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Art Agenda: Laura Horelli at Galerie Barbara Weiss

2011-12-15T05:25:00.000-08:00

"Laura Horelli's 'The Terrace' at Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin" on Art Agenda (December 14, 2011).

To read the review, visit: http://www.art-agenda.com/reviews/laura-horelli’s-“the-terrace”/
The gallery's website: http://www.galeriebarbaraweiss.de/

Texte zur Kunst: Blake Rayne at Capitain Petzel

2011-12-06T05:17:00.000-08:00

"Mode of Production: On Blake Rayne at Capitain Petzel, Berlin" in Texte zur Kunst (Heft 84 - Dezember 2011).

For more information, visit: http://www.textezurkunst.de/84/
The gallery's website: http://www.capitainpetzel.de/exhibitionspress_17_1.html

Spike, Winter 2011: Christian Falsnaes at PSM

2011-12-06T04:37:00.000-08:00

"Christian Falsnaes at PSM, Berlin" in spike Art Quarterly (Issue 30 - Winter 2011).

For more information, visit: http://spikeart.at/index.php?option=com_magazine&func=show_article&id=138&lang=en
The gallery's website: http://www.psm-gallery.com/node/121

BOTH BEING GIVEN

2011-12-03T05:54:00.000-08:00

BOTH BEING GIVEN

On CAMERON ROWLAND BOTH TOGETHER WITH JOHN BEESON

Along the line where two planes meet, a space is formed. Across the seam where two pages connect, a narrative unfolds. With his recent exhibition at deuxpiece in Basel, Switzerland (30 September-02 October, 2011), Cameron Rowland laid claim to these boundaries; through his installation, he commanded the exhibition architecture, he manipulated viewers’ perception of space, and he spoke through a visual language that was multivalent in relaying the meaning of his participation and his contribution.

Calling upon various approaches to artistic agency, Rowland sometimes laid out his subjects in direct address, and he sometimes enunciated his subjects by complementing them with alternate versions. On the other hand, he periodically also obscured the primary subject through reproductive processes. In other moments, still, the artist intentionally obscured the legibility of meaning––either through the construction of an illusion or through formal obscuration. Of fundamental importance to the artist’s concerns, the making of something illegible or the shrouding of something in darkness was a racially politicized act.

In the photographic works Spiritual 1 and Studio views with White Negress and others, hands––those body parts that are responsible for grasping and manipulating objects and which are capable of symbolically indicating a state of mind, feeling, or, simply, one’s presence––specifically black hands, recede and become indiscernible among black cloth or the dark space surrounding the edges of a book. Black forms stand in stark contrast against white surrounds; however, whiteness exhibits the ability to dominate and redefine. In Spiritual 1, the white paint that the studio model has been photographed stepping into seeps into the black fabric in which he is shrouded both at his feet and at the crown of his head, where he has “baptized” himself. In this way, following the language used by the artist in describing the activity, one can see that the work’s formal language reflects on a dominant institution in our society, one which has had a particular impact on black culture, historically: namely, Christianity. The thought that this history of dominance is local to the United States, where Rowland was born and raised, is, of course, leveled by attention to the current Swiss policy barring the construction of minarets. Oppression by a dominant value system––be it concrete or abstract––is a shared reality.

In the photographs reproduced in the work Studio views with White Negress and others, informed viewers will recognize iconic works by Modernist master Constantin Brancusi. Occupying the foreground in each photograph is Brancusi’s White Negress. Already evoked in the title of that work, the stereotypical Africanoid features borne by the small bust apparently submit to a confusing re-racialization following the fact that the work has been carved in white marble. (In bronze, the work goes by the title Blond Negress.) What is more, Brancusi’s works are here depicted in their original studio setting, from which they today seem fully disassociated, given the works’ rigid, iconic stature. Also, the two photographic reproductions differ slightly, since the works were slightly rearranged, then re-photographed. Following Rowland’s self-reflexive presentation of the book in which he found these photographs––in his photograph, the book is held up and open by two hands; it was then printed silkscreen on paper, creased along the spine of the depicted book, framed, raised on a shelf, and set leaning against the wall––he emphasizes the concept of representation. For, in the case of White Negress, buried beneath layers of reproductions and representations, there is the reality of an individual with Africanoid features as well as the history of influence and abstraction that brought the reality of art production in Africa to rest in high Modernism’s discourse on pure form.

Informing and simultaneously motivating Rowland’s production of formal abstraction––as is best embodied in the work Crayon Study 1––are the somehow invisible lines of influence, which may allow artistic production to ignore reality, as well as a dialogue on visual literacy. In that the forms of Crayon Study 1 have been abstracted from (or, from another perspective, aspire to imitate) the letterforms and syntactical structures of writing, they insist on their illegibility. Illegibility, as such, is a reality that we must face in art as well as in culture at large, since some do not have the specialized knowledge of others, and since in our society there are those who are structurally disadvantaged, sometimes even unable to read.

Complementing the primary forms that Rowland exhibited in the installation at deuxpiece were additional elements that were nevertheless of equal significance and value as discrete artworks. Such was the case with the artwork that took the form of a publication, which gave form and primacy to the dialogic relationship between those works which became physical and the many variations that did not––to paraphrase Sol LeWitt. Both and Other Types contains its own visual language and describes a period of time and activity that came before the installation of the exhibition, but which is indistinct. Serving as the mechanism by which to store as well as display and distribute the books, Non-Structural Column 1 functioned in its own way as a sculpture and as an architectural intervention; the structure gave the illusion of being a structural column, since its two planes form a logical geometry and from certain points in the room it appeared to reach all the way from the floor to the ceiling.

Taking a related approach but maintaining a slightly different aim, Other works, a digital print which had been mounted on stretchers actually reaching from the floor to the ceiling, depicted another space filled with objects. Although the space clearly differed in form and scale from that of the exhibition space, it supported the partial impression of a continuous space. Not only did the work manifest specters of alternate works installed in an alternate space, it did so specifically by means of depicting (and thus revealing) the studio, where the photo was taken, as a site of production and presentation. Choosing not to privilege this space, but rather to invite a comparison between it and the exhibition space, Rowland therefore emphasized the nature of each space and each object therein contained as an experiment, as a choice made and a choice potentially made differently.

This brings us, finally, to Relic, a work that hinges on its ability to evoke relations to other objects, spaces, and times, while also maintaining a degree of autonomy. At the same time that the work serves Spiritual 1 by giving form to its material and performative history, Relic is a disembodied body; it represents the present absence that is the crux of much of Rowland’s project. Read in dialogue with painting, the mass of hanging fabric reveals the very matter out of which representations are constructed. More than that, it is the shadow cast by both the activity of production as well as the individual who produces. This dependent but simultaneously independent, singular form, like much of the work in the exhibition, makes a claim on behalf of an Other, a position in society and in tradition, through its relation to diversified artistic production as well as through its constituency among an ensemble of artistic products present in the space of the exhibition.

––John Beeson

The website of the project space, deuxpiece: http://deuxpiece.com/

The website of the artist, Cameron Rowland: http://cameronrowland.com/

Artforum, December 2011: Mario Pfeifer at KOW

2011-12-01T05:22:00.000-08:00

"Mario Pfeifer at KOW, Berlin" in Artforum International Magazine (December 2011).

For more information, visit: http://artforum.com/inprint/issue=201110
The artist's website: http://www.mariopfeifer.com/
The gallery's website: http://www.kow-berlin.info/exhibitions/solo_exhibition_5

CAMERON ROWLAND _BOTH TOGETHER_ WITH JOHN BEESON: Installation Views

2011-12-01T01:40:00.000-08:00

CAMERON ROWLAND BOTH TOGETHER WITH JOHN BEESON
deuxpiece, Basel, CH

Spiritual 1 (left) and Relic (right)

Relic

Relic (left) and Other works (right)

Studio view with White Negress and others (left), Crayon Study 1 (center), and Non-Structural Column 1 (right)

Non-Structural Column 1 (detail) with BOTH AND OTHER TYPES

For more information:
The website of the project space, deuxpiece: http://deuxpiece.com/
The website of the artist, Cameron Rowland: http://cameronrowland.com/

artforum.com Critic's Pick: Timur Si-Qin at Société

2011-11-30T09:55:00.000-08:00

"Timur Si-Qin at Société, Berlin" in Critic's Picks on artforum.com (November 29, 2011).

To read the review, visit: http://artforum.com/archive/id=29643
The artist's website: http://timursiqin.com/
The gallery's website: http://societeberlin.com/

Artforum, November 2011: Fred Lonidier at Silberkuppe

2011-11-01T04:47:00.000-07:00

"Fred Lonidier at Silberkuppe, Berlin" in Artforum International Magazine (November 2011).

For more information, visit: http://www.artforum.com/inprint/issue=201109
The gallery's website: http://www.silberkuppe.org/

Spike, Fall 2011: Dan Perjovschi at Galerija Gregor Podnar and Seduction

2011-10-28T08:17:00.000-07:00

"Dan Perjovschi at Galerija Gregor Podnar, Berlin" and "Seduction: Sperrmüll" in spike Art Quarterly (Issue 29 - Fall 2011).

For more information, visit: http://spikeart.at/index.php?option=com_magazine&func=show_article&id=134&lang=en
The gallery's website: http://www.gregorpodnar.com/_index.php?p=p_211&sName=dan-perjovschi-%B7-september-%B7-berlin-gallery

RADICAL BOTANICAL

2011-10-20T07:55:00.000-07:00

One of the principal features of A Thousand Plateaus, written by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guittari and published in 1980 as the second volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, is its presentation of an alternative to the traditional arboreal model of thought, which the authors develop through the aid of the metaphor of ‘the rhizome’, a botanical type. Another prominent text that makes use of botanical imagery is The Radicant, written by French cultural theorist and curator Nicolas Bourriaud and published in 2009, which makes use of the metaphor of ‘the radicant’ to describe tendencies among contemporary (or postmodern) artists and their artistic production.

The botanical metaphor has certain implications: growth––in the sense of development, but also of movement; a natural presence and organic development in its given environment; an uncontainable nature––perhaps a kind of fragility, but also simultaneously a kind of integrity; as well as an intrinsic radicalness. Surely, these are the reasons that these texts, which appear to make such an earnest grasp for a visionary and (re-)definitive status, each call upon new botanical metaphors: they attempt to capture their belief in a renaissance of thought and culture, at once expounding on the indications of the forthcoming epoch’s radicalness as well as borrowing from it.

In the context of visual art, botanical material has a resounding metaphorical quality. However, given the definitive status of the aforementioned texts, their own conceptions and arguments are represented in art as often as their prophetic descriptions are naturally manifest. But when botanical material, for itself, is invoked and physically present in contemporary art, it proves to be a fruitful taproot from which to access the habits and concerns of young artists, who follow in the wake of a postmodern mythology, perhaps living out the prophecy that preceded them, or perhaps indicating an alternate state of things.

