902 "Beethoven Frieze", the centre of the new exhibition.
Now considered one of the Austrian painter's most important works, the frieze was once thought of as obscene and pornographic because of the way women's bodies were depicted.
One section of the mural shows three mostly naked women, one who looks pregnant and the other two covered only by their long flowing tresses of hair. Another includes naked mythical figures and a zombie-like, half-naked female with stringy black hair.
Klimt, who died in 1918, was a Symbolist painter whose primary subject was the female body and his work shocked contemporaries with its frank eroticism.
The room where the frieze is exhibited is locked at night for security reasons. But it too has its share of the sex club's mattresses, surrounded by fake tropical plants and a life-size stuffed lion.
Gerald Adler, of Britain's Kent School of Architecture, who is planning to take students to see the exhibition said that sex no longer had the power to shock in a modern art museum.
"He's putting it in a place that's an accepted venue for avant-garde art, so it loses its effect," he said.
The exhibition runs until April 18.