29 October 2009
Doug Aitken in Rome
I went to Rome for a flying visit last week, for the opening of Doug Aitken’s new film installation and performance Frontier (curated by Francesco Bonami, it’s the third commission for Enel Contemporanea). I hadn’t been to the city in years, though, when I was about 20, I lived there for a while and loved it. Even so, I had forgotten precisely how weary and magnificent it is – the very air seems varnished. I went for a walk and kept getting lost; I thought I knew my way around, but was constantly disoriented. Birds (swifts? swallows? bats?) were flinging…
Categories: Art, Cities, Events
by Jennifer Higgie
| No responses 26 October 2009 As the art world has grown it has sprouted many cumbersome appendages. One of these awkward outcroppings is the hiring of public relations companies to promote biennials, museum exhibitions and other events. At best this promotional structure, which often inexplicably bypasses the institution’s own PR department, means that journalists are given more information and access to the organizers and artists in the event. At worst it gives rise to a proliferation of a kind of institutional propaganda – this can be as hands-off as a thick press kit or as full-on as a booked schedule of interviews with curators and…
Categories: Art, Cities, Events, Museums
by Christy Lange
| No responses 21 October 2009 I have come across so-called shreds – live videos of famous guitar players with the soundtrack replaced – only fairly recently, realising they have made the rounds already since 2008, but I keep laughing everytime I look at them again. These genius bits of parody have been expertly realised by Categories: Music
by Jörg Heiser
| 2 responses 13 October 2009 ‘Là où je suis n’éxiste pas’. ‘Here where I am doesn’t exist.’ It’s not a comfortable translation – I had to read it twice – but the subtitle to ‘Le Printemps de Septembre’ (Spring in September) is not intended to be a tidy, comfortable idea. It responds in part to the equally gnomic strap-line of the 2008 edition of this yearly contemporary art festival (which was also under the artistic direction of Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Geneva, director Christian Bernard): ‘Wherever I’m going, I’m already there.’ Bernard and associate curator, Jean-Max Colard, were keen to downplay the…
Categories: Art, Biennials, Cities, Events, Museums
by Jonathan Griffin
| No responses 10 October 2009 Marko Lulic has done a great, hilarious homage to a video featuring Raquel Welch from 1970 that itself is great and hilarious. In the original, the background features outdoor sculptures that were initially set up for the Mexico City 1968 Olympics. In Lulic’s version, you get to see the West-German equivalent as backdrops instead, the extremely successful public commission drop sculptures that the late Erich Hauser realised for decades. Lulic will open a Show on 10 October in Rottweil, at the Kunststiftung Erich Hauser, i.e. on site of the video; he is artist in residence there at the moment.…
Categories: Music
by Jörg Heiser
| No responses 08 October 2009 On the morning after the 60th anniversary celebration of the founding of the People’s Republic of China of October 1, I overheard a conversation among three volunteers on the street, who belonged to the community of 800,000 uniformed citizens mobilized prior and during the National Holiday to safeguard the city at every street corner. One of them had witnessed the fireworks on the official gala performance of the previous night on Tian’anmen Square and was describing in detail and excitement to the other two the changing of colors and patterns of the fireworks. I witnessed briefly the animated exchanges and…
Categories: Art, Cities, Events
by Carol Yinghua Lu
| No responses 06 October 2009 A couple of weekends ago, I visited Vilnius at the invitation of the CAC, for the opening of the Baltic triennial (which I’ll be reviewing for the January issue of the magazine so won’t go into here but I must say it was one of the the busiest openings I have ever seen). I had never been to the city before – the capital of Lithuania, the southernmost of the three Baltic states and, in the 14th century, the largest country in Europe – and found it both fascinating and depressing. Simon Rees, the Australian curator of CAC…
Categories: Art, Biennials, Cities, Events, Museums
by Jennifer Higgie
| No responses 02 October 2009 The other week I was in Stockholm, part of a bunch of curators and critics in the city for ‘sthlm.sthlm.sthlm. 72 art hours in Stockholm’, a new event organised by institutions (Moderna Museet, Magasin 3, Bonniers Konsthall, Tensta Konsthall, Index, and Iaspis, the international studio programme) and private galleries (Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Claes Nordenhake, Magnus Karlsson, Milliken) in an effort to highlight the art scene of Sweden’s capital. (I suggest to listen to Virna Lindt’s classic track Attention Stockholm – streamed online here – as a soundtrack to this write-up). I had spent a great summer in Stockholm exactly 10 years…
Categories: by Jörg Heiser
| No responses 01 October 2009 Central to last week’s Berlin art world hustle and bustle was a strange, contradictory experience of contemporary art between restraint and abundance. On the one hand, there was the ‘abc’, the art berlin contemporary show, organized by Berlin galleries (but also including galleries from other places, all in all 64) at the beautifully Modernist Akademie der Künste in Hansaviertel. It was a concentrated, clear, manageable affair, largely thanks to a simple (anti-)curatorial premise: that all of the works should be displayed on, or within the range of, an Egon Eiermann table measuring 1×2 m. The implication was also that…
Categories: Cities
by Jörg Heiser
| No responses 28 September 2009 While Germany wakes up this Monday to a new government, Berlin’s art scene – presumably – wakes up to a big hangover after a crazily busy art week in the city. When last Thursday mayor Klaus Wowereit participated in a panel discussion entitled ‘Does Berlin need a Kunsthalle?’ at Hamburger Bahnhof Museum (coinciding with myriad art events in Berlin, including the art fair, ‘art berlin contemporary’, and tonnes of gallery openings), he confirmed his intention to build one. But whether he’ll still be concerned with this question in the near future is the big question after yesterday’s general election in…
Categories: Art, Cities, Museums, News
by Jörg Heiser
| No responses 
Nouveau Vague
Virtuoso phallus shredding
Santeri Ojala from Tampere, Finland (Finland being, as we know, also home of the annual world championships of air guitar).
The big question for me is: what would be the art world equivalent to this? It’s hard to imagine since the art world is full of spoof…
Le Printemps de Septembre
Cosmic Space Dance I and II
Beijing Celebrates
Postcard from Vilnius
Attention Stockholm
Greetings from Berlin pt. 2
Greetings from Berlin pt. 1
