Berlin–Paris 2010
Thirteen exhibitions, all presented by Parisian galleries, opened across Berlin last Friday. Exhibitions ranged from solo projects to group shows and three-gallery collaborations, introducing a broad swathe of artists and dealers to a new audience. Openings took place in a range of galleries, from established tastemakers such as Esther Schipper and neugerriemschneider of Berlin, to newcomers like Kreuzberg’s Chert and Sommer + Kohl, located in a promising new gallery area in Schöneberg.
Berlin’s contemporary art market, awash with relatively new dealers and a sprinkle of established German names, contrasts significantly with the combination of modern and contemporary and programmes in Paris. In some…
by Anna Altman on 24/01/10 | 2 responses | Read More
Moderna Museet Malmö
Sweden has a new modern art museum: on Boxing Day, Stockholm’s Moderna Museet opened their second branch, housed in the old Rooseum building in Malmö, (which, before it was converted, was a derelict power station). Ostensibly inspired by the Tate model, the new venue – complete with a turbine hall and signature font – currently offers a selection from the permanent collection in Stockholm as well as two temporary exhibitions: Luc Tuymans and Astrid Svangren.
Luc Tuymans, Hair (2009)
After wandering through the relatively small museum space – Tuymans’ bleached-out paintings on the ground floor and…
by Christine Antaya on 20/01/10 | No responses | Read More
1st Former West Congress
That some cultures remain haunted by the idea of their own ‘belatedness’ and their need to ‘catch up’ with ‘the West’ were recurrent themes at the ‘1st Former West Congress’, a packed-to-the-rafters three-day event in Utrecht, Holland, sponsored by the BAK contemporary art centre, the Centre for the Humanities at Utrecht University, and the Vanabbemuseum in Eindhoven. ‘Former West’ is the title of an ambitious, long-term research initiative geared toward measuring the impact the year 1989 has had on the art of the West through a series of conferences, publications and exhibitions that ally post-socialist perspectives with post-colonial thinking on social and historical change. (Video…
by Vivian Rehberg on 14/01/10 | No responses | Read More
The Spectacle of Competition
Upon first hearing of the Lingerie Football League (LFL) it is hard not to feel like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into view. The LFL is a women’s American Football league consisting of ten teams of seven players competing over a 20-week season. These teams bear such names as the San Diego Seduction, the Philadelphia Passion, and the oddly meteorological, Seattle Mist. The players are young, pretty and uniformly thin. As with genuine American football teams their uniforms are strikingly distinctive: boy shorts are combined with…
by George Pendle on 11/01/10 | 1 response | Read More
City Report: Cluj
Over the last two years, Cluj, in northern Transylvania, has become strongly associated with contemporary painting, with the so-called Cluj School being compared to similarly productive periods in Leipzig and Dresden. While this label is seen by many as unrepresentative, it has helped focus international attention on the city, which has gained prominence over Romania’s capital, Bucharest.
First promoted as a coherent movement by the organizers of the 2007 Prague Biennale, painting from Cluj does have a clearly recognizable look, typified by the somber paintings and installations of Victor Man (b.1974).…
by Richard Unwin on 03/01/10 | No responses | Read More
PERFORMA 09 in review: Part 2
Guido van der Werve: Nummer twaalf
Photograph: Paradise Gonzalez
Sparsely decorated with plaques, trophies and photographs of intense figures hunched over chessboards, the narrow townhouse that is home to Manhattan’s Marshall Chess Club – a former haunt of Marcel Duchamp and Bobby Fischer – conjures an aura of asceticism, of innumerable hours sacrificed practicing a game with countless possible outcomes. It was there that, for his video Nummer twaalf (Number Twelve), Guido van der Werve was filmed playing grand master Leonid Yudasin on an ingenious ‘chess piano’ whose squares function like piano keys. On a stormy night…
by Kristin M. Jones on 15/12/09 | 2 responses | Read More
PERFORMA 09 in review: Part 1
RoseLee Goldberg – the critic, art historian and writer who founded Performa in 2005 – tapped at her BlackBerry through most of Music for 16 Futurist Noise Intoners. It was annoying, but I’ll forgive her indiscretion. The evening’s compositions, after all, were scored almost a century ago for a newly silence-less world clattering with engines and aeroplanes. So why shouldn’t a centennial restaging be accompanied by the faint clack of mobile messaging? And Goldberg undoubtedly had lots to address on her backlit screen. For the third edition of this visual arts performance biennial last month, she and her staff presented well over 100 events, at…
by Graham T. Beck on 15/12/09 | No responses | Read More
Arts in Marrakech 2009
A modest salt border divides North Africa from southern Europe, prompting some adventurers to swim the short distance between the two continents. According to the Strait of Gibraltar Swimming Association, most long-distance swimmers attempt the crossing from the Spanish island of Tarifa, swimming an average of 20km (depending on currents) to Punta Cires on the Moroccan coastline. It is uncertain if Czech swimmer David Cech, one of only eight swimmers to have completed the full round-trip, had his passport in a Ziploc bag tucked under his Speedos. There is enough reason to.
A vast and expanding lack of reciprocity underpins the relationship between…
by Sean O’Toole on 13/12/09 | 3 responses | Read More
Shopping Around
In 1934, charting the slums of Southampton for his travelogue English Journey, the Bradfordian writer J.B Priestley, a soft-socialist as traditional, boiled-cabbage, pipe-and-slippers as any writer of that era, stopped to deliver an infuriated blast against small-time shopping: ‘The small shop flourishes in this quarter, as it does in all such quarters. Even after you have given yourself the strongest dose of individualistic sentiment, it is hard to look at these small shops with anything but disgust or to find good reason why they should not be promptly abolished. They are slovenly, dirty and inefficient. They only spoil the goods they offer for sale, especially…
by Owen Hatherley on 06/12/09 | No responses | Read More
Calling Out of