Posts Tagged ‘book’

Book review: Utopia & Contemporary Art

Posted on May 2nd, 2012 • Filed under Look • No Comments

Utopia & Contemporary Art, edited by Christian Gether, Stine Høholt and Marie Laurberg. (available on amazon UK and USA.)

Publisher Hatje Cantz writes: Utopia has become a controversial concept, spanning the field between the belief in an ideal society and the dystopian nightmare. Within the last decade, the contemporary art scene has witnessed a return of utopia and utopian thinking. Whether detectable as an impulse, critically reassessed as a concept, or cautiously or daringly articulated in a specific vision–utopia continues to matter. This publication investigates the meanings of utopia in contemporary art. Theorists, critics, and curators discuss the different ways of thinking and performing utopia in contemporary art from a broad range of angles. The essays explore the current relevance of utopia as well as how people in different societies live, think, act, and imagine.

The two parts, Utopia Revisited and Utopian Positions, provide both a theoretical backdrop for the reformulations of utopia in contemporary art as well as examinations of specific utopian stances in connection with the three-year utopia project at ARKEN Museum of Modern Art and solo shows by Qiu Anxiong, Katharina Grosse, and Olafur Eliasson.

Olafur Eliasson, Din blinde Passager (Your Blind Passenger), 2010. Photo: Studio Olafur Eliasson

Utopia & Contemporary Art is a collection of essays by curators, art critics, academics and art historians who explore the meaning and place that the concept of utopia has taken in art. The first part “Utopia Revisited” illustrates the resurgence of utopia in contemporary art. Although utopia as a governmental precept has fallen from grace after a series of misguided attempts to put it into practice in the 20th century, the art world is now welcoming the concept back into its critical discourse. Utopia as a mode of thinking can inspire us to take a break from reality and think beyond what is already existing. ‘Utopian’ artworks do not necessarily require from us to take their ideas literally. Their objective is rather to elicit a moment of reflexion and inner questioning “to which extent could the art proposal work?” “how does it compare to the world i live in?” etc.

Because the book is a collection of essays about the topic, there are some repetitions in the Utopia Revisited part, with most authors feeling they have to remind us of Thomas More. Each text, however, bring a different outlook and perspective on utopia in art.

View inside the book

Richard Noble‘s contribution kept on bringing issues that are otherwise often ignored by enthusiastic artists, curators and critics: how most utopian art is made by artists from bourgeois background, paid for by rich collectors or state institutions and how it has virtually no impact on society nor the political world. How difficult it is to make a political work or art that is effective as an artwork or as a political act or both. Or how to distinguish between an utopian artwork from a political artwork. How the impact of a political artwork is influenced by the context (Noble gave the example of the reason behind Ai Weiwei‘s arrest for tax evasion: a project that involved displaying publicly the list of the names and ages of the victims of the Szechuan earthquake, an information that Chines authorities had suppressed.)

Another essay worth mentioning is the one by Jacob Wamberg in which he maps the utopian tendencies of modern art movements depending on whether they are located in ‘virtual’ space (the one of autonomous consciousness, think Kandinsky), the ‘real’ space (the one that directly engages with architecture and design, think Bauhaus) or in between (in the social sphere, think Situationism, Fluxus, Dada, etc.)

View inside the book. Unrealized Art Projects

The second part of the book, Artists Projects, is pure joy. It opens with a selection of Unrealized Art Projects that Hans Ulrich-Obrist has been collecting since 1990. He has amassed thousands of texts, drawings, and correspondence that documents projects which, for some reason, never saw the light of the day.

Things get even better in the third and last part of the book, Utopian Positions. In The Claim for New Territories, Ildiko Dao and Simon Lamunière, look at communities founded by artists. From Yoko Ono and John Lennon’s Nutopia to micro-nations, to a borderless city built on Second Life, up to the more viable The Land, a self-sustaining and transdisciplinary project created by Rirkrit Tiravanija and Kamin Letchaiprasert.

Cao Fei , Whose Utopia, 2006

Ilya Kabakov, The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment, 1988

And perhaps because each culture has its own idea (or perhaps experience) of what constitutes an utopia, the final essays examine artists’ utopian projects in different territories: Rachel Weiss considers the form and role of utopia in Cuban art, Inke Arns gives a tour the Utopian in Eastern Europe, and Hou Hanru explores the Chinese contemporary artists’ reaction to the rise of the consumerist society in their country.

In the background: Battery house by Francois Roche and Philippe Parreno, at The Land Foundation, Thailand, launched by Rirkrit Tiravanija and Kamin Letchaiprasert, 1998-

Views inside the book:

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The Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences Celebrates its Illustrious and Incredible Collection and History in Two New Exhibitions and a Book!

