Tales and traumas of a 'Teenage Drama Queen'

Crufts is described of as "the World's greatest dog show". It is held annually in the Birmingham NEC in the middle of March. It is well and truly an international event, with dogs representing over 26 countries entering the 2005 competition!

The show is named after Charles Cruft, who held the first show in the Royal Agricultural Hall, Islington in 1891. The show was always staged in London until 1991, when it's centenery exhibition was held in the Birmingham NEC, since then it has always been in Birmingham.

Over 24,000 dogs from all around the world take part in the show each year. The ultimate aim of most of the competitors is to be "best in show". This prestigious award was awarded last year to Norfolk Terrior, Co-co.

Below: Last year's best in show, Co-co and his cup.


As well as the esteemed Best In Show title there are other highly popular competitions, including the Obedience World Cup. England has won this event two years consecutively and other countries will be desperate to stop them making a hat trick.

To see some of my images from this year's event please see this link

To find out more information about Crufts please look here.

We were studying minimalism in music today, in paticular attempting to play Stephen Chadwick's "in Dorian D", and I thought I would see what else I could find out about it.

Minimalism
(taken from wikipedia)

Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is stripped down to its most fundamental features. In other fields of art, it has been used to describe the novels of Ernest Hemingway, the plays of Samuel Beckett, the films of Robert Bresson, the stories of Raymond Carver (called the King of Minimalism), and even the automobile designs of Colin Chapman.

As a specific movement in the arts it is identified with developments in post-World War II Western Art, most strongly with the visual arts, for example the paintings of Mark Rothko. The term has expanded to encompass a movement in music which features repetition and iteration, for example the music of Steve Reich, Philip Glass and Terry Riley. (See also Post-Minimalism). It is rooted in the spare aspects of Modernism, and is often associated with Postmodernism and reaction against Expressionism in both painting and composition.

The term "minimalist" can also refer to anything which is spare, stripped to its essentials, or providing only the outline of structure, independent of the particular art movement, and "minimalism" the tendency to reduce to fundamentals. It is sometimes applied to groups or individuals practicing asceticism and the reduction of physical possessions and needs to a minimum.

Minimalism in music
(taken from a worksheet)

The term 'minimal music' means music created with the most basic and limited amount of material. Eric Satie (1866-1925) composed 'vexations', which is perhaps one of the first examples of minimal music; it consists of a short phrase repeated 840 times without variation! This type of repetition has given four American minimalist composers (Steve Reich, born 1935, La Monte Young, b.1935, Philip Glass, b. 1937 and Terry Riley, b. 1935) the nickname 'Monotonous school'. However, although some of their pieces may be monotonous to some people's ears, many of their works are full of rhythmic excitement, rich timbres and harmonic colours. This tends to result from a layering of ostinati, which merge to create complex structures of rhythm and pitch. Traditional Western Europeanmusic relies a great deal on ostinati and repetition, but the four American composers' works have been influenced by the characteristics of Indian, Balinese, and West African music, especially in the use of uneven or irregular rhythmic patterns.

Minimalism in art
(Also taken from Wikipedia)

A minimalist painting, for example, will typically use a limited number of colors, and have a simple geometric design. Minimalist sculpture on the other hand is greatly focused on the materials (see David Smith and Donald Judd). While many believe minimalism to be a movement specific to geometric representations, it extends far outside this constraint.

There were three notable phases of the minimalist movement:

First the distillation of the forms wherein the greatest contributors were probably the Russian Constructivists and the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuşi. The Russian Constructivists proclaiming the distillation was in order to create a universal language of art which the masses were meant to understand. It may have also supported the rapid industrialization planned for the massive country. Brâncuşi's work was much more of a search for the purity of the form and thus paved the way for the abstractions that were to come, such as minimalism.

The second (and most notable) phase in the movement came with artists including Carl Andre, Anne Truitt, Dan Flavin, Sol LeWitt, Frank Stella, Donald Judd, Ad Reinhardt and Robert Smithson. It commenced in 1964 with the exhibition of Dan Flavin's 'Monument for V Tatlin' which was an assembly of neon lighting tubes. The tubes had not been modified in any way by the artist, merely arranged. The assembly did not signify anything other than itself. It simply existed. These 1960s artists were anti-Romantic. They very explicitly stated that their art was not self-expression, in complete opposition to the previous decade's Abstract Expressionists. Very soon they created a minimal style, whose features included: rectangular and cubic forms purged of all metaphor, equality of parts, repetition, neutral surfaces, industrial materials, all of which leads to immediate visual impact. Later minimal sculptors included Tony Smith, Larry Bell and John McCracken.

Ad Reinhardt summed up the style in these terms: 'The more stuff in it, the busier the work of art, the worse it is. More is less. Less is more. The eye is a menace to clear sight. The laying bare of oneself is obscene. Art begins with the getting rid of nature.'

This style was heavily criticised. It was called futile, mechanistic, mandarin, elitist, circular, pedantic and authoritarian. Some critics thought they were dealing with outright fraud.

Also notable are the post-minimalists, including Martin Puryear, Tyrone Mirchell, Melvin Edwards and Joel Shapiro. The keystone of post-minimalism is the often distinct references to objects without direct representation. This has become a predominant trend in modern sculpture.

Below: one of Dan Flavin's minimalistic lighting tube installations.

An interesting history lesson for todays "song of the day". Billy Joel's "We didn't start the Fire" highlights many of the happenings of the 20th century...

Song of the day

We didn't start the Fire Written by Billy Joel












There are many opinions on the origins of the song: the most commonly related is that Billy Joel overheard his teenage nephew complaining over a history essay that 'No history ever happens these days'. Inspiration fired, Joel set out to prove, in musical format, just how much had happened over the last 40 years. He chose to begin with 1949, the year of his birth, and painstakingly built up a chronological list of events, to form one of the most memorable and enduring 'list' songs in pop history.

The concept of the list song itself is nothing new. Bob Dylan brilliantly told his life story as little more than a succession of unconnected phrases in 'Subterranean Homesick Blues'. Ian Dury provided a wry view of modern British life in 'Reasons To Be Cheerful'. Even Madonna got in on the act - the bridge of 'Vogue' is much more famous than the rest of the song. Other musically notable examples include Holly Johnson's 'Legendary Children' and the Pasadenas 'Tribute (Right On)'.
Taken from a short Biography of Billy Joel on here...

xx