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Posts Tagged ‘review’
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
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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Book review – Critical Dictionary
Posted on February 14th, 2012 • Filed under Look • No Comments
The Critical Dictionary goes from Algeria to ZG. Through interviews with artists and historians, essays, quotations and photos with or without texts, the anthology uses the alphabet as a starting point to look for meanings, shake up definitions and tell readers something -but not everything- about appropriation art, borders, war monuments built in Serbia in 1946-2000, forest, overt research, etc. It comments on ‘thing’ and on ostranenie. In case you were wondering, ostranenie is the artistic technique of forcing the audience to see common things in an unfamiliar or strange way, in order to enhance perception of the familiar. And ostranenie is a practice Critical Dictionary is particularly good at. In the book, images and words are juxtaposed, they collide and challenge each other. The results often have political undertones, a sense of humour and the witticism one has come to expect from visual art.
Demonstration in this excerpt from an interview the author had with The Huffington Post: To define a forest as a large area with a thick growth of trees isn’t wrong, exactly, but is limited. It says nothing about the forest as a pervasive symbol in Romanticism, an international movement of the early 19th century that challenged the Enlightenment by confronting light and transparency with darkness and opacity. Or why from 1948 onwards, Israelis were keen to plant trees on demolished Arab villages, presenting the resulting forests as pure nature. Such issues are raised, I hope, by ‘F for Forest’ in the book Critical Dictionary.
P-Plinth:
Tom Lovelace, In Preparation for the Real, 2010
Tom Lovelace, In Preparation no. 4, 2011
Tom Lovelace, In Preparation no. 5, 2011
Critical Dictionary was created by David Evans, a writer and picture editor who lectures at the Arts University College in Bournemouth. He was inspired by Georges Bataille’s short essays in the Surrealist art magazine Documents and by Bertold Brecht War Primer, photos of war he cut in newspapers and magazines, and accompanied with four-line poems.
W-Whippet:
Jo Longhurst, I know what you’re thinking, 2002-2003
G-Greenwich Meridian:
Simon Faithfull, 0° 00 Navigation, 2010
The Critical Dictionary started as an online art magazine, it then became a book, and it is now an exhibition at WORK Gallery. I can’t remember having seen anything like Critical Dictionary before. You can open it at any page and it will wake up your brain immediately. There isn’t even an introductory essay to bring any method or order to the experience. And i can’t remember either having encountered such exercise of translating a website into a book into an exhibition.
Richard Paul, Amateur, 2012. View of the exhibition space
Anon, Found Photographs, 2011. View of the exhibition space
Office of Experiment, Overt Research Project, 2008-2009
Office of Experiment, Overt Research Project, 2008-2009
View of the exhibition Critical Dictionary at WORK gallery
View of the exhibition Critical Dictionary at WORK gallery
The book Critical Dictionary is published by Black Dog Publishing (available on amazon UK
The exhibition of the same name will be on until 25 February 2012 at WORK gallery in London.
All images courtesy the artists and WORK gallery.
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Book Review – Art & Activism in the Age of Globalization
Posted on December 28th, 2011 • Filed under Look • No Comments
Art & Activism in the Age of Globalization: Reflect No. 8, edited by Lieven de Cauter, Ruben de Roo and Karel Vanhaesebrouck (available on amazon USA
NAI Publishers says: Should artists be activists? Is activist art one of an artist’s primary responsibilities or a pointless sideshow on the fringes of serious politics? The philosopher, writer and art historian Lieven de Cauter, Ruben de Roo and Karel Vanhaesebrouck explore this theme in collaboration with other thinkers and doers in his new book Art and Activism in the Age of Globalization.