Posted on March 29th, 2012 • Filed under Learn • No Comments

In the 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries, when natural history was still called philosophy and most naturalists were amateurs, collectors would create what they called cabinets of curiosities — accumulations of animal, vegetable, mineral and anthropological specimens to amaze and amuse.

Often these collections grew large enough to occupy entire rooms, or even buildings. In some cases, they turned out to be precursors of modern museums.

In a way, that was the kind of project seven Philadelphia men embarked on in 1812, when they rented premises over a millinery shop, gathered a few preserved insects, some seashells and not much more, and created the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia…

–”Cupboards of Curiosities Spill Over,” Cornelia Dean, The New York Times

The Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences has a lot going for it. It is the oldest natural science research institution and natural history museum in the New World, with a history stretching back to 1812. It boasts the Titian R. Peale Butterfly and Moth Collection, a lot of nearly 100 glass boxes containing said insects arranged in pleasingly geometric patterns by Titian Peale, son of painter and first American museologist Charles Willson Peale (see 4th image down). It boasts fossils collected by American president and Declaration of Independence author Thomas Jefferson. It also houses an incredibly vast and utterly astounding collection of natural history artifacts, books, taxidermy, skeletons, wet specimens and more. More’s the pity, then, that you would never suspect the quality and breadth of this collection by its public face, which gives one the impression that The Academy is merely a bland, second-rate natural history museum aimed at easily distractable children.

I am very pleased to report, then, that the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences has used the pretext of its 200th birthday to right this wrong, and make visible its illustrious history and mind-bogglingly gorgeous collection through 2 new exhibitions–both now on view–and a new nearly 500-page luxurious book. One exhibition–”The Academy at 200: The Nature of Discovery”–displays rarely viewed specimens and artifacts from the museum stores. “Everything Under the Sun,” a second exhibition, features luminous photographs by the amazing Rosamond Purcell of a variety of the incredible artifacts and specimens hidden backstage. The associated book is entitled A Glorious Enterprise: The Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia and the Making of American Science and features Rosamond Purcell’s lavish color photographs.

Above is an excerpt from The New York Times’ review of the book and exhibitions; you can read the entire piece and see the photographic sideshow (from which the above images are drawn) by clicking here and here, respectively. You can find out more about the book “A Glorious Enterprise”–and purchase a copy of your very own–by clicking here. You can find out more about the exhibitions by clicking here and here.

Thanks so much to friend and Morbid Anatomy Art Academy Instructor Marie Dauhiemer for sending this along!

Images top to bottom: All by Rosamond Purcell drawn from the New York Times slide show, and presumably featured in the book and exhibition:

1. A spider crab (Libina canaliculata), collected by Joseph Leidy in Atlantic City.
2. Black-backed kingfishers (Ceyx erithancus), collected by the ornithologist Rodolphe Meyer de Schauensee in Siam (now Thailand), 1937-38.
3. Cone shells collected for the museum from Tanzania, Dutch New Guinea and the Palau Islands by A.J. Ostheimer III during the 1950s.
4. A selection from the butterfly and moth collection of Titian R. Peale, a noted 19th century entomologist.
5. A Ruby-cheeked Sunbird from Borneo, given to the Academy by Thomas B. Wilson in 1846.

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One Not To Miss: DELUSIONAL: The Story of the Jonathan LeVine Gallery Book Signing

Posted on March 21st, 2012 • Filed under Look • No Comments

Delusional: The Story of the Jonathan LeVine Gallery from weholden on Vimeo.

 

The Story of the Jonathan LeVine Gallery BOOK SIGNING 

SATURDAY, MARCH 10th, from 3—5pm

Jonathan LeVine Gallery
529 w 20th Street, 9flr
New York, NY 10011
(212) 243-3822 
www.jonathanlevinegallery.com

See you there!

 

Read the original post on Wooster Collective

 

One Not To Miss: DELUSIONAL: The Story of the Jonathan LeVine Gallery Book Signing

Posted on March 21st, 2012 • Filed under Look • No Comments

Delusional: The Story of the Jonathan LeVine Gallery from weholden on Vimeo.

 

The Story of the Jonathan LeVine Gallery BOOK SIGNING 

SATURDAY, MARCH 10th, from 3—5pm

Jonathan LeVine Gallery
529 w 20th Street, 9flr
New York, NY 10011
(212) 243-3822 
www.jonathanlevinegallery.com

See you there!

 

Read the original post on Wooster Collective