The art addressed in this essay is young, as are the artists who make it. They came of age in an era characterized by so-called ‘relational aesthetics’ as well as ‘institutional critique’––regimes that describe the formal effect of art based on the interrelation of disparate structures and the significance of artistic activity based on the interrelations between people and their relations with institutions––an era, which, far from having ended, has persisted and evolved. These artists find themselves in a point of concurrence between the art market’s strongest foothold in Europe and a nonetheless thriving holdout of various significant traditions in recent art. They were born into a scenario that must feel much like a stage––given the infrastructure supporting the production, exhibition, and sale of new art––if not open access into the contemporary art scene: the town of Basel, in Switzerland. There, Art Basel finds itself every year, drawing crowds, lending credibility to a firmament of contemporary art students and recent graduates and the projects that they launch year-round; but this focus is most significant––perhaps uplifting, perhaps oppressive––during those few days every June, when the art world descends on a small town, and the art-viewing public multiplies by a degree of at least a hundred. In any case, the young artists in Basel make work, they show it, they do it together, and they make a time of it.

...

May 25, 2011

The preceding is an excerpt from the essay Radical Botanical.

For more information, please contact john.beeson@gmail.com.

Preview: BOTH AND OTHER TYPES

2011-09-16T04:18:00.000-07:00

The project space deuxpiece in Basel (CH) is pleased to announce the exhibition CAMERON ROWLAND BOTH TOGETHER WITH JOHN BEESON, opening on September 30th, 2011 at 8.00pm. Comprising an orchestration of images, objects, and architectural interventions, the exhibition will attempt to engage viewer perception and the physical and social dimensions of the given environment.

On the occasion of the exhibition, BOTH AND OTHER TYPES, which Rowland and Beeson have produced in co-operation with the Stuttgart-based publishing house Edition Taube, will be made available to visitors.

Artforum, September 2011: Horst Ademeit

2011-09-01T08:49:00.000-07:00

For my first review in the printed version of Artforum (September 2011), I've written about the exhibition Secret Universe. Horst Ademeit at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin.

For more information, visit: http://artforum.com/inprint/issue=201107
The museum's website: http://www.hamburgerbahnhof.de/exhibition.php?id=32228&lang=en

Brooklyn Rail, September 2011: Musik als Träger von Ideen

2011-09-01T08:45:00.000-07:00

Jean-Yves Leloup
Digital Magma: From the Utopia of Rave Parties to the iPod Generation
Lukas & Sternberg, New York (2011)

For its ability to speak to feelings and to alter our perception of times and spaces, music has a singular potency. In addition, eras and trends in music can reveal fundamental characteristics about the circumstances of its production and reception. In Digital Magma, Jean-Yves Leloup offers his conception of how electronic music has enabled a generation to pursue its unique penchant for communal experience, while also providing contemporary societies with a means to reflect their individual realities. In the digital age, he suggests, electronic music has been a volatile ground on which technical developments have paralleled radical shifts in the creation of cultural products and their producers.

A D.J. and sound artist, as well as a writer and curator based in Paris, Leloup commences with techno and the club, but he duly departs on a path that reaches back into the history of musical experimentation in the early 20th century and then out into the broader reaches of digital technology’s influence on contemporary culture. He articulates this through such themed chapters as “Immersion,” “Playlist,” “Avatars,” “Collectivism,” and “Dematerialization,” crisscrossing the trajectories of ambient music (from Erik Satie to Brian Eno), minimalism (John Cage and La Monte Young), sound installation (Max Neuhaus), and concrete sound (from Karlheinz Stockhausen to Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry), among others.

Despite these historical points of reference, Leloup’s principal theories of “the culture of the mix,” “the permanence of sound,” immersion, and spectacle find their most pointed explication in the case of electronic music. The D.J. creates potentially endless mixes, appropriating and transmitting sounds originally composed by other musicians. The listener, absorbed in the crowd, possibly lost on substances, and caught in an eternal return of bass, becomes the site of his or her own spectacle.

Techno, a subset of electronic music, was born in Detroit in the 1980s “of a crossbred enrichment between Black American culture, Western avant-gardes, and European pop music.” As Derrick May, one of its local pioneers, said of the music originating from that once-dominant site of American car production: “We created our own sounds, and all these sounds, subconsciously, came from the idea of industry, machinery, mechanics, electronics…When we decided to create, we created our environment.” Such a link to history is paradigmatic for the author’s understanding of music in the digital age: it develops at the confluence of specific circumstances and technological innovation. The quotation is further emblematic of the fact that Leloup often allows primary sources and authorities on the subject to make his case for him.

The development of electronic music has coincided with fundamental changes to music and its relationship to the industry of its production. For example, Leloup believes that a “dematerialization” of music—in the course of its digitization and transferral to devices for portable listening and storage—has caused it to become “both omnipresent and devalued.” Moreover, the genre has paralleled various tendencies on the Internet: toward the integration of individuals into virtual landscapes (see Brian Eno’s atmosphere-defining album Ambient 1, Music for Airports), the manipulation of identity through avatars and impersonation (see the multiple personae of Uwe Schmidt, a k a Atom Heart), the overlapping of media (see the audiovisual concerts of Carsten Nicolai and Ryoji Ikeda), and the democratization of information and its production (see the output from home studios, such as that by Richard James, a k a Aphex Twin). Following these developments, the genre conflicts with the music industry’s drive to control production, since the creation of electronic music can be accomplished with as little as a laptop, and is further aided by the opportunities for reproduction, modification, and distribution offered by Copyleft and Creative Commons licenses.

Given this theme of progress, it comes as no surprise that the author pairs popular theories with lesser known subjects and theories, such as Baudrillard’s notion of “hyper-reality” with Kiss cover bands. However, Leloup tends to conflate abstract ideas and specific cases which do not comfortably reside on the same ground, and he does not go to the necessary lengths to account for their juxtaposition. But it is possible for this divide to be bridged, as evidenced by the album In Memoriam Gilles Deleuze (Mille Plateaux, 1996), which resonates with, rather than attempts to explicate, what makes the philosopher’s work relevant in another field.

Moreover, Digital Magma retreads territory that scholarship has already explored, and it is not likely that this offering will be the definitive analysis. However, it does depict a thriving cultural history that is prime for recollecting, relaying, and re-envisioning.

Originally published in the September 2011 issue of the Brooklyn Rail.
Also viewable, here, on the Brooklyn Rail's website.
The book is available through Sternberg Press
.

textezurkunst.de Gesehen und Bewertet: TRANSITIVE PROPERTY

2011-08-25T07:40:00.000-07:00

Malin Arnell, Pablo Zuleta Zahr, Exhibition view, SEPTEMBER, Berlin

Through an act of sleight of hand, SEPTEMBER gallery in Berlin recently served as the site for three simultaneous solo exhibitions. In fact, the congregation of works, which were in various media and were created by four artists – two of whom comprise an artist pair (Katrin Lock & Tim Brotherton), occupied shared thematic territory; the initial confusion that visitors might have experienced in the gallery as to which artists produced which works and to which exhibition these belonged acted as a valuable indication of where to find meaning in works that regularly dealt with the relationship between subjects and contexts.

...

Read the full review on Texte zur Kunst's website.

For more on the exhibition, visit SEPTEMBER's website.

CAMERON ROWLAND _BOTH TOGETHER_ WITH JOHN BEESON at deuxpiece, Basel

2011-08-11T07:23:00.001-07:00

deuxpiece

Spike, Summer 2011: Haris Epaminonda at Schirn Kunsthalle

2011-06-15T04:27:00.000-07:00

HARIS EPAMINONDA

»Chronicles«

Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt am Main

13.5.–31.7.2011

A drum beats sporadically, and then a flute trills. After a moment of silence, the sound of running water comes from a speaker in a corner of the dark room. In another room, bells chime, and in another corner, still, the same instruments play a different movement. Such is the piece of music composed by the Manchester-based Part Wild Horses Mane on Both Sides that accompanies the video installation Chronicles (2010–ongoing) by Cypriot artist Haris Epaminonda (* 1980).

...

Read the full review in issue 28 of spike ART QUARTERLY.

For more on the exhibition, visit Schirn Kunsthalle's website.

Edition Taube: Confessions of a Poor Collector

2011-06-13T09:25:00.000-07:00

I'm pleased to announce that, in collaboration with Edition Taube, we have realized an authorized reprinting of Eugene Schwartz's timeless manuscript "Confessions of a Poor Collector."

For more information and to purchase a copy of the new edition, click here.

artforum.com Critic's Pick: Nairy Baghramian at Daniel Buchholz

2011-06-01T04:03:00.000-07:00

For my next Critic's Pick on artforum.com, I've written about Nairy Baghramian's exhibition Formage de tête at Galerie Daniel Buchholz in Berlin.
Visit the archived link here: http://www.artforum.com/archive/id=28292

frieze.com Show: Fredrik Værslev at Circus

2011-05-26T02:21:00.000-07:00

For my first review on frieze.com, I've written about Fredrik Værslev's exhibition The Secrets of Aging Well at Circus in Berlin.
Read the review here: http://www.frieze.com/shows/review/fredrik-vaerslev/
For more information on the artist, visit: http://www.fredrikvaerslev.com/

artforum.com Critic's Pick: Gabriel Kuri at Esther Schipper

2011-05-14T10:46:00.000-07:00

For my first Critic's Pick on artforum.com, I've written about Gabriel Kuri's exhibition carbon index compost copy at Esther Schipper in Berlin.
Visit the archived link here: http://www.artforum.com/archive/id=28249

'Try a Little Tenderness' in the Brooklyn Rail

2011-05-04T07:50:00.001-07:00

Jan Verwoert, Edited by Vanessa Ohlraun
Tell Me What You Want, What You Really, Really Want
(Piet Zwart Institute and Sternberg Press, September 2010)