In a time of globalization, populism, hypercapitalism, migration, War on Terror, and global warming, artistic engagement is vital. Art and Activism in the Age of Globalization takes the measure of contemporary activist art. What is the role of art and activism in the polarized, populist society of the spectacle? Art & Activism examines both the criticism of engagement as a mere pose and the need for cultural activism in today’s society. Urban activism and activism by anonymous networks are also investigated. Special attention is devoted to the effects of the War on Terror on activism in practice. The book concludes with a theoretical framework for contemporary activism and an impassioned plea for genuinely political art.
Errorist International, Operation BANG!, 2005
It is traditional in the blogosphere (is anyone still using this word?) to close the year with a ‘best of’ post listing the 10 most popular stories, the best exhibitions seen, the gadgets that have changed our life. I wish i could do it, it’s excellent for traffic. Alas! i have the memory of a mongoose and i’m too lazy to go through the archives of the blog. But i can safely declare that the best book i’ve read in 2011 was Art & Activism in the Age of Globalization.
A number of books about art and activism have landed on my doorstep over the past few years but this is the first one that takes as its premise the fact that activism, protest, subversion, disruption, criticism, community, resistance, etc. have become little more than buzzwords. Punk has lost its bite and essence and is now little more than a fashion trend. Che Guevara is more famous for the t-shirts his face sells than for the role he played in the Cuban Revolution. Subversion has been the cornerstone of Madonna’s rise to pop power for decades. The discursive fringe has reached the mainstream. Resistance is hip! Subversion is cool!
The popularity of these terms have depleted them from any meaning or strength. Well almost… Today you can land a commission or assignment from public institutions and private sponsors by writing application that claims that your ‘subversive’ artwork will raise ‘a healthy debate in the community’.
The editors of the book have therefore found it necessary to come up with a new word to define a powerful strategy that connects art and political engagement: subversivity. Subversivity is a disruptive attitude that tries to create openings, possibilities in the ‘closedness’ of a system.
The quality of the book extends way beyond its premise. Art & Activism in the Age of Globalization is composed of 30 essays by artists, art historians, philosophers, cultural critics, social scientists, curators, theatre directors, etc. I expected at least one or two of these texts to be bland, too scholarly, or cliché. But all i read was solid and relevant. There were a few repetitions but i never grew tired of the thoughts, experiments and ideas shared in the book.
The texts jumped from one discipline to another: visual art, theatre, architecture, hacktivism, urbanism, performances. They discussed artistic and activist practice in Europe and North America of course but also in Syria (exploring the form activism can take in a country where public activity is closely monitored by the State), South Africa, Argentina and other countries which ought to appear more often on the contemporary art map.
Unlike many books i review on the blog, this one contains very few images. Two to be precise and that includes the one on the cover. I didn’t really miss the images and discovered a few artistic/activist projects that would have deserved an individual post:
Renzo Martens, still from Episode 3, 2008
Renzo Martens, still from Episode 3, 2008
Ruben De Roo takes Renzo Martens’ film Enjoy Poverty as a platform to explore how artists can stimulate the political consciousness of the consumers of tragedies that we (‘Western’ audiences) are. A few years ago, Martens went to the Democratic Republic of Congo to launch a two-year project that examined the exploitation of one of Africa’s major exports: images of poverty and suffering. The artist traveled with a blue neon billboard that read ENJOY POVERTY and worked with Congolese photographers, teaching them how to sell images of suffering to Western media and aid agencies.
Christoph Schlingensief, Bitte liebt Österreich / Please Love Austria, 2000 (Image: Baltzer)
Christoph Schlingensief, Bitte liebt Österreich / Please Love Austria, 2000 (Photo © Paul Poet)
In their remarkably powerful and compelling essay, members of the collective BAVO call for socially committed artists to abandon “NGO art” (mostly art devoid of any political stand for fear of loosing subsidies) and urged them to be ‘really political’ by developing strategies and practices of resistances that stretch the limits of their discipline in the direction of radical politics. They gave Christoph Schlingensief’s Please Love Austria as a meaningful example of art engaging with politics:
In 2000, shortly after Jörg Haider’s far right party became part of the Austrian government, Christoph Schlingensief set up a camp for asylum seekers in a shipping container outside the Vienna Opera House. Twelve asylum seekers lived in the container for 6 days, their lives streamed over the web in a kind of Big Brother show, and the audience were invited to vote their least favourite players to exit the container and be deported to their native country. Decorated with a banner saying Ausländer Raus! (‘Foreigners out!’), the container became a flashpoint in Austria’s national and racial debate. One of the outcome of the work is that, at the end of the show, antifascist action groups stormed the container and freed the immigrants (who were actually actors.)
