2008 Turner Prize Shortlist Announced
Nominees:
Runa Islam
Mark Leckey
Goshka Macuga
Cathy Wilkes
Although 1997’s shortlist - won by Gillian Wearing - comprised four female artists, Tomma Abts (who won in 2006) is the only woman to have won the prize in the last decade. The exhibition opens on 30 September 2008, returning to Tate Britain after a year at Tate Liverpool for which it coincided with the city’s stint as European capital of culture.
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by Sam Thorne on 13/05/08 | No responses | Read More
Angus Fairhurst
Like everyone whose path he had crossed, we at frieze were shocked and saddened to hear of the death of Angus Fairhurst. Angus was a funny, clever, charming man who will be much missed. As well as his work as an artist, Angus was a sensitive and elegant critic, though he wrote only occasionally.
I met Angus in 1990 when we were putting together the pilot issue of frieze. Along the way he played me a tape of ‘Gallery Connections’, the project he had produced a few months before. By placing two phones next to each…
by Matthew Slotover on 06/05/08 | No responses | Read More
Different Thinking
Earlier this year, two academics from Duke University published a paper on the power of logos. During the course of their research they had subliminally flashed the Apple and IBM logos at students, and asked them to perform a ‘visual acuity test’ in which they had to list all of the possible uses for a brick beyond building a wall. While the students never knew they’d even seen a logo, the answers given after seeing the Apple were judged to be far more creative than those given after Paul Rand’s striped IBM logotype was flashed. Now that Apple really does…
by Jennifer Kabat on 29/04/08 | No responses | Read More
Frieze Writer’s Prize 2008 Announced
The award will be judged in 2008 by Tate Triennial curator Nicolas Bourriaud, frieze co-editor Jennifer Higgie and Guardian critic Adrian Searle.
• Entrants must submit one previously unpublished 700 word review of a recent contemporary art exhibition.
• Entries must be submitted in English, but it may be a translation (this must be acknowledged).
• Entrants must be over 18 years old.
• To qualify, entrants may only previously have had a maximum of 3 pieces published in any national or regional print newspaper or magazine. Publication online does not prohibit…
by Jennifer Higgie on 28/04/08 | No responses | Read More
How Japanese is it?
101 Tokyo, a new art fair held in the Japanese capital earlier this month, has given the city’s contemporary art world a chance to scratch its collective head and ask some pertinent questions about a pocket-sized contemporary art scene Business Week recently estimated to be one-hundredth the size of London’s or New York’s.
Is there a revitalization going on in the city’s tiny art scene? Are there now collectors in Tokyo interested in buying contemporary? What cultural obstacles prevent contemporary art from flourishing in Japan? What role do foreigners play in the…
by Nick Currie on 24/04/08 | No responses | Read More
Face Off
Adrian Shaughnessy’s Cover Art By: New Music Graphics (Laurence King Publishing, 2008) begins with a jeremiad of sorts, suggesting that the book is a survey of a dying art. ‘The major labels still commission cover art, but it’s rare to find examples with any resonance or originality,’ he glumly notes.
This degrading of the role of cover art is in part a consequence of the prevalence of downloading, but downloading is only the end-point ofa process that began with the CD. Shaughnessy cites critic Paul Morley’s view that the CD was ‘a banal bastard stopgap…
by Mark Fisher on 21/04/08 | No responses | Read More
Best Before 1995 - Part 2
Over two terms, members of the Bush administration have become remarkably adept at adopting the language of relativism. In 2002 President Bush received a memo from Frank Luntz, an Oxford Ph.D. and Republican lobbyist, titled ‘The Environment: A Cleaner, Safer, Healthier America’. There he writes:
‘The scientific debate is closing [against us] but not yet closed. There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science […] Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community. Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views…
by Ronald Jones on 16/04/08 | 1 response | Read More
Manifest Destiny
In the US we like our cowboys, and the American West has always been part of our personal myth making. We like our spaces vast and our cowboys period. We elected two pretend ones as president (brush-clearing is not ranching, Dubya), and the number could easily extend to three if you count Teddy Roosevelt with his ‘walk tall and carry a big stick’ mentality. The West has always been our stick—or perhaps our carrot – and it’s been that way for more than a century now.
With their kitsch plays on national fantasies, Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Remington…
by Jennifer Kabat on 09/04/08 | No responses | Read More
Best Before 1995
The idea of cultural relativism is nothing but an excuse to violate human rights.