Jan Verwoert’s first published collection of writings takes as its title part of that indelible refrain from the Spice Girls’ 1996 smash-hit “Wannabe.” Both forthright and provocative, like the song, Verwoert delivers what Roland Barthes called a “text of pleasure” as well as, at times, a “text of bliss”: writing from a point rooted in culture, Verwoert regularly addresses his reader as he posits new understandings of the ever-shifting landscape. However, that precarious responsibility of the critic, to proffer positive and negative judgments of specific works, is largely suspended, since Verwoert’s is a more general cultural criticism than one focused on the successes, failures, and longevities of specific vanguards within the limited sphere of contemporary fine art.
At one point, Verwoert asks, “Does meaning do anyone any good?” Then he answers, “Not necessarily.” Rather: “Beyond meaning lies feeling. And feeling someone feel what you feel makes all the difference.” What we have here is writing that has less to say about meaning in art and more to say about feeling and art; such sincerity ensures an intimate relationship between the author and his reader and causes his treatment of subjects to come across more as evocative than fixed.
Imaginative and generous, Verwoert grounds abstract and philosophical exposition within a broad field of cultural references. Lyrics from Bill Withers and the Dead Kennedys are comfortable complements to Michel Foucault and Guy Debord in an analysis of the exhaustion prescribed by high-performance, post-industrial society. And it is Edgar Allen Poe’s musings about returning strength in a state of convalescence that inspires Verweort’s ideal of a collectively-minded community, one whose members would show a sincere dedication to productive activity.
Verwoert imagines an art that follows in the tradition of hoping for a better life and society, and which allows for the conception of new and different social arrangements; a permeating type of love allowed through communal empathy, in part following from the deterioration of gender binaries, is often considered to be a potential feat that such an art could accomplish. Ambiguity, Verwoert rightly argues, is a productive state for art, and he addresses several of its forms: metaphor, translation (across media), indeterminacy (see his metaphor of the stoa), and the détournement of the Situationists. Alongside these terms he adds his own: “‘I Can’t’ in the key of ‘I Can,’” to describe actively keeping meaning abstract or latent in order to preserve its potency.
At times, Verwoert mistakes the potential for art (as well as writing) to be “intimate and indeterminate” with the responsibility of criticism to render judgments. For example, “Living with Ghosts,” a convincing account of the social and historical conditions that steered the evolution of appropriation in postmodern and contemporary art, only theorizes an ethics of referentiality and, as such, does not make use of its potential to critically activate otherwise static, clinical, contemporary practices of appropriation. Only elsewhere, in a text specifically about the work of Cerith Wyn Evans, does Verwoert affirm the dynamic type of practice that he fell short of advocating in the more general case: “Instead of displaying knowledge, [Wyn Evans] invests passion in the invocation of a spirit… Crucially, though, a certain quality of irreverence is present in this gesture of reverence.”
Implicit in the attention that Verwoert gives to an artist or a work of art is his support thereof. Explicit judgments of concrete projects, both positive and negative, are mostly lacking, but they would go far in firming the reader’s understanding of how to continue searching for satisfaction and promise in the contemporary landscape.
In this collection, Verwoert is never as strong or compelling in writing extensively about one artist or body of work (with the exception of the passages on Július Koller) as he is in his commentary and declarative passages. Still, through the charismatic and seductive voice of Verwoert’s writing, this array of essays draws its reader intimately into a dynamic cosmos of remarkable intelligence. More deliberation than criticism, for its range and its personality, this collection is inspiring as well as humanely moving; it is engagement, after all, which is the wellspring of both meaning and feeling in art and writing.

Originally published in the May 2011 issue of the Brooklyn Rail.
Also viewable, here, on the Brooklyn Rail's website.
The book is available through Sternberg Press.

Available Online

2011-05-04T03:16:00.000-07:00

My essay on the exhibition "Matts Leiderstam. Grand Tour," which was selected as one of the top eight, winning submissions in the Grazer Kunstverein's recent "Exhibition-Review Contest," is now available online.

The essay is planned for publication along with the two other winning submissions that focused on Matts Leiderstam's exhibition in a catalogue forthcoming from the Grazer Kunstverein and Vice Versa, Berlin.

More details to follow.

It is possible.

2011-04-29T03:32:00.000-07:00

"The figures move--for it is possible in a work of art--in total stillness."

Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years

"Into the 'Merzbau': A Melodrama"

2011-04-20T02:55:00.000-07:00

Here's a raw journal entry that was picked up by the Hannover City Zeitung:

Wie sieht der New Yorker Kunstkritiker John Beeson den Merzbau von Kurt Schwitters?
Obwohl Schwitters gerade im Princeton University Art Museum New Jersey mit einer Reise-Version des Merz-Baus zu sehen ist (bis 26. Juni,), also quasi "um die Ecke" für John, hatte sich Beeson vor einiger Zeit ein Original-Bild machen wollen und reiste dazu nach Hannover. Gleichzeitig als mein Oster-Tipp zu verstehen, mal wieder das Sprengel-Museum zu besuchen. ip

"Here you are" mit seinen Impressionen:

"It took me a long while to come to it; I simply didn’t know what to think at first. Of course, I’d never seen anything like it before, and it didn’t make any sense. The project of the “Merzbau” was, more or less, without sense. I began to think of it as one of his “Merzbilder” (or “Materialbilder”), which Schwitters had simply expanded into space. That was easy enough to accept because a single, still vantage into the room could be embraced in much the same way as a picture. Viewing the room from one point of perspective bounded the actual variance in depth into the limits of my field of vision, into the limits of two dimensions. However, simply to move, as one is naturally want to do within a space, especially one so peculiar and with so much to see, was to take the fragile sense of normalcy in the space as well as any impression of having restrained the spatial chaos and to then throw it off its axis. Besides the construction causing intense spatial confusion -- not even to specify the architectural confusion it caused, which was complete -- when I lowered the purely formal lens with which I was viewing the structure and realized (or rather, remembered) that it existed in combination with what could be called living -- that people lived in and around it -- it was as if my own conception of normalcy and possibility were a thin sheet of glass smashed by a sharpened metal hammer and the alarm lying behind had been violently pulled. With the lights coming on and off to imitate the lighting of the construction in day and night, and staring either into reflections of the construction or my own face in clandestinely placed mirrors, I felt as if in a haunted house as had never before existed. Truly, rather than being another feeble grasp at the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, this construction changed the laws of nature, confined a space that ultimately retained less of a relation to life than to art, generated a “Merz-Gesamtweltbild.”

In Kooperation mit dem Sprengel Museum Hannover und der Kurt und Ernst Schwitters Stiftung, Hannover, organisiert die Menil Collection die erste Museumsausstellung des Hannoverschen Merz-Künstlers Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) in den USA seit 25 Jahren, – seit der Retrospektive 1985 im Museum of Modern Art, New York, die 1986 auch im Sprengel Museum Hannover stattfand. Kuratorin der Ausstellung Kurt Schwitters. Color and Collage ist Dr. Isabel Schulz, Leiterin des Kurt Schwitters Archivs im Sprengel Museum Hannover und Geschäftsführerin der Kurt und Ernst Schwitters Stiftung.

Originally published here.

Planned for publication

2011-04-04T07:27:00.000-07:00

Although it has not yet been officially announced, the Grazer Kunstverein has selected my essay on the exhibition "Matts Leiderstam. Grand Tour" as one of the top eight, winning submissions for the recent "Exhibition-Review Contest."

The essay is planned for publication on the museum's website as well as in a catalogue forthcoming from the Grazer Kunstverein and Vice Versa, Berlin. Details to follow.

New York Conversations is a text film.

2011-04-04T06:32:00.000-07:00

Film still, "New York Conversations," 2010. 64 minutes, 16mm-to-video.

At the risk of making an assumption, I'd like to point out what looks like a fundamental similarity between Anton Vidokle's "text film" entitled "New York Conversations" and the film aspect of "Critical Conditions." In any case, the combination of text and moving image as a means of activating the exchange of information in conversation is a promising strategy.

Still from "Critical Conditions at Hermes und der Pfau," 2010.

spike ART QUARTERLY: Matthew Brannon at Portikus, Frankfurt am Main

2011-03-24T07:00:00.000-07:00

MATTHEW BRANNON

»A question answered with a quote«

Portikus, Frankfurt am Main

29.1.–3.4.2011

Just inside the entrance to the single, lofty gallery of Portikus, a multicolored letterpress print entitled Regrets Only (2008) introduces several tendencies in Matthew Brannon’s repertoire: Hanging down from the top of the page are two ghostly legs – below, an overturned champagne bottle, a radio, and the line of text: »Not another word.« An implicit reference to suicide is a fitting introduction to this exhibition, which, with a forked tongue-in-cheek, often smuggles harsh language and macabre subject matter in the form of charmingly illustrative imagery.

...

Read the full review in issue 27 of spike ART QUARTERLY.

For more on the exhibition, visit Portikus's website.

déja vu

2011-03-10T08:30:00.000-08:00

In Bande à part: "... that fabled bird of Indian legend which is born without feet, and thus can never alight."

In Days of Being Wild: "I've heard that there's a kind of bird without legs that can only fly and fly, and sleep in the wind when it is tired. The bird only lands once in its life... that's when it dies." And... "I used to think there was a kind of bird that, once born, would keep flying until death. The fact is that the bird hasn't gone anywhere. It was dead from the beginning."

Also in 2046...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avalerion

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martlet

And, what was that mythical bird mentioned by Bolaño? In which book was it? ...was it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simurgh

The Light of Day: "On Art Seen In New York Now"

2011-02-19T08:57:00.000-08:00

Below, you'll find the introductory section to a semi-experimental, critical essay that I developed together with Andrea Neustein, a New York-based writer and curator, during late 2009 and early 2010.

In its form and content, the essay took inspiration from the contemporary cultural and technological landscape; months of open-ended discussions turned into a considered experimentation with Google Wave, which was subsequently developed during months of continued conversations over Skype.

The essay itself was left in a state of unfinish; however, I still hold out hope that it will find its way into publication in a physical format that will also reflect its original energy and production process. Please don't hesitate to contact me if you're interested in seeing or reading more, or if you'd like to help us finally realize the project.

SENT BY MAIL at Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin

2011-02-01T13:34:00.000-08:00

Roman Signer, Herbstfilm, 2010. Courtesy Galerie Barbara Weiss. Photo: Jens Ziehe.

A new exhibition at Galerie Barbara Weiss proceeds from a call made to a selection of gallery and non-gallery artists, alike: contribute to a group show, but do so through the mail, not by means of a professional art delivery service. Traditionally, mail art, that subset of Conceptual art that took the postal service’s standards and practices as its inspiration and its soundboard, has abided by certain formal and thematic tendencies. However, SENT BY MAIL revises assumptions about mail art’s limitations and simultaneously comprises a compelling contemporary exhibition. In that the concept for the exhibition was a simple and honest gesture - a superficial linking of diverse artists - artists’ submissions are very personal, showing their makers caught off-balance, often grappling for familiar territory and sometimes driven to pursue new means.