Alfredo Jaar, Lights in the City, in 1999
Gie Goris mentions Alfredo Jaar‘s Lights in the City as an example of art work that fuels a debate in society and unsettles without resorting to easy provocation.
The artist installed red light on the Copula of the Marche Bonsecours, a landmark monument in the centre of Montreal. The lights were connected to homeless shelters located 500 yards from the building. When a homeless person entered one of the shelters, they could press the button that would make the top of the building glow red.
Eventually all the shelters for homeless people in Montreal could be wired and connected to the Cupola. This way, a major landmark and historical monument in the city would be acting as a non-stop lighthouse, producing endless, painful distress signals to society. With enough media coverage and public outrage and support triggered by these ongoing distress signals, homelessness could be completely eradicated from Montreal, Jaar explained.
The strategy worked so well that the commissioning authority ended the intervention.
The book ends with the most honest plea: to burn the book (or burn your brain) because subversion (or subversivity) can be undermined by essays, books, intellectual jargon and ‘radical’ theories.
Image on the homepage: Errorist International, Operation Bang!, 2005. Action in Mar de Plata, Argentina. Courtesy of the Etcétera Archive.
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Review of the Frieze Art Fair
Posted on December 22nd, 2011 • Filed under Look • No Comments
Paul Simon Richards for Live from Frieze Art Fair this is LuckyPDFTV. Photo by Polly Braden. Courtesy of Polly Braden/ Frieze
As many of you probably know, i love contemporary art fairs. Yes, it’s pure porn art and there’s too much to see, most of which is quite frankly bad. But there are good surprises as well and i don’t mind spending hours in front of painted horrors if at some point i stumble upon a piece that will move me. I’m that easy. Besides, art fairs expose me to works and artists i would otherwise never have accepted to look at.
That’s how in mid-October i found myself in Regent’s Park, London, clutching my hard earned press pass (did they make bloggers sweat to get an accreditation!), expecting to be blown away. Year after year, i had read about the Frieze art fair in mags and newspapers. It looked extravagant and fearless. It looked like an art fair i would enjoy.
Alas! What the 173 galleries exhibited inside the gigantic pavilion was a bit uneventful.
Maybe the euro crisis had compelled gallery owners to be cautious and somewhat conservative in their selection of art works. Maybe my expectations were too high. I walked from corridor desperate for some excitement to photograph.
I was keen to see Pierre Huyghe’s crab living inside a Brancusi head but i never managed to locate it. I didn’t manage to miss Christian Jankowski’s 65-metre yacht though. Made by a specialist boat builder, the luxury ship could be purchased at the merchant’s prize for €500,000. Or for €625,000 if you fancied having the artist sign it. The references were obvious (Duchamp, financial crisis, bling culture, etc.), the whole point not so much.
Of course it wasn’t all pain and gloom. The PM3 of the talks are online, there was Nathalie Djurberg! there was Nathalie Djurberg!, i ended up in The Guardian (albeit in a photo gallery showing people who confuse art fairs with fashion shows) and i did find works that make this post worthy of a quick scroll down:
Michael Landy, Credit Card Destroying Machine, 2010 (Thomas Dane gallery). Photo by Linda Nylind. Courtesy of Frieze/ Linda Nylind
Michael Landy was showing a Tinguely-inspired eccentricity that shred your credit card in exchange of a drawing by the artist. You might remember that 10 years ago Landy spent 2 weeks destroying all of his worldly possession in an empty store on Oxford Street.