Shirin Ebadi, Nobel Laureate
The language of relativism projects power by raising doubt or casting uncertainty where none existed before. Its favoured targets are declarations of objective truth and ethical judgment. Relativism peaked when Susan Sontag granted the merit of fearlessness to the hijackers who brought down the World Trade Center in 2001. ‘Where is the acknowledgement,’ she asked in The New Yorker less than two weeks after the attack, ‘that this was not a ‘cowardly’ attack on ‘civilization’ or…
by Ronald Jones on 08/04/08 | No responses | Read More
Another Fake Obituary
The diagnosis is fatal: art criticism is done for. Hal Foster and Dave Hickey have variously heralded its decline in the US while in South Africa, a 14-hour inter-continental flight south from New York, the withering stature of local art criticism has become a repeat liturgy at various public forums.
‘We don’t have a culture of criticism, just a tradition of bitching,’ intoned poet Lesego Rampolokeng during a fractious exchange at a visual arts conference held in Cape Town some three years ago. Often quoted, his assertion has now acquired the status of a definitive pronouncement.
…
by Sean O'Toole on 31/03/08 | No responses | Read More
Metacritics and Strangers
Imagine it’s 2010. You’re planning a short trip to New York, and you want to see the most interesting exhibitions the city has to offer. Where to start?
Well, you need to know what’s on, so you fire up the web and hit New York Art Beat. This site launched back in the spring of 2008, four years after its invention as Tokyo Art Beat, the first bilingual integrated guide to the Japanese capital’s art scene. NYAB not only tells you what’s on, when and where (with links to…
by Nick Currie on 25/03/08 | 1 response | Read More
New Feeling
It took the Talking Heads half a year to find a company that could make Robert Rauschenberg’s Speaking in Tongues cover for them. Keyboard player Jerry Harrison finally turned to a firm that made Oscar Meyer hot dog packaging. Apparently it’s not that easy to find a company to vacu-form a clear vinyl record.
If you grew up in the US in my generation, Oscar Meyer is painfully Proustian thanks to their ad jingle – a whole group of American kids grew up thinking ‘baloney’ was spelled ‘O-S-C-A-R’. Also growing up in the US, I remember the very…
by Jennifer Kabat on 25/03/08 | No responses | Read More
Variations on a Theme
Music critic Paul Morley has written a catalogue essay (designed by Dexter Sinister; published by Film and Video Umbrella) to accompany a recent installation by American artist Cory Arcangel, a couple thousand short films about Glenn Gould (2007). Or rather, Morley has assembled most of the text in the same way that Arcangel assembled his video montage – from fragments found on the Internet. Arcangel’s installation consists of a version of Bach’s Goldberg Variations (1741) meticulously constructed from YouTube samples of individual notes played by amateurs. By making the connection between YouTube and Gould, the bricolages invite…
by Mark Fisher on 19/03/08 | No responses | Read More
Artificial Intelligence
Autechre made their debut for Warp Records in 1992, contributing a track entitled ‘The Egg’ to the benchmark electronica compilation Artificial Intelligence. This is something that they may not wish to be reminded of however; interviewed recently on the American music website Pitchfork, Autechre’s Rob Brown admitted that he found the duo’s first two albums ‘cheesy’ to listen to now. But compared to ‘The Egg’ (which today could pass for the woozy idylls of Warp label-mates Boards of Canada), their debut and sophomore albums – Incunabula (1993) and Amber (1994) – were…
by Tony F. Wilson on 13/03/08 | No responses | Read More
Very Superstitious
Roman emperors, we’re told, based important decisions on omens divined from the entrails of birds. For centuries, defining certain human behaviours as ‘sin’ or ‘heresy’, believers handed their neighbours over to church torturers and executioners with a clear conscience. But our consumer era – the end of history – represents the end of superstition, doesn’t it? We live now in an era of rational, informed choice, don’t we?
Maybe not, thinks Katrin Tees, an Estonian artist showing her amusingly pointed photographs in ’Don’t Worry—Be Curious!’, the 4th Baltic Triennial of Photographic Art,…
by Nick Currie on 27/02/08 | No responses | Read More
Clearing the Air
For a long time, continental philosophy has dominated large areas of cultural criticism, not least in the art world. Its orthodoxies have infected the way in which artists understand and describe their own work, as well as the critical reception of that same work. Traditionally, continental philosophy’s main adversary has been a dismissive Anglo-American commonsense. But a sophisticated challenge to continentalism is now emerging, drawing upon some of the same theoretical resources but using them for very different purposes.