There are those artists who produce within the grounds of their comfort zone, the products only having been writ small; Niele Toroni and Rebecca Morris’s small-scale abstract paintings are prime examples of this phenomenon. To an extent, so is John Miller’s work, which includes an object in imitation gold - one of the artist’s motifs. The work nevertheless evidences some methodological restructuring, as the object is collaged onto a postcard and interacts with the depicted landscape. Further still from routine, is Roman Signer’s Herbstfilm - a package displayed full of dry, autumn leaves and a small, plastic toy camera. Through the object’s abstract language and a familiarity with the artist’s production in general, viewers can find insight into the artist’s greater methodology. We don’t find a mailed video or photograph of one of Signer’s “action sculptures,” but a translation into a simpler language of his career’s investigation into film, performance, site and humor. On the contrary, in the case of Gitte Villesen and Deimantas Narkevicius, mailed videos are exactly what we find; perhaps chosen for their mail-ready form, these videos appear to be otherwise thematically unrelated to the show’s subject.

Most enlightening about this exhibition is not its proof of what artists can fit into the mail today, but, conceptually, how they have an expanded concept of what art is, how it can relate to the mail and what it can continue to express, even following systematic reduction. The videos of Villesen and Narkevicius highlight the increased mobility of information allowed by technological development. Heike Baranowsky’s thirty-six part sound work - recordings of the artist’s physical movement - which was mailed in weekly, four-CD installments, does the same with sound; moreover, like Toroni’s painting, it stands as evidence that space exists for process within mail art. What is more, in one of the most animated works in the exhibition, an unaddressed letter composed with word processing by Mai-Thu Perret finds space for poetry of a kind not fully absorbed into the nevertheless literarily experimental art of the 60s and 70s. Narrative, on the other hand, is not as present as would be expected, given the communicative potential of mail. Then, although Waszem Kahn’s curious work Pins and Pounds - comprising a plastic bag of torn pound-note pieces hanging next to a board with pieces from similar type notes pinned together - treats the relationship of part-to-whole, only Raoul De Keyser’s section of a silkscreened work is truly an excerpt, relating both to the literary and the logistical. In their works, Barbara Steppe, Boris Mikhailov, and William Engelen invoke expandability, refuting the logistic limitations seemingly dictated by the mail. Surprise, finally, anticipation and concealment, clear connotations for traditional “snail” mail, are captured by the ultimately understated work of Monika Baer, wherein the buyer of her lone, hanging key also purchases an unknown work on paper housed in a corresponding post office box.

All in all, the prompt - for contributions to be sent by traditional mail - challenged artists to exercise a poetic economy of means that not all were capable of pulling off with finesse. Those who resorted to activity within their comfort zone should be judged on the relative value of their production by reduced means - some of whom, naturally, were successful. On the other hand, it was the artists who offered some new proposition with their contribution who succeeded, more often than not, in expressing an intelligent sensitivity to a challenging and clearly unresolved historical possibility.

Translated by Bradley Alexander, Moritz Drung, and Daniel Herleth

Originally published as "SENT BY MAIL in der Galerie Barbara Weiss" on Kunst-Blog.

"Discourse in a State of Unfinish" for LET'S ART - Ein Jahr Pedro Wirz

2011-01-09T08:25:00.000-08:00

New from artist Pedro Wirz, editor Lucia Elena Prusa, and publisher Edition Taube

Discourse in a State of Unfinish:
New Balance and Unfinished Business at Hermes und der Pfau

The idea for New Balance and Unfinished Business was beautiful in its simplicity: an opening-up affected by a quiet collision of diverse elements. What was the exhibition? What wasn’t it - a physical arrangement of art objects in a traditional gallery space - video, sculpture, photography, text - as well as a series of events - a traditional opening celebration, a screening of an interview between those behind the project followed by an open forum for critique, an evening to hang out, twenty-four hours spent screening the newest movie releases, and a dinner with friends and peers to come together and celebrate. We thought we’d crash into the place, occupy it, and break up the standard way of doing things.

In large part, New Balance and Unfinished Business constructed a metalanguage that spoke to institutional critique but nevertheless allowed objects and performances to speak for themselves - as loudly or as quietly as we saw fit. And, really, what says more about the intimate environment of the project space Hermes und der Pfau and the experience of us three, twenty-something art students than hanging out and experimenting in whatever ways we were compelled to?

In fact, none of the three of us had ever worked together before, and we came to do this project only over the course of time. Confusing as it was for everyone, the situation allowed all three of us to explore the different dimensions of our practices. Each of us contains some capacity of a curator (performative or traditional) and critic (professional, effective, or of institutions) as well as artist (professional or recreational).

The exhibition of physical artworks actually comprised two different selections of works. The work was only from Pedro and Manuel, and it reflected this early concept of a competition between the two of them. We got a hold of an Eiermann table, on top of which one of the two would put physical works, as well as a nice, big monitor, where the other would show a video. Halfway through the exhibition, they switched places and installed new works.

What was the work actually like? I’m not sure if it’s even worth addressing all of the works shown because of the wild variety of media, subjects, and styles - from experimental video with sculptures of naked bodies and some acting - basically a documented performance - to photoshopped images of sculptural prototypes to found objects and formal exercises in sculpture and installation. The work included a fair amount of experimentation, as did its installation in the room. But, that’s no surprise; the guys were developing their ideas, aesthetics, and attitudes. It wasn’t perfect, but that wasn’t the point.

There was a fair amount of participation in the first event, Critical Conditions, where much of the dialogue focused on themes of organization/disorganization and success/failure. About a week later we threw Hanging Out at Hermes und der Pfau. It was a damn shame that Pedro couldn’t make it that night, but, hey, that’s life. We all came back together to throw a dinner party a week or so later, and Pedro slaved over the stove in the downstairs space to make one hell of a meal. And, 24h Kino was crazy. We watched some really shitty movies, but this guy Jakob hung out with us, and we took some breaks - me to go see Elmar spin down the street and the other guys to check out this house party. I slept for a while early in the morning during one of the worst movies, but I swear my eyes still played tricks on me the next day. I wasn’t quite sure what we’d just done, but I knew that it was something special to treat a gallery like a living room.

There was definitely some pretty hardcore institutional critique manifest in the project. Manuel’s textual pastiche Institutional Performance addressed the subject pretty much directly. My interview/video/public discussion tried to open the whole thing up as wide as possible - critically reflecting on the foundations as well as the manifestations of the project and bringing the exhibition audience into that conversation with us. In the dialogue between the three of us that is still ongoing, is Manuel right in saying that the exhibition was disjointed and self-indulgent? Yes. Was this fundamental to the design? Yes. Did we reserve the right to be critical of any and all of the circumstances? You’re goddamn right.

In the end, here’s how I see it - and, really, that’s all I’ve got: we made choices, knowing full well that they would carry consequences. In a way, it’s a complete comment on art production. Incorporated into this project is the inevitable event of successes being accompanied by failures. And, the so-called critical metalanguage embraced the reality of both. I can’t avoid my own perpetual tendency towards honesty, and, so, I admit that New Balance and Unfinished Business fully held experiment, accident, and diversion at its foundation. In doing so, it thoroughly incorporated any and all of its multiple dimensions within the bounds of a single, teetering project of daring proportions and an ultimately fated nature.

John Beeson

New photos of the exhibition and the Critical Conditions event:

Curated Sculpture #2 - John Beeson: "... CONTINUES TO HAVE ITS INFLUENCE..."

2010-12-14T12:23:00.001-08:00

Featured in Regionale - The Village Cry at Kunsthalle Basel, CH

28. November 2010 - 02. January 2011

For the second in his series of Curated Sculpture works, artist Pedro Wirz has invited critic and curator John Beeson to produce an exhibition of texts to be mounted on a sculptural work designed by Luiz Albisser. The exhibition title references the seventh issue of The Village Cry, which contains a page header reading, “BAUHAUS CONTINUES TO HAVE ITS INFLUENCE…” The somewhat awkward language used in The Village Cry nevertheless makes a resounding statement about the arts: at every stage in the life of an artwork, it carries with it both the evidence of its own inspiration and the potential to influence future works.

Of longstanding interest to the curator, this subject is perhaps no better exemplified than by the personal library of young Jorge Luis Borges, which is described in the author's short story “The Other” (“El Otro”), from 1975. In this peculiar story, Borges recounts an encounter and conversation that he - as a man of seventy, sitting along the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts - had with himself - though the other Borges was nineteen and sitting beside the Rhône in Geneva, Switzerland. In an attempt to convince the young man that Borges was in fact him at a later time and in another place, the older Borges described the collection of books that could be found in the younger man’s wardrobe closet.

Compiled with as much accuracy as possible - in regards to specific translations, editions, and publication dates - and included here in the exhibition … CONTINUES TO HAVE ITS INFLUENCE…, the eight books in this collection, the library of Borges' formative influences, serves to evidence two concepts simultaneously: the incredible network of influence (often manifest as reference) that moves through the oeuvre of Borges and also the metaphysical power of art to create false realities and recreate realities. What could be considered the secondary sources contained in the exhibition - excerpts from magazines, literary works, reproductions of photographs, and miscellanea - serve to broaden the context by which this conception of influence and that of metaphysics can be understood. More than mere references to Borges and his world, these materials reflect the fluid passage of a metaphysical (or metafictional) tradition in art, irrespective of time.

Including:

A) Borges' Library:

i) The Arabian Nights' Entertainment, Edward William Lane, trans.

ii) Thesaurus poeticus linguae latinae, Louis-Marie Quicherat

iii) Germania, Thomas Gordon, trans.

iv) Don Quixote, Garnier Hermanos, pub.

v) Tablas de Sangre, José Rivera Indarte

vi) Sartor Resartus, Sir Thomas Carlyle

vii) Journal Intime, Henri-Fréderic Amiel

[(viii) Sexual Customs of the Balkans, Unknown]

B) Magazines

i) Kaleidoscope, Fall 2010: Issue 8

ii) Artforum, Summer 2010: The Museum Revisited, featuring "André Malraux selecting photographs for Le Musée Imaginaire"

C) Excerpts

i) from "The Other," Jorge Luis Borges

ii) from By Night in Chile, Roberto Bolaño

iii) from "The Part About the Crimes," 2666, Roberto Bolaño

iv) from an undated interview, Jorge Luis Borges

v) from "Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote," Jorge Luis Borges

For more information on the exhibition, please visit: http://www.kunsthallebasel.ch/ausstellungen?lang=en.

For more information on the work of Pedro Wirz, please visit: https://sites.google.com/a/pedrowirz.com/art/.

And, check out the new monograph Let's Art - Ein Jahr Pedro Wirz, from editor Lucia Elena Prusa and publisher Edition Taube, featuring my essay "Discourse in a State of Unfinish."

spike ART QUARTERLY: Gabriel Kuri at the Bielefelder Kunstverein

2010-10-05T08:09:00.000-07:00

GABRIEL KURI

"Join the Dots and Make a Point"

Bielefelder Kunstverein

4.9.-1.11.2010

The four new groups of work by Mexican artist Gabriel Kuri (*1970) presented in the exhibition Join the Dots and Make a Point – the artist’s first in a German institution – depend on the logic of dialogue. Instead of finding coherent statements expressed in individual sculptures and installations, viewers find the means and a forum for constant reevaluation in the exhibition as a whole, embodied in the artist’s use of disparate materials and subtle sculptural gestures.

...

Read the full review in issue 25 of spike ART QUARTERLY.

For more on the exhibition, visit the Bielefelder Kunstverein website.

Je me démande, M. Brecht

2010-09-23T03:31:00.000-07:00

Dans certaines situations, nous devons nous attendre à obtenir plus d'une réponse, d'une réaction, d'une manière d'agir, nous devons nous attendre à un oui et à un non, les deux devant être relativement fondés, paraître motivés.

Thank you

2010-09-14T12:46:00.000-07:00

"I don’t know how he executed several graphite works from 1986 that consist of little more than tangles of looping scribbles." (Holland Carter, New York Times review of Lines Which Do Not Exist)

Several Degrees of Separation

2010-09-14T12:30:00.000-07:00

His take — that the young poet was an eager communicator even as he was just discovering what he wanted to say — applies to his own path.

Site Unseen: The Chapman Brothers at Cabaret Voltaire

2010-09-04T04:19:00.000-07:00

(Source)

Wouldn’t it just be fitting for an art movement hell-bent on undermining all the principles that its contemporary public held sacred to be killed off by its own progeny in the very place where that art movement was born? But, in a line that sounds like it comes from a second-rate horror film crossover: how exactly do you kill an art movement?

In fact you can’t. And, the Chapman brothers should know as much. Art movements only die by natural causes - such as when their aesthetic or conceptual aims have lost relevance, when their members either disband or cease to make art in the same way, or when history throws a grenade in the path lying ahead. Any attempt to kill an art movement only rightly can be conceived as an indication that the aesthetic or conceptual structures of the given type of art remain relevant to the would-be assassin, and, by extension, the field of contemporary art. Postmodernism in art was conceived of as taking one of two possible forms: either a resistant one - the preferred path, which one could think of here as the Chapman brothers having resisted the temptation to respond to Dadaism’s continued relevance - or a reactionary one. (See: Hal Foster, The Anti-Aesthetic) Clearly, the Champan brothers couldn’t resist Dadaism’s lingering provocation.

Let us not forget another moment in art history when an artist confronted one of his forefathers head-on: when, in 1953, Robert Rauschenberg asked for a drawing from Willem de Kooning, and, upon receipt, the former spent the next month or more erasing de Kooning’s drawing. Leo Steinberg has taught us that Rauschenberg’s piece “Erased de Kooning” was more than a gesture (Dadaistic, as it would have been), and that it was more than simply an Oedipal act. Surely, the work was, in a way, an attempt by Rauschenberg to exorcise himself from de Kooning’s influence and, moreover, from the immutability of de Kooning’s great, even masterful, handiwork. However, Rauschenberg’s activity of laboriously erasing de Kooning’s marks brought the two artists onto parallel (though technically and conceptually opposing) paths; for, Rauschenberg was literally retracing de Kooning’s steps, except his labor was destructive rather than constructive.

Although one is initially drawn to ask how the Chapman brothers thought they could kill Dadaism and why the artists thought that they could do so by creating a series of works in the same vein as their victim - collage - it is clear that the artists have done much the same as Rauschenberg; the Chapman brothers are taking part in artistic practices invented by the Dadaists, and they are doing so with the sharpened dagger of their iconoclastic agenda hidden up their sleeve.

(Source)

When it comes to iconoclasm, what better definition is there than a physical attack on a historical work of art - the type of object that is painstakingly cared for by institutions, such as museums, which exist more or less to represent the public interest? Believe it or not, the Chapman brothers have gone and painted over a historical work. The gesture comes off as being utterly daring, even delinquent. The Chapman brothers have been producing works of this kind since 2008; they have already purchased and painted their own details on top of works (though, this is not to say “masterpieces”) by Goya, Hogarth, and Hitler. At first, it’s hard to believe that the reworked painting now at Cabaret Voltaire, Cavalry (1507) by Breughel the Younger, is the real thing. In fact it is, and the bottom line is that there’s no rule against it. Their reworking - just like erasure - has destroyed (or, rather, taken the place of, since one can assume that it will never be removed) the obscured elements of the painting.

Now, if their project had involved painting over Jean (Hans) Arp’s Portrait of Tristan Tzara or Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, that would have been the logical way to mount this attack on Dada. Instead, the artists have produced a work that is very much in line with the logic of Dadaism. One can imagine that the Dadaists would applaud the Chapman brothers and see in this work an aspect of the project that they, the Dadaists, conceived.

In the end, the Chapman brothers have once again proven themselves to be so stubbornly iconoclastic that it’s not possible to conceive of their exhibition Die Dada Die as a real attempt on the art movement’s life. Rather, the show would seem to be a sign of the frustratingly unfinished business still standing between contemporary art and Dadaism. However, this is no revelation, given the more than apparent evidence seen in the forms of contemporary art. If the exhibition is, in fact, a reflection of the continued prominence of Dadaistic tendencies in contemporary production, at least it could be said that Die Dada Die is a unique and thus interesting reflection on the dialogue.

Regardless of how earnestly the writing for the exhibition may say so, Dadaism - like all historical art movements - is not in a state of conflict, and it cannot be fought with. Dadaism now comprises only its history as a series of events and the documents that relate to its existence. Separate from itself, it is survived by the influence that its memory holds over contemporary art and by the works in its artistic lineage. While Die Dada Die at Cabaret Voltaire may not be the scene of a crime or a theoretically failed artistic project, it is, nevertheless, a good excuse to indulge in Dadaistic practices without being condemned for being derivative.

R.I.P. Artlog.com.

on punctuality

2010-08-31T14:21:00.000-07:00

One last comment and then I'll do my best to abandon the concept of the archive with all its theoretical baggage: since an archive is constructed for the sake of posterity, looking back from a point in the future, does the lapse between moment of production and moment of documentation have any relevance whatsoever? The fact is, lapses in updating this archive are dually destructive - as I'm sure any blogger would agree. Once it's been too long since the last post, the next one becomes harder to write and feels like it should contain something of an apologia. A blog intended to be read (and regularly) requires care on a schedule. Are my own hesitations, then, evidence that I expect this archive to be read? To whom do I think I owe regularity?

on intentions

2010-08-31T14:04:00.000-07:00

This blog was initially intended as an archive of my work, easily accessible for reference. Over time I came to view it as something else. The redundancy of compiling references motivated me to provide the blog with its own life and yet regulate that development, in a way reflecting the belief that there could be such thing as a partially-animated archive. For one reason or another, my conviction for compiling references dwindled and then died altogether, as did my motivation to post original content. My archive has remained elsewhere active, though, since the pieces that I have written for what is now a variety of platforms are privately documented. Perhaps more interestingly, since the writing that I have done that has found it onto online platforms (and my critical writing has, so far, only been published online) remains fully accessible and archived in those domains, the redundancy of referencing my own writing is perfectly poignant.

Guideline

2010-08-27T07:43:00.000-07:00

"...the art historian’s job is to place boundaries on possible interpretations as much as it is to reveal new possibilities."

Rainer Ganahl: Art in Context

2010-08-18T15:27:00.000-07:00

Since the late 1980s, Rainer Ganahl has frequently exhibited his work in solo and group shows around the world; he has been included in biennials from Moscow to Shanghai, has shown in the Arsenale in Venice and as a representative in the Austrian Pavilion, and recently has opened a series of solo exhibitions in museums around Europe. He speaks with John Beeson about context, form, and the benefits of biking.

Read the full review on BOMBlog.

Rundgang 2010, ABK-Stuttgart, Part II

2010-07-23T03:50:00.000-07:00

Untitled, in collaboration with Daniel Herleth

Detail.

Rundgang 2010, ABK-Stuttgart, Part I

2010-07-23T03:38:00.000-07:00

bei Rainer Ganahl

Three-color monotype with pencil and eraser.

Photo-print of a photograph of a two-color monotype with pencil and eraser.

Collage-Assemblage-Mixed media, from a series of collaborations with David Goodman.

Work at the Forgotten Bar Project, Berlin

2010-06-26T03:52:00.000-07:00

Chalk on the wall.

mit dem Klasse von Rainer Ganahl

Essay for Making:History at Weingrüll, Karlsruhe

2010-06-18T16:51:00.000-07:00

Lost and Found

Weingrüll/John Doe Projects is pleased to announce its next exhibition, Making:History, which will feature the work of Jong-Hyun Park and Bradley Alexander.

In the physical traces of a life lived that cover a simple, old chair – scars, scratches, breaks, and bumps Jong-Hyun Park sees something lost – a use, a user, a relationship, a “history.” Like any residue, these marks often give no indication of the person, the environment, or the moment in which the event occured which caused them. But, manifest in these traces that hold onto their story like a secret are the romance and practicality that are a part of any object with personal significance. Park could be said to have a phenomenological approach to the appearance of his subjects; he is congnizant of his inability to read the history of these objects in their various traces, and perhaps he has no real interest in the specifics. Instead, through a material-conceptual process, Park is able to make art objects that abstractly present his sculptor’s attitude towards history in the same way that these traces evidence their cause.

Park, who has trained for years to develop his masterful control over ceramics, engages the material to multiple conceptual ends; the high level of control and extreme material preciousness of ceramics serve to bolster in reality the increase in signficance that the artist pursues symbolically by the use of casting. That Park goes beyond the simple logic of casting to create effectively trompe l’oeil spectors of his subjects can be seen as an indicator of his affinity for traditional sculpture as well as his commitment to the viewer’s intense and complex experience with his works. The fact that individual works are exhibited in either of two ways – one-of-a-kind or one-in-a-series – corresponds to the logic of moulding and subsequently the notions of originality versus seriality that relate to various traditional sculptural materials.

In the contemporary disposition for constant material replacement, Park envisions peoples’ propensity to replace their personal histories. So, rather than presenting new materials, which are often selected and purchased by consumers because of their ability to superficially define a person, Park creates anew what is old and neglected. The artist admits to sharing this contemporary habit for consumption in his normal life, and there is a poetry in his doing what is unnatural in order to illustrate his artistic interest. Neither nostalgia nor a glass-half-empty pessimism motivate this recapturing of what is lost, but rather a sculptor’s logic. In terms of their function, the motifs of chair, hammer, and clothes hanger in Park’s works relate to the long tradition of still life. Here, however, these decaying forms are not indications of mortality; they are instead a physical presence of something lost – again, not a mask, but, effectively, an object suggesting its own disappearance.

