CARDIFF CONTEMPORARY FESTIVAL 1

Cardiff Contemporary is a citywide festival celebrating contemporary visual culture. The theme for this, the third year, is Reveal/Conceal, and is made possible by the efforts of a huge number of artists and organisations, with funding from the City Council and the Arts Council.
       Last Sunday (26 October) we set out to see some of the free art around the city centre. The first stop was the Castle, where we were promised an installation by Richard Woods and a sonic clock tower experience by Richard James and R Seiliog. Although we could see the installation at the entrance we were asked to pay the £14 entrance fee to go into the grounds. The sonic tower was a happening at 5pm, and it was just mid-day. You didn't have to enter the Castle to hear the seven sound pieces, so we decided to abandon the Castle and move on.
       We moved towards the station to see the One Minute Sculptures by Erwin Wurm. Nobody in the Station seemed to know anything about them, even the Information desk was baffled. Eventually, one of the ticket collectors gave us the nod. We should have read the programme more carefully. They are large photographs of one minute sculptures on the walls outside, partially obscured by the taxi rank; a man with a face made of stationery objects from his desk, a woman with a bucket balanced at a jaunty angle on her head, a man upside down in a cardboard box, that sort of thing.  
        On route we saw a young man sitting in a container opposite St David's Hall, and popped our head in. There was a photograph of a large Spillers biscuit. We were interested to learn that Spillers had made ship biscuits for decades, as well as dog food. This study by Alex Rich was about our maritime heritage. We would have liked to have seen more, but we missed them, walking the wrong way. So we walked towards the g39 gallery off City Road, which had been working with Alex on the project:'Reflections Towards a Well-tempered Environment.' Unfortunately, the g39 isn't open on a Sunday, but our programme didn't tell us that.
       We decided not to walk back to Wood St, where lots more art was to be revealed or concealed. Instead we took a cultural walk up City Road, where art of a different sort, colourful, international, popular, commercial, delighted us with its colours, designs and smells.