At the forefront of these developments is the philosopher Graham Harman, whose work on cultural theorist Bruno Latour was…
by Mark Fisher on 20/02/08 | 2 responses | Read More
Off the Wall
‘Art is the New Activism’, or so the New Statesman declared on the cover of last week’s issue (21 January 2008). UK street artist Banksy recently invited a group of artists to his now annual ‘Santa’s Ghetto’ exhibition in Bethlehem; the article contends that this foray heralds a ‘rise of a guerilla movement’. Peter Kennard, one of the invitees and the author of the article, claims that the group stands in contrast to the ‘intellectual interventions’ of contemporary artists, in that Banksy et al ‘want to connect with the real world, rather than work for the market…
by Nicola Harvey on 24/01/08 | 1 response | Read More
Brazil’s Newest Museum
On a warm spring evening last November ugly plywood boards came down to unveil a public space that brought fresh air to Maria Antonia, a historic street in the heart of São Paulo. Cocktail glasses in hand, guests marveled at the open space, where an Amilcar de Castro sculpture, alone in the middle of an ample courtyard, welcomed visitors to Brazil’s newest museum, the Instituto de Arte Contemporânea (IAC).
Though realized over the last two years, the project’s roots go back more than a decade. In 1991, Raquel Arnaud, one of São Paulo’s most prominent art dealers, decided…
by Silas Martí on 23/01/08 | No responses | Read More
This is Not a Love Song
Ettore Sottsass thought that a retrospective was akin to death – ‘a coffin’ was what he called it. And now the Austrian-born Italian designer is dead, this is not a retrospective (or obituary) summing up his career. You will not read here about his childhood (Innsbruck and Turin), his architecture, his father (another architect), his golf resort in China, or even his design for a mainframe computer in the late-1950s (it won awards).
Instead, we could start with Bob Dylan and ‘Stuck Inside of Mobile (With the Memphis Blues Again)’ from Blonde on Blonde (1966). It seemed providential…
by Jennifer Kabat on 23/01/08 | No responses | Read More
Related Matters
At a recent talk at the Architectural Association in London (‘Revisiting Relational Aesthetics’, 30 October 2007), Hal Foster looked again at his arguments about relational aesthetics as well as the artists working with fictional archives, first laid out in the October article ‘An Archival Impulse’ (Autumn 2004). Heard again, Foster’s argument about artists who mine history to create present webs of meaning, or who blend fact and fiction in assembled archives, had an air of existential dispossession to it: the ‘archival impulse’, he stated, ‘is made within a world whose given connections are lost’. Such grey skies hover over the…
by Melissa Gronlund on 23/01/08 | 1 response | Read More
The Desperate Man
In Paris this season the must-see museum exhibition has been the Courbet retrospective at the Grand Palais. It’s a four-curator stunner of a show, the first French outing in 30 years for the man Linda Nochlin once called ‘the Mick Jagger of the nineteenth century.’ The Met’s Woman with a Parakeet has come to town, and the near-pornographic Origin of the World has been reunited with the André Masson landscape that its last owner, Jacques Lacan, used to disguise it. It’s reassuring when such an impressive show pulls such a large audience: the Grand Palais is now opening until late…
by Jason Farago on 14/12/07 | No responses | Read More
Karriere Bar
Logging onto the Karriere Bar’s website and clicking the link ‘i’m a voyeur baby’, fragments of real-time conversations and ambient sound enter my study, picked up from an ashtray-shaped microphone on a table at the Copenhagen venue. This bar/home interface is the work of Janet Cardiff & Georges Bures Miller, one of the 32 artworks showing at Danish artist Jeppe Hein’s newly-opened bar and restaurant in Copenhagen (promising ‘contemporary art & social life’), co-run with his sister Lærke.
The Internet affords a kind of convivial voyeurism that is sometimes more appealing than being at…
by Staffan Boije on 11/12/07 | No responses | Read More
Metadub
Kode9 and Spaceape, ‘9 Samurai’ (2006)
Part of the celebrations for the 25th anniversary of The Wire magazine, this event was given the name ‘Metadub’. Aptly, since all of the acts here organize their sound around dub’s bass-heavy derangement of time.
