NGA, Vilnius
In the final week before the opening of the National Gallery of Art of the 20th and 21st Century (NGA) in Vilnius last weekend, Romualdas Budrys, Director General of Art Museums in Lithuania (an art czar position like that of Sir Nicholas Serota at Tate), embarked on the redirection and re-hang of the permanent collection exhibition, pragmatically titled ‘20th-Century Lithuanian Art’. He made this decision at the expense of two years of scholarship and hard slog led by Lolita Jablonskiene (head of the NGA) and her team. News of these events was quickly met with shock by Lithuania’s tight-knit art community. The result is reminiscent…
by Simon Rees on 27/06/09 | No responses | Read More
The Iraqi Cultural Centre
Jeremy Deller’s ‘It Is What It Is: Conversations About Iraq’ (2009) has been exhibited in multiple locations across America in recent months, most recently at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles (it tours to the MCA Chicago, 10 October-15 November). Exhibition visitors are given the opportunity to converse with a selection of guest speakers, almost all of whom are either intellectuals who grew up in Iraq or people with recent, first-hand experience of the situation there. The invited speakers are present in the exhibition space on a rotating programme, and are available to speak with anyone interested in entering into informal conversation with them.
…by Angus Cook on 26/06/09 | No responses | Read More
Moscow
’Nash’, the Russian word for ‘our’, carries a little more emotional weight in the original than it does in English. ‘Our people’ can mean like-minded ones, friends or just other Russians; when Russians talk about ‘our team’ or ‘our soldiers’, there’s only one country they have in mind.
But when Russians talk about ‘our art’, this adds another emotional dimension. Contemporary Russian art is produced in spite of financial turmoil, a post-Soviet institutional wasteland and the fact that Russia is not exactly an easy place to do anything productive. Those producing art are a rare breed here: Moscow’s art world has around 300…
by Max Seddon on 23/06/09 | No responses | Read More
View from the Tropics
One book I’ve never seen featured in ‘Ideal Syllabus’, this publication’s snapshot of other people’s bookshelves, is a tome called Unpublished Conversations. Of course, it doesn’t exist, but my point is this: some of the most penetrating conversations about art never achieve the status of printed – or, in the digital era, printable – word. It is easy enough to understand why. To paraphrase D.H. Lawrence, they lack perfection or consummation, they leave nothing finished. Herein lies another reason why Unpublished Conversations will never hit the bookshops: being entirely wilful and utterly contingent, this vast polyphony claims no audience. The audience, after all, is the…
by Sean O'Toole on 18/06/09 | No responses | Read More
Marcus Coates: ‘A Ritual For Elephant and Castle’
Marcus Coates’ 2004 video work, Journey to the Lower World, saw this ordinary-looking Englishman don animal skins and enter a trance state, communing with indigenous animal spirits to answer questions posed by residents of a Liverpool tower block scheduled for demolition. Comic in manner but serious in intent, Coates’ performance was a means of evoking the mystical or otherworldly to inspire or encourage an imaginative response from its participant community.
Conceived by Coates, London-based curatorial collective Nomad, and music promoters QU Junktions, last…
by Louis Pattison on 11/06/09 | No responses | Read More
Freedom Of The City
One doesn’t seek out free improvisation for its soothing properties. Yet it is not just the repeated sounds of instruments stretched to their sonic limits that provoke cognitive exhaustion by the second night of the two-day ‘Freedom Of The City’ festival. It is more the way in which the acute listening and reactive tensions between the often small, intense ensembles on Conway Hall’s elegant 1920s-designed stage begin to seep into the listener too. Successful communication is never guaranteed in live improvisation. Questions – for improv is nothing if not a questioning style of music – spring to mind often, regarding the aim of each note,…
by Frances Morgan on 10/06/09 | No responses | Read More
55th Oberhausen Short Film Festival
The Oberhausen Short Film Festival, now in its 55th year, continues to provide a platform for an amazingly diverse range of short films. As well as the international competition, which this year featured some 51 films from 31 countries, the festival included profiles of Japanese avant-garde filmmaker Matsumoto Toshio, Mexican ethno-documentary filmmaker Nicolás Echevarría, Russian collective Factory of Found Clothes, and the Sarajevo Documentary School. Added to this was the main themed programme (entitled ‘Unreal Asia’), more than a dozen programmes by artists’ film and video distributors, and a number of other competition strands, including one for music videos. If you craved still more, there…
by Dan Kidner on 27/05/09 | No responses | Read More
The Sinking of the Titanic
The Roundhouse in North London is full of ghosts. Indeed, since it reopened in 2006, the building could even be considered a ghost of itself. A display on the first floor currently celebrates its 1960s heyday, when bands such as The Doors played legendary shows here and R.D. Laing organised a symposium at which Gregory Bateson and Herbert Marcuse spoke. All of these names come from a history that still haunts us – Morrison is more vividly present figure than anyone from today’s backward-looking rock scene – but to which we no longer belong.
The highlight of this evening – which is part…
by Mark Fisher on 26/05/09 | No responses | Read More
Bienal de São Paulo
While it becomes increasingly certain that next year’s Bienal de São Paulo will be postponed to 2011 due to insufficient funds and lack of a president, recent gossip has it that investor and art collector Heitor Martins will soon assume the presidency of the São Paulo Bienal Foundation. Aside from his credentials as a financial consultant and respected collector, Martins is married to Fernanda Feitosa, founding director of SP Arte, the city’s art fair, which finished last Sunday with 80 galleries showing in the same pavilion that hosts the Bienal.
The appointment would undoubtedly turn the couple into Latin American…
by Silas Martí on 22/05/09 | No responses | Read More
Bursting Bubbles
The recent tribulations of the contemporary art market deserve, and will hopefully receive, some extensive and thoroughly reported articles and books. These are unlikely to be by writers who have already alienated potential interviewees by writing newspaper articles entitled ’Who Put the Con in Contemporary Art?‘ For now, though, there’s television, and there’s critic and broadcaster Ben Lewis. For those that don’t know him, Lewis purveys an alloy of Matthew Collings’ unthreatening faux-naivety and Brian Sewell’s philistine act, and his hour-long, apparently year-in-the-making documentary The Great Contemporary Art…
by Martin Herbert on 19/05/09 | 1 response | Read More The impact of aging on visual artists is usually assessed through their body of work. But what if the aging body is the work? And what if that aging body is female, an inevitable reality that much of society continues to see as a horrific anachronism? (Enter Botox, boob jobs and bodies like Madonna’s, strung tight as drums.) Born from such questions, the week-long ‘Performance Saga’ festival in Basel mixed up-to-the-minute video interviews with’60s and ’70s performance greats like VALIE EXPORT, Joan Jonas, Alison Knowles and Carolee Schneemann in bars, museums and shop windows across the city. The week’s events culminated in a day of…
by Quinn Latimer on 18/05/09 | No responses | Read More From the Colosseum in Rome to the ‘Bird’s Nest’ in Beijing, stadium architecture has always been about state-building. Warsaw’s 10th-Anniversary Stadium (the Stadion Dziesiçiolecia; abbreviated as Stadion X-lecia) opened late in 1955, the same month as the Palace of Culture, to memorialise the proclamation of the Manifesto of the Polish Committee of National Liberation on 22 July 1944. Literally built from the rubble of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, for 50 years the structure served as a stage on which the history of Poland was acted out. The first event that it hosted was a football match: a 2-2 draw on 27 July 1955…
by Daniel Miller on 15/05/09 | No responses | Read More ‘I can hardly understand the importance given to the word “research” [...] The several manners I have used in my art must not be considered as an evolution or as steps toward an unknown ideal of painting [...] I have never made trials or experiments.’ Although research, in relation to the creative disciplines, remains a fresh topic in the United States, in Europe it has become a tortured subject. Sir Christopher Frayling’s watershed 1993 essay ‘Research in Art and Design’, a model of idea-pioneering, prompted much teeth gnashing in the…
by Ronald Jones on 14/05/09 | No responses | Read More ‘Though it has always been a badge of honour among intellectuals to dislike being stamped with any sort of label,’ said Graham Harman at the start of his typically exhilarating presentation at the ’Speculative Realism and Speculative Materialism’ conference at the University Of West England in Bristol (UWE), ‘other fields of human innovation have a much stronger sense for the value of a brand name.’ Harman argued that branding is ‘not merely a degenerate practice of brainwashing consumerism, but a universally recognized method of conveying information while cutting through information clutter.’ He…
by Mark Fisher on 12/05/09 | No responses | Read More In September 2007, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art opened ‘The Age of Rembrandt’, an exhibition presenting the museum’s entire collection of Dutch paintings made between 1600 and 1800. Included alongside Rembrandt were such acknowledged masters as Frans Hals, Jacob van Ruisdael, Gerard ter Borch and Johannes Vermeer (of whose 35 known paintings the museum owns five). But rather than arrange the canvases by date of creation or by genre, the curator somewhat controversially chose to display the paintings in the order in which they entered the museum’s collection. The first gallery featured part of the fabled ‘1871 Purchase’, made the year after the museum’s…
by Brian Sholis on 08/05/09 | No responses | Read More
Performance Saga
Stadium X
Omphaloskepsis
Pablo Picasso interviewed by Marius de Zayas (1923)
Speculative Realism
Rogues’ Gallery