Like Park, Bradley Alexander is a sculptor’s sculptor. The logic of his sculptures are based on the logic underlying every element, both formal and conceptual, both the composite materials and the subject matter. Like a puzzle, each piece has its own coherent identity, but, pieced together to reveal a bigger picture, they show that their significance is structurally coterminous with the meaning of the whole. These sculptures, in their playfulness, hint at a formal absurdity where there nevertheless is none. They are playful, clearly, but even though they appear freely constructed, integrated into their freedom is an earnestness that pumps through every vein of the works.

Alexander, too, is making works that relate to a specific history while simultaneously constructing another. The artist, following his research into his family history, functions as the pivot in an arm of artistic production. In another way, he has digested specifics – names, biographies, dates, and places – and has produced a body of work that stands before the viewer as abstractions of this history. Where they can be viewed as critical reflections is in their portrayal of the parties involved and in their mimicking of how history creates evidence.

In a way, Adam Gimbel, the artist’s great-great-great-grandfather, who serves as a focal point in this field of subject matter (Brad being the other), may be for the viewer like a character in a series of literary vignettes. Although this individual has personal resonance for the artist, Gimbel, for us, can only be the reason motivating Alexander’s artistic decisions – his invocation of fur, metal, and trade as subjects, since 90% of the Jewish population in Biedesheim, Germany dealt in these sectors; his use of materials with a specifically commercial identity, since Gimbel owned a department store; and the Do-It-Yourself aesthetic characterizing the works altogether, since Gimbel’s German obituary described him as the epitome of a “self-made man.”

At the same time that Alexander’s works beg the question of what we can know about history, the reality of artistic production begs the question of what we can know about Alexander and the history that he possesses the knowledge of, since the level of his absorbtion and ongoing research into this history cannot be completely evidenced by these artworks. As an artist that came to Germany out of an interest in his own history and an interest in the country’s artistic present, he now thoughtfully shows how, though it is possible to come to terms with history and tragedy, what has been lost cannot ever be completely remembered.

For more information visit Weingrüll (John Doe Projects).

Reflection on a Poor Collector as part of The Expanded Space

2010-06-16T15:38:00.000-07:00

On June 16th, 2010, I read aloud from Confessions of a Poor Collector, a text by Eugene M. Schwartz, at Nicholas Krupp Contemporary Art in Basel, CH as part of The Expanded Space: 1. Internationales Symposium über das Sammeln der Künste, jointly organized by the curatorial collectives The Forever Ending Story (Basel, CH) and Museum of Art & Ideas (Hamburg, DE).

For more information visit The Forever Ending Story.

"Does the angle between two walls have a happy ending?" at Federica Schiavo Gallery

2010-06-14T15:30:00.000-07:00

The most recent exhibition at Federica Schiavo Gallery in Rome, a group show entitled ‘Does the angle between two walls have a happy ending?’ sought a variety of meanings in works that reflected mostly on modern architecture but also on design and art history. A pretty and thoughtfully arranged show, it nevertheless communicated a formal comprehension of modernist forms to a greater extent than it conveyed its self-proclaimed conceptions of political, social, and ideological content.

Read the full review on Artvehicle.

Stephen Willats at Victoria Miro

2010-06-09T15:20:00.000-07:00

THE WORLD AS IT IS AND THE WORLD AS IT COULD BE, an exhibition of new work by British conceptual artist Stephen Willats, now occupies the first-floor gallery of Victoria Miro in London. Integrating bold graphics with flares of text, Willats’ mostly two-dimensional works address the world’s harsh realities and utter banalities with an even, theoretical attention.

Read the full review on BOMBlog.

Hardcore Décor / / / / / Installation Views

2010-05-12T11:27:00.001-07:00

Hardcore Décor

Julien Viala, Florian Klette, Tae-kyun Kim

Curated by John Beeson

Cumulus by Julien Viala

Plaster, Styrofoam, Fleess Tapette, Paint

Cumulus (detail) by Julien Viala

Trace (left) by Julien Viala

Plaster, Styrofoam, Graphite

One's Audience (right) by Florian Klette

MDF, Paint, Carpet, Crystal

One's Audience (detail) by Florian Klette

The Offer (preparation for a performance) by Florian Klette

Wellplatten, Styrofoam, Screws, Cake

Sign One by Tae-kyun Kim

Plaster, Metal, Plastic

Sign Two by Tae-kyun Kim

Plaster, Plastic

(Not pictured: Sign Three by Tae-kyun Kim, 60x80 cm Photoprint)

Hardcore Décor / / / / / Julien Viala, Florian Klette, Tae-kyun Kim

2010-05-01T15:04:00.000-07:00

Hardcore Décor
Julien Viala, Florian Klette, Tae-kyun Kim
Curated by John Beeson

Opening: Wednesday, 05.05.2010 at 19.30
Import / Export, Stoltzestrasse 11, 60311 Frankfurt / Main
06.05 - 03.06.2010

In the exhibition “Hardcore Décor,” an aesthetic Baroque rendered in
plaster and plastic will draw the viewer in and over the top. As oil
in water, the physical character of the works separates from their
philosophical meanings, and yet, altogether, the result is a coherent
environment. By our recipe, adding enough flour will make the art
thick enough to stick to the wall, to sit on a pedestal, or be solid
enough to chew. “Hardcore Décor” will feature entirely new work by
three students currently enrolled at the Staatliche Akademie der
Bildenden Künste Stuttgart – Florian Klette, Tae-kyun Kim, and Julien
Viala. John Beeson, who is currently a guest student at the academy,
will curate the exhibition.

Using white plaster forms and hand-made pink wallpaper, Julien Viala
will produce an installation that will stretch through multiple
sections of the gallery space, setting the aesthetic tone of the
exhibition and acting as a thread unifying the space and the works of
the other artists. Florian Klette will contribute two performative
sculptures to this exhibition. One is addressed to visitors at the
opening celebration. Another, which is designed to invite interaction,
will remain throughout the duration of the exhibition. Finally,
Tae-kyun Kim will present a selection of photographs as well as a
group of sculptural works, which in their purity and their drama will
occupy the gallery as marbles in the apartments of the Palace of
Versailles.

With a full-on Baroque aesthetic that mirrors their ironic attitude
regarding earnestness in art today – with such manifestations as
conventional materials and methods of construction, displays of
traditional beauty, dry intellectualism, self-seriousness, and
outright positivism – the artists will show how sarcasm is a condition
that continues to afflict the roots of contemporary art production.
For, when the masses are riddled by apathy, consuming energy drinks
while sitting and watching extreme sports is the closest that many
people come to experiencing heroism. And, so, the artists’ aspiration
is to reflect the overindulgence of today through art that is both
sweet and snide.

“Harcore Décor” represents one half of an exchange occurring between
the Kunstakademie and off-space communities of Stuttgart and Frankfurt
am Main.

Julien Viala (*1978 in Munich) was raised in Paris, France. From 2004
to 2007 he studied at the Alanus University of Arts in Bonn with
Professor Jochen Breme. In 2007 Julien took part in the exhibition
“untitled.” at Künstlerforum Bonn. Now at the ABK-Stuttgart, he is
enrolled in the class of Professor Udo Koch. In 2009 Viala had the
solo exhibition entitled “On the verge between time and space” at
Galerie Sebastianskapelle e.V. in Ulm. He was also selected to take
part in the exhibition “Übermorgenkünstler” at the Heidelberger
Kunstverein.

Florian Klette (*1982 in Karlsruhe) is a Stuttgart-based artist. Since
2006 he has studied with Christian Jankowski at the ABK-Stuttgart. In
2007 he participated in “Institute for Social Research,” a
collaborative project between students from the California College of
Arts, San Francisco and the ABK-Stuttgart. Klette’s work has been
exhibited at the Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart; the
Heidelberger Kunstverein; Interventionsraum, Stuttgart; and Invisible
Exports, New York.

Tae-kyun Kim (*1975) was born in Busan, South Korea. He received his
B.F.A. from Dong-A University. He is currently enrolled in the class
of Professor Udo Koch at the ABK-Stuttgart. He received the first
prize and a commission for a public work through the Landesgartenschau
Villingen-Schwenningen as well as the second prize for the
Kunstprojekt Klett-Passage in the Hauptbahnhof in Stuttgart. Kim has
recently participated in the exhibitions “Urbane Visionen Stuttgart”
in the Gustav-Siegle-Haus and “(Z)ART,” which was curated by Jan Hoet,
at Galerie ABTART.

John Beeson (*1986) is from New York City. He will be living in
Stuttgart through July 2010, while he is enrolled in the class of
Rainer Ganahl. John is the author of the column “Sight Mapping” for
BOMB Magazine’s BOMBlog. He has studied art history at Paris IV, La
Sorbonne and Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where he graduated
with a B.A. in 2009. Recently, John has worked on the exhibitions
“Fortress to Solitude: The Portrait Show” with Guillermo Creus in
Brooklyn, NY, “Nothing But at Suitcase” at Raum zur Kunst in Basel,
CH, and “New Balance & Unfinished Business” with Manuel Goliath and
Pedro Wirz at Hermes und der Pfau in Stuttgart.

Critical Conditions, an event as part of New Balance & Unfinished Business at Hermes und der Pfau

2010-04-21T19:36:00.000-07:00

Critical Conditions at New Balance & Unfinished Business, Part One from John Beeson on Vimeo.

Critical Conditions at New Balance & Unfinished Business, Part Two from John Beeson on Vimeo.

Critical Conditions at New Balance & Unfinished Business, Part Three from John Beeson on Vimeo.

Critical Conditions at New Balance & Unfinished Business, Part Four from John Beeson on Vimeo.

Critical Conditions at New Balance & Unfinished Business, Part Five from John Beeson on Vimeo.

This post first appeared on BOMBlog.

RT @johnbeeson : http://twitter.com/bombmagazine/status/12590885181.

Short Films by Andy Price

2010-04-14T09:32:00.000-07:00

These are two videos (really one and a half) by a friend from Wesleyan University. I helped him with them back in 2007 and 2009, while we were students there.

Nothing But a Suitcase at Raum zur Kunst

2010-04-10T03:10:00.000-07:00

Title: "Nothing But a Suitcase"

Concept: This proposal concerns an exhibition project for Raum zur Kunst in Basel, CH concurrent with the exhibition "The Amazone Conversation," which will run from April 10 until April 21, 2010. Inspired by a variety of contemporary concepts including nomadism and commutability, this exhibition project will take place on two tables (or one table) in a space to be occupied by a show of paintings, sculptures, etc. curated by Manuel Scheiwiller. "Nothing But a Suitcase" will be organized by John Beeson in Stuttgart, DE, but the curator will not travel to install the exhibition. Instead, in Stuttgart days before the opening, John will present Manuel with a suitcase containing all that is needed to create the installation. John's absence in the space relates to what is commonly referred to as "phoning-in" work - especially a curatorial effort. This absence is also the result of necessity. The project's very nature is inspired by the romantic literary trope of a character who constantly travels and carries all of his belongings in one suitcase - e.g. Archimboldi in Roberto Bolano's "2666" - as well as by Marcel Duchamp's "Boîte en Valise," which consists of a retrospective's worth of reproductions of the artist's works contained in a single suitcase.

Part One: John will find and pack a suitcase with enough clothes for himself for a one-night stay in Basel - exactly what he would have needed were he to have made the trip. In addition, the suitcase will be packed with physical works by a number of artists from Stuttgart selected by John. The suitcase will contain a bronze sculpture and a preparatory wax plate for the same sculpture by Julien Viala. (The sculpture will likely be displayed standing on top of the wax plate.) The suitcase will also contain a scroll of drawing by Brad Alexander (to be exhibited standing up and partially unraveled). It will also contain a small ceramic sculpture of a tooth carved by Jong Hyun Park. It will also contain photo-documentation of a conceptual work and reproductions of two physical works from one series by Daniel Herleth and prototypes of Erik Sturm's sculptures. Eugenie Dalland will contribute a book to the suitcase. Pedro Wirz will roll four cigarettes that are free to be taken by visitors to the gallery. The suitcase will be displayed in the middle of the table with all the works around it as a reference to the fact that everything came from the suitcase.

Part Two: Also included in the suitcase will be an envelope addressed to Manuel. This envelope will contain detailed descriptions, plans, and photographs (of the exhibition as installed by John in Stuttgart) to indicate how Parts One and Two should be installed (more or less) by Manuel in Basel. In addition, the envelope will contain images of two-dimensional works by David Goodman, Travis Fitzgerald, Chaz Ganster, Terry Conrad, Jesse Coburn, and Cameron Rowland, and written contributions by Mark Kelley, Andrew Gorin, and John Paoletti.

Part Three: The envelope will also contain a series of directions for projects to be created by artists in Basel in collaboration with John. For example, Manuel will be asked to buy a bottle of a beer and pour it out as a reference to the fact that John would have drank a beer in Basel were he present and that Manuel does not drink beer. Manuel will ask other artists and friends in Basel, who John does not know, to carry out the rest of the projects, which might include: going out and eating a cheeseburger (without any physical representation of this effort in the exhibition), thinking for two or three minutes about their experience and knowledge of Basel (where John has never been and knows nothing about), having Manuel describe John's personality and character as well as John physically to a friend, engaging one stranger in a critical discussion about the installation, etc.

Additionally: John may include some way of indicating the artist/owner of the contributions.

Finally: The exhibition project "Nothing But a Suitcase" at Raum zur Kunst should be fully documented, and all the objects contained in the suitcase should be returned in their original condition by Manuel to John in Stuttgart.

Installation View of "The Amazone Conversation" at Raum zur Kunst, Basel, CH. Curated by Manuel Scheiwiller.

More here.

New Balance & Unfinished Business: Manuel Goliath / Pedro Wirz / John Beeson at Hermes und der Pfau

2010-04-08T02:54:00.000-07:00

New Balance & Unfinished Business
Manuel Goliath / Pedro Wirz / John Beeson
08.04. – 01.05.2010, Opening 08.04.2010 at 7 pm

Critical Conditions, 15.04. at 7 pm
Hanging Out at Hermes und der Pfau, 22.04. at 7 pm
24h Kino, 24. / 25.04. from 7 pm to 7 pm
Dîner Privé (by Invitation Only), 28.04. from 8 pm

A new balance has been struck between the practices of artist, curator, critic, et cetera. While the three practitioners Manuel Goliath, Pedro Wirz, and John Beeson are not the first to cut across multiple fields, they have resolved to bring the strategy to bear with the exhibition New Balance & Unfinished Business at the project space Hermes und der Pfau.

“New Balance & Unfinished Business” draws inspiration from life’s pastimes and pleasures, the experience of relating to others, and quasi-objective reflections on quality and meaning in art. The artists’ versatile practices will be reflected here by a teetering mélange of objects and activities whose only sure quality is their relation to art. The exhibition itself will be a continuously evolving admixture of projects – at times artistic, curatorial, creative, and documentary. Over the course of the exhibition, the artists will present evidence of their past projects as well as new curatorial exercises and a changing series of their own works. Moreover, the artists invite visitors to return to the project space again and again and again during the month of April to take part in a variety of events. Neither simply performances nor festivities, these events intend to prolong and develop the viewers’ engagement.

For ‘Critical Conditions’ (15.04.2010 at 7 pm) the three artists and the co-founders of Hermes und der Pfau – Philipp Ziegler and Anne-Sofie Ruckhaberle – will reenact the conversation depicted in John Beeson’s video work. Following the combined screening and reading, the public will be invited to openly critique the exhibition.

Later in the month with ‘Hanging Out at Hermes und der Pfau’ (22.04.2010 at 7 pm), the artists will turn the project space into a place to hang out, talk, and listen to a music podcast DJ’ed by collaborators living outside of Stuttgart.

For twenty-four straight hours during ‘24h Kino’ (24.04.2010 at 7 pm until 25.04.2010 at 7:00pm), visitors to the project space will be able to watch the new releases playing in movie theaters around Stuttgart.

Finally, Hermes und der Pfau will be host to a ‘Dîner Privé’ (by invitation only).

Manuel Goliath Scheiwiller (*1984), lives and works in Basel and Stuttgart. He has studied at the Rotterdam Dance Academy, the Amsterdam Theaterschool, The School of Visual Theater in Jerusalem, and is currently enrolled at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart in the classes of Christian Jankowski and Rainer Ganahl. With Daniel Almgren Récen, he initiated “gross und stark”, a performance art platform, which has presented events in Göteborg, Amsterdam and New York City. In addition, Manuel founded Raum zur Kunst in Basel, whose inaugural exhibition will open in April 2010. Manuel recently exhibited his work “Angel Angel We Go Down” at the Melkweg in Amsterdam, and he presented the performance “Lawrence Weiner Book Sale” at On Stellar Rays Gallery in NYC. Through the invitation of Showroom and New Jerseyy, he presented the performance “The Night of the Wild Cannibals” at Kunsthalle Basel in 2009.

Pedro Wirz was born in São Paulo, Brazil in 1981. He received his Bachelor’s degree in public relations at the University of Taubaté in São Paulo. Following this, Pedro worked with a variety of different photographers, including Thomas Susemihl and Claudio Elisabetsky. Since 2007, he has lived in Basel, where he is enrolled at the Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz, Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst, Institut Kunst. He established “Wirzhaus” with Raphael Linsi and Luiz Albisser in 2007 and “Wirtshaus im Schalter” with Raphael Linsi in 2008. In 2009, he initiated the curatorial project series “The Forever Ending Story” together with Raphael Linsi, Claudio Vogt, and Tilman Schlevogt and the curatorial project series “Deux Piece” with Noëmi Denzler. Through an Erasmus exchange, he is studying at ABK-Stuttgart in the classes of Birgit Brenner and Christian Jankowski for the 2009-2010 school year. Pedro was recently selected to take part in the “1st Salon of Artists with No Gallery” in São Paulo.

John Beeson (*1986), is from New York City. He will be living in Stuttgart through July 2010, while he is enrolled at the ABK-Stuttgart in the class of Rainer Ganahl. John is the author of the column Sight Mapping for BOMB Magazine’s BOMBlog. John has worked with the curatorial departments of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Wadsworth Atheneum in Connecticut as well as at the International Print Center and Hauser & Wirth in New York. Recently, with Guillermo Creus, John curated “Fortress to Solitude: The Portrait Show” in Bushwick, New York, and he worked as a curatorial assistant on an exhibition of new media art entitled “Incidents & Accidents” at the Hogar Collection in Brooklyn, New York. He has studied printmaking and modern art history at Paris IV, La Sorbonne and Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where he graduated with a B.A. in 2009. Also in April 2010, John will curate “Nothing But a Suitcase” at Raum zur Kunst in Basel and an exhibition at Import / Export in Frankfurt.

This is a copy of the press release that I wrote for the exhibition, and in which I took part as an artist/curator.

Brad Alexander: When 1 + 1 ≠ 2

2010-03-19T14:54:00.000-07:00

INTERNATIONAL POST ROUTES, 2009. Porcelain and steel wire.

Brad Alexander, originally from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has been living in Southern Germany since graduating from Wesleyan University in 2008. Alexander is currently enrolled at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Stuttgart, which has seen Willi Baumeister and Alfred Hrdlicka as professors as well as Oskar Schlemmer, Max Ackermann, and Bernd Becher as students. Following in the trend of the New Leipzig School—made famous by Neo Rauch—and the Städelschule in Frankfurt, the ABK in Stuttgart is garnering increased attention both from within the region and from without.

In a move that has grown in popularity among a generation of American college students, Alexander targeted the scholarships available for study in Germany. During his time abroad, he has taken advantage of the opportunities to work with pioneers in the field of contemporary art. Alexander is in his second of six years at the art academy. Like so many others, he has found inspiration in a country that is rich with its own history as well as fatally tied to the rest of the world during the modern era.

John Beeson: You asked me recently what you should make, and, given that I was in New York at the time, I was pretty inundated with Gabriel Orozco. I had just gone to the exhibition at MoMA and had heard Benjamin Buchloh speak about the work. Orozco’s sculptural ideas were oftentimes dialectical in nature; they had to do with a cultural identity in relation to a greater theoretical, universal interest. For this reason, I was thinking about dialectical models in object making, such as the relationship between physicality and ephemerality, objects and non-objects.

Brad Alexander: There are certain dialectics which, for me personally, have become less interesting. One of them is this object/non-object—if you can call it a dialectic—this contrast. In this case, the dialectic exists in the approach to the object itself, how the object comes into being. And, I think my position on whether something is an object or a non-object—if you can call it the synthesis of these two—is a realization that this spectrum exists. An object can exist all the way into non-existence in art, and these non-existing objects are already a canon. Viewers understand non-objects, and they already have a place in the production of many artists.

In terms of the larger picture, the real synthesis is putting that aside and realizing that there are other issues which are perhaps more interesting in art at this point. Now, we can focus on beauty, justification, stance on precedent selection, and endlessly redefining meaning. You can use the entire spectrum of objecthood in your art making. I can make things that are non-objects, and I can just as well make things that are objects. Personally, I prefer that the work appeal to the eye somehow. It is, after all, visual art. A great thing is turning the distinctly ephemeral into a concrete object, which is something that greatly interests me.

JB: Take your recent work International Post Routes. How does this logic apply in that case?

BA: I was looking at a map online that tracked the movement and positions of all the airplanes flying above Europe in that moment—something impossible to see without radars. The ephemeral nature of the form created by their actual positions can never be repeated, even though radars can produce a schema of their relative positions. Add the fact that there are people, letters, and shipments of different things in the airplanes, and there is a continuously changing swarm of things above our heads at every moment. International Post Routes could be read as a frozen moment.

I didn’t start with an idea consciously generated by a dialectic but rather a fascination with something else. I found this non-objective idea of a swarm of information beautiful, and I attempted to create an aesthetic object out of it.

JB: So you found it interesting to try to create an object out of something immaterial? Is this a fundamental part of your artistic process – to pursue opposing logics?

BA: In this case that’s what I did. But, I don’t see the value in solely pursuing antitheses as an artistic model.

JB: Relative to you personally or in art in general?

BA: In art now. Regarding an object and how much materiality an object has, I think there are more pressing concerns in art.

JB: What next? If that method is not interesting then what may be interesting?

BA: What is important is finding the most suitable means of communicating an idea. We have so many different ways of communicating now—you can choose any one of these methods and use that in how you materialize your idea. Just choosing an established method that has worked for someone else is something a bit naive, of course. It’s not as simple as selecting a process and a precedent and trying to work with the logic of a given type of object. I think developing an attitude towards other models of decision-making redefines how we go about making our own.

JB: That’s an interesting way of looking at it—that choice is at the forefront of what’s interesting today because there are so many different choices that one could make.

BA: I think that’s one of the hardest parts about being an artist. You have to make decisions that force you to take stances on older methods.

UNTITLED (INOPERATIVE WAGON), 2009. Charred wood and steel.

JB: So, recently, I had a conversation about the popularity of the conceptual manner being taught and exercised at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. Some people seem to believe that a shift may be occurring in favor of the practices at the ABK in Karlsruhe and the ABK in Stuttgart. Do you find that the education at ABK-Stuttgart stresses a diversified approach to art?

BA: Absolutely. And, I think approaches vary widely from class to class. Someone said to me that the experience students can have in different classes could be so extremely different that it would be as if they were studying in different academies. Every professor has a different approach, which includes showing the students different styles of decision-making.

JB: Does the work that an artist makes need to highlight in some way the fact that they’re making choices and that they had a lot of different options to begin with? For example, maybe that’s part of the problem with being a traditional artist today—that, by doing so, you’re not reveling in the fact that you have so many opportunities and so many different choices.

BA: I think that artists are more and more being forced to justify themselves.

JB: In what ways?

BA: For example, one of the first questions that Peter Friedl asked me when we met recently was: “There are already so many objects existing in this world – especially in art – and what gives an artist the right to bring a new object into existence? Why should somebody do that?” Of course, that’s a really good question; it’s a really complicated question, which is nearly impossible to answer.

JB: That question, because it’s so vague, also begs the question: “Why make an object that looks like this? Because there are already so many objects that look like this.” And, that’s related to: “Why make an object that concerns itself with this question? There are already so many objects that concern themselves with this question.”

BA: There you go. That’s sort of my point before, regarding the dialectic. How do you bring that dialectic up to date? How do you make it relevant to what artists are doing now? And, I think that using the whole spectrum of the dialectic is like giving a nod to the history of the object/non-object contrast, and then going about your own business.

JB: If historical dialectics are not as interesting today as this new type of artistic activity—making choices from a vast field—then what about the existence of dualities as a model in individual works of art?

This relates to some of Orozco’s works—Black Kites, for example, which is a human skull drawn over with checkerboard patterning. Dualism is a motif or, rather, an artistic model that comes up again and again in his production of objects. He takes a given subject and complicates it with another subject, which may or may not be given. It may be patterning, or it may be a process. But, it’s this idea of one-to-one.

BA: In terms of contemporary ideas, that’s one I find very interesting—these one-to-one relationships. How can you take an object and by the addition of another layer—oftentimes a very simple layer—change the meaning of the object?

OCCIDENTALIZATION (detail), 2009. Bronze and tea.

JB: Why is the model of duality so interesting? Is it limited to dualities? Could it be tripartite relationships between subjects? Or, could it be abstract subjects?

BA: Absolutely. There’s something about this one-to-one relationship that is already so complicated in itself, and I think it’s interesting to see how many times and in how many different ways an artist can successfully make one plus one equal something other than two. The possibilities there are infinite. In terms of projects, this might be one of the more interesting projects for artists now. Although, I could be wrong.

JB: And, the idea may still apply on an individual basis. If the work of art is made by complicating two subjects, and the result is something irresolvable or paradoxical, then that’s the question that I was trying to ask initially: “Is this a particularly interesting method now?”

Just as we were discussing what’s interesting for artists today—and your response was making choices – what might be interesting for the viewing public today? What could artists do in terms of choices and art making models that would be interesting and relevant to the contemporary public?

BA: One thing would be to continue making things for people to look at, but at the same time to stop making things that people can only look at. There is a subtlety to what I mean —I would like to come into contact with artworks for whom the viewer’s experience is more closely related to the complexities of living rather than simply being a direct aesthetic and intellectual interaction. I haven’t figured out how this can be done, but I hope it develops naturally in my work rather than looking like I’m taking a stance on the matter.

This post first appeared on BOMBlog.

Bettina Lockemann. Kontaktzonen at the Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart

2010-02-25T12:12:00.000-08:00

CODE ORANGE, 2003. Series of 80 black and white photographs. All photos courtesy of the artist.

A new exhibition in the expansive Württembergischer Kunstverein in the city of Stuttgart in southeastern Germany is the first comprehensive solo show for Cologne-born artist Bettina Lockemann. Serving as a prolonged investigation of documentary technique and its aesthetic, nearly all of the numerous photographic series and several videos depict sites of the artist’s international travel. Much of the work’s significance derives from the tenuous relationship that Lockemann has to her specific European, Middle Eastern, Far Eastern, and North American destinations. Throughout the entire exhibition, the viewer is left to grapple with the persistent concern of Lockemann’s aesthetic investment and her artistic discretion.

Lockemann’s early interest in the technology of webcams takes form in a work entitled Virtuelle Stadt from 1999. For the three years preceding the work’s completion, the artist compiled an archive of webcam still images depicting a variety of locales. Through their overt lack of indentifying features in presentation, these urban views beg two questions: on their originating context given the specificity of their focus and on their value as aesthetic objects considering their hands-off approach to capturing subjects. Like the work Internationale Stadt from the same year, which intermixes street-level photos taken in New York City, Berlin, Paris, and Zurich, Virtuelle Stadt comes together to create a visual landscape with a generic topographical and cultural identity.

The photographs that comprise the series Code Orange from 2003 are more evocative than most others in the exhibition, in a large part because of their indulgent depictions of Washington D.C. and New York City on the proverbial eve of the War in Iraq. Somewhat problematically, this series plays on assumptions about the paranoiac fervor that has characterized the United States for several years. In these photographs viewers read a particular subtext given the subject matter—everything assumes a threatening character regardless of whether the activity is actually suspicious. The work appears simple for being so loaded. Rather than anticipating and subverting these paranoiac suspicions through her own discretion, Lockemann gives form to assumptions that appear to be as much hers as they are the viewers’.

CONTACT ZONE, 2008. Series of 74 black and white photographs.

Contact Zone is a series comprising photographs taken during the artist’s visits to several Japanese cities during a three-month period in 2008. The series focuses on this premise: following the closure of Japan’s borders to Westerners from 1600 to 1854, the influx of specialists in the years 1868 to 1912 built up the country’s urban infrastructure using Western architectural models. Instead of attempting to present a comprehensive document of the Japanese context—a task that any tourist would be naive to undertake—Lockemann succeeds in presenting a coherent documentation of the relationship between Eastern and Western elements in the physical landscape. Lockemann’s project serves to preserve her integrity as a photographer, since she does not presume to overstep her own capacity. The resulting photographs represent an engaging visual heterogeneity. Lockemann delivers the formal tropes that recur in series throughout the exhibition—evenly scattering trees in the field of vision; situating lines of buildings and streets off to the left or right of the vertical axis; apparently casually catching lampposts, people, and cars in the closest foreground. Contact Zone’s theme of topographic heterogeneity is present to different extents in various images in this 74-work series. Sometimes the evidence is stark and methodically captured. Other times the subject of the work is allowed to casually pale to a commanding cityscape, encroaching nature, or the quiet details of life.

Headed by co-directors Hans D. Christ and Iris Dressler, the Württembergischer Kunstverein is motivated in large part by its association of 3,000 members, a half of whom are artists. The Kunstverein model developed during the end of the 18th century—the one in Stuttgart was built in 1827. In the not-as-yet unified Germany, when the art of Stuttgart’s regional artists traveled to Munich, Nuremburg, or Hamburg to be taken in by the bourgeois during their leisure time, this was considered international art. (Learning this about the history of Kunstvereins as Hans led me on a tour around the institution in Stuttgart felt bizarre—to be speaking about pre-modern socio-political history in a contemporary art space.)

The Kunstverein is an institutional model that simply does not exist in the same way in the United States, although there seem to be similarities between the service it provides today and, for example, the New Museum in New York. For one thing, Kunstvereins do not have collections. On the other hand—in a stroke of genius self-protection preventing the type of controversy that surrounds the upcoming exhibition Skin Fruit—there is a “contract”—as Hans described it—that prevents the Kunstverein’s governing board from influencing their exhibitions or operations. The Kunstverein in Stuttgart gets 10 percent of its budget from member dues and the remainder through regional, national, and global sources of public funding.

Hans and Iris have forged a new path for the Kunstverein in the few years that they have been at the helm. The co-directors are committed to a type of networking wherein they function much as moderators to foreign artists, critics, curators, and collectors. They hold a vested interest in art from non-European and developing countries, and they conscientiously support artistic production within the originating context in an attempt to prevent the art’s assimilation. They are willing to commit resources to collaborations and the production of art outside of Germany, even with the understanding that there may not be a one-to-one manifestation of these efforts in the Kunstverein.

In the case of solo shows, the artist’s intention is the highest priority. And, while this attitude is by no means revolutionary, given that “contract” that prevents the board from influencing or preventing exhibitions, the Kunstverein is able to show art that is markedly political and regularly challenging. Before the current Bettina Lockemann exhibition, the schedule included Subversive Practices: Art Under Conditions of Political Repression, Stan Douglas. Past Imperfect, Mark Tansey, and the years-long series Expanded Media. Also significant in these dire economic times—when the Kunstverein and the Kunstlerhaus, another Stuttgart art institution, will each be forced to cut two exhibitions from their schedules—is the fact that the next exhibition, an open-call of members’ art, is to be exhibited on entirely salvaged and recycled materials and installed by a team of Kunstverein members.

This post is the first in my column on BOMBlog, entitled Sight Mapping, which is a collection of essays and conversations offering insight into the nuances of the European art system.

This post first appeared on BOMBlog.