Over some 20 years, street photographer Igor Moukhin chronicled rallies and protest marches across Russia.
Igor Moukhin, Resistance (XL gallery)
Seb Patane, Untitled, 2011 (China Art Objects Galleries)
Brian Griffiths, Bear Work Wear (black), 2011 (Vilma Gold gallery)
As i screamed earlier, there was Nathalie Djurberg! there was Nathalie Djurberg!
Nathalie Djurberg, Woods, Gio Marconi. Photo by Linda Nylind. Courtesy of Linda Nylind/ Frieze
Nathalie Djurberg, Woods, Gio Marconi. Photo by Linda Nylind. Courtesy of Linda Nylind/ Frieze
Nathalie Djurberg, Woods, Gio Marconi. Photo by Linda Nylind. Courtesy of Linda Nylind/ Frieze
In Encounter(s), Tejal Shah collaborated with artist Varsha Nair. Wearing a straightjacket, outstretching their bodies, they wrapped themselves around pilars, across stairs, through gates and against other pieces of architecture. The work amplifies the paradox of our highly networked reality wherein technology variously connects, only to ironically distance us.
Tejal Shah, Encounter(s), 2006
Marina Abramovic, The Levitation of Saint Teresa, 2010 (Lisson Gallery)
Probably my favourite painting at the fair:
Miriam Cahn, Herumstehen, 2005 (Elizabeth Dee gallery)
In case you were wondering ‘how much does the work below cost?’, i found some figures online: In Frame, the section in the fair for young galleries showing solo artist presentations supported for a second year by Cos, sales were also substantial. François Ghebaly sold out their Patrick Jackson booth, selling Dirt Pile on Table (roots&glass) (2011) priced at $9,000; two versions of Heads, hands and feet (2011) for $15,000 and 3 dirt pile sculpture for $20,000 all to significant international collectors.
Patrick Jackson, Head, Hands and Feet (black) + Head, Hands and Feet (red), 2011 (François Ghebaly Gallery)
Wolfgang Tillmans. Faltenwurf (Grey), 2011 (Galerie Chantal Crousel)
Dawn Mellor, South African Gallerist Kristen Scott Thomas is showing neo-institutional critique works by Zurich based artist Chaz Bono, 2011 (Team Gallery)
Ken Okiishi, Manhattan Transfer (Alex Zachary gallery)
Tobias Zielony, Yet Untitled (#14), 2009 (KOW Berlin)
Tobias Zielony, Powwow, 2009 (KOW Berlin)
Alex Hartley (of the Nowherisland fame) was showing what looked like a photo of the Unabomber cabin. Close (very close) inspection revealed that it was a sculpture with the architectural model carved and built into the photography of the landscape itself. The series is on show at Victoria Miro this Winter.
Alex Hartley, Waiting for Daylight to End (Kaczynski Cabin), 2011
Cinthia Marcelle, O Cosmopolita, 2011
This is the billy-goat costume that Paweł Althamer wore to travel the world on the footsteps of a Polish children’s-book character.
Pawel Althamer, The Billy-Goat, 2011
Glenn Ligon, Negro Sunshine, 2006
No art fair is conceivable without at least one work from Elmgreen and Dragset (i spotted 3 at Frieze):
Elmgreen and Dragset, The Fruit of Knowlege, 2011
Taryn Simon, The Wailing Wall, Mini Israel, Latrun, 2007
Cornelia Parker, 30 Pieces of Silver (with reflection), Frith Street Gallery
Matthew Brannon (Casey Kaplan Gallery)
Oleg Kulik, Kulik vs. Koraz, 1997 (XL gallery)
Sorry i have no title nor author for the following works:
More images.
Photo on the homepage: Paul Simon Richards for Live from Frieze Art Fair this is LuckyPDFTV. Photo by Polly Braden. Courtesy of Polly Braden/ Frieze.
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