The evening began with the two main artists from the Skull Disco label, Appleblim and Shackleton. Skull Disco’s releases – best sampled on the brilliant compilation LP Skull Disco Soundboy Punishments – are at the most atmospheric end…
by Mark Fisher on 09/12/07 | No responses | Read More
Turner Prize 2007
As has been widely reported across the UK press, the Tate awarded its annual £25,000 Turner Prize at a ceremony in Liverpool on Monday. From a shortlist of four artists – Zarina Bhimji, Nathan Coley, Mike Nelson and Mark Wallinger – the jury selected Wallinger as the 23rd recipient of the prize, awarded for the best exhibition by a British or UK-based artist in the 12 months preceding the May nominations.
Wallinger was nominated on the basis of State Britain (2007), shown at Tate Britain earlier this year – a painstakingly…
by Dan Fox on 06/12/07 | 4 responses | Read More
Con Man
It goes without saying that critics should know their subject. Ben Lewis’ odd and ignorant diatribe, ‘So Who Put the Con in Contemporary Art?’, was published in London’s Evening Standard on 16 November and belies such logic. Confusing and conflating market forces with what is actually being produced on the complex and multi-layered stage that comprises the contemporary art world, he writes, ‘You will search the colour magazines of the art press, such as frieze, Art Review and Art Forum and barely find a critical article, let alone a critical word.…
by Jennifer Higgie on 03/12/07 | 26 responses | Read More
2008 Whitney Biennial
81 artists have been selected for the 2008 Whitney Biennial, which runs from March 6 to June 1. In addition to the usual museum venue, the biennial extends to the Seventh Regiment Armory, where a series of performances and installations will take place from March 4 to March 22.
The selection was made by Henriette Huldisch and Shamim M. Momin, two members of the Whitney’s curatorial staff, and overseen by Donna De Salvo, the Whitney’s Chief Curator and Associate Director of Programs. Three advisors will also join: Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator of The Studio Museum, Harlem;…
by Sam Thorne on 02/12/07 | No responses | Read More
Fifteen Minutes
The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth — it is the truth which conceals that there is none.
The simulacrum is true.
Ecclesiastes
On 20 April 1963 the French Ministry of Cultural Affairs, led by André Malraux, closed the complex of caves at Lascaux to the public. Preservation was the reason; the paintings had become considerably damaged by an excess of carbon dioxide produced by the steady flow of 1,200 tourists per day. The caves, discovered in 1940, had been opened to the public just 13 years earlier to show off the…
by Ronald Jones on 22/11/07 | No responses | Read More
A Void in São Paulo
On November 7th, the São Paulo Bienal Foundation announced the appointment of Ivo Mesquita as curator of the 28th edition of its show, less than one year before its opening in October 2008. Mesquita’s proposal has fuelled an ongoing controversy and sharply divided the Brazilian art scene.
Instead of a traditional exhibition, the 28th São Paulo Bienal – to be titled ‘Em Vivo Contato’ (‘Live Contact’) – will not contain any art objects: the 2nd floor of Oscar Niemeyer’s Bienal pavilion will be completely empty; the basement will become a place for performances and film screenings, while the…
by Fabio Cypriano on 20/11/07 | 1 response | Read More
Harping On
For ages after seeing singer-songwriter Baby Dee I had a strange chuckle ringing my ears – the performer’s between-song ‘Hee, hee, hee’, which sounds a bit like an overgrown child playing white witch. Certainly, Baby Dee’s spell worked on me. The artist’s free concert in Berlin in late September – organized by new project space Rise and hosted by easily my favourite independent culture club, Basso in Kreuzberg – was a rare jewel-like offering.
If you do a bit of nosing around for Baby Dee on the Internet you’ll pretty soon hit on a remarkable biography that goes…
by Dominic Eichler on 31/10/07 | No responses | Read More
Hongkong and Shenzhen
Hongkong is obviously fascinating as a cityscape, especially Pei’s Bank of China building (though unloved by locals due to alleged Feng Shui problems, not least the two antennae that resemble vertical joss-sticks, a symbol for death). But the downside is the seamy world of bars and discotheques – right around the corner from the arts centre tower which houses the Goethe Institute and numerous other institutions – where young women from the Philippines and other parts of East Asia are desparately hoping to find a wealthy local husband.
This year is the tenth anniversary of the handover of…
by Jörg Heiser on 26/10/07 | No responses | Read More
China
Beijing is a safe and predominantly clean city, relatively easy to navigate by taxi (as long as you have your destination written in Chinese, or can get someone on the phone to explain to the driver). But when it comes to art, it’s a buzzing hotchpotch of sheer pomposity and chaotic energy.
Uli Sigg, the former Swiss ambassador to China, who has arguably the most internationally renowned collection of Chinese contemporary art (some 1300 works), has initiated the annual Chinese Contemporary Art Award, as well as the first Chinese Art Critic Award, for which I was invited to…
by Jörg Heiser on 16/10/07 | 1 response | Read More
The Art Institution on Trial
The recent trial between the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA) and Swiss artist Christoph Büchel, heard on 21 September 2007 at the Springfield District Court, Massachusetts, raises troubling questions about the rights of artists to control the display of their work and the responsibilities of curators to protect artistic vision. Though this high profile dispute has been played out within the inappropriate context of litigation, the questions raised are as much ethical as they are legal and go to the core of future collaborations between artists and curators.
The issue in the summary trial was whether…
by Daniel McClean on 15/10/07 | No responses | Read More
The Life Aquatic
I’ve recently got hooked on SpongeBob SquarePants. It’s a children’s cartoon, but the pure buzz it delivers works just as well on an adult’s sensory apparatus. Partly, this is because of the bright colouring and the cheeky animation style, with which the surreal cartoon universe of Bikini Bottom, the submarine town that the programme’s cast of sea creatures inhabit, is brought to life. But first and foremost the fizz is generated by the exuberance of the programme’s protagonist, SpongeBob SquarePants, a small yellow sea sponge in a schoolboy uniform. SpongeBob’s spontaneity and readiness to instantaneously respond to new situations and…
by Jan Verwoert on 09/10/07 | 2 responses | Read More
Sound and Vision
What connects the following?
1. ‘Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967’, which opened last week at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
2. Jerome Bel’s performance ‘The Show Must Go On’ at the Lyon Opera, commissioned as part of the Lyon Biennial which opened in September, and featuring around a dozen dancers enacting the lyrics to a playlist of songs ranging from ‘Into Your Arms’ by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds to Celine Dion’s ‘My Heart Will Go On (Love Theme from “Titanic”)’.
3. Sound & Vision by…
by Dan Fox on 04/10/07 | 2 responses | Read More
Reality Czech
In Prague, the past lives alongside the present and the future like a silent but unavoidable house guest. The city’s National Gallery is based in the Veletrzní Palác, a six storey Functionalist behemoth built in 1928 to house the trade fairs of the flourishing central European city. Now proudly presenting an expansive collection of Czech and international masterpieces, it is directed by controversial director Milan Knízák, himself an artist who is not shy of installing vast examples of his own sculpture in the forecourt of the museum. While Knízák, like many, struggled during the Communist era to keep his avant-garde…
by Jonathan Griffin on 21/09/07 | No responses | Read More
Search Me
Perhaps it’s because I’m used to writing words for money, or that I lack a certain Utopian drive, but I’ve never quite understood the attraction of contributing to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia written, edited and occasionally vandalized by its army of unpaid readers. Why devote precious, unremunerated hours to an un-attributed entry on the wallaby, or the comic actor Steve Guttenberg, only to find that your text has been re-formulated by a passing amateur zoologist, or desecrated by an incensed film fan who’s convinced that Guttenberg should have handed in his badge after Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol (1987)?…
by Tom Morton on 12/07/07 | 1 response | Read More
Oh, Vienna (Redux)
Vienna’s internationally renowned mid-scale art centres – Secession, Generali Foundation, Bawag Foundation, and Atelier Augarten – are all simultaneously, for different reasons, going through a major crisis. The BAWAG Bank has been suffering from financial scandal for the past year, during which time its foundation, a Kunsthalle-type art centre which has previously hosted exhibitions by Asger Jorn and Rodney Graham, has seemed under threat. The exhibition that I was curating there‚ ‘Romantic Conceptualism’, went as planned, and yet it is to be the last in the current space. The press conference was hijacked by the heads of BAWAG and Generali…
by Jörg Heiser on 12/07/07 | 3 responses | Read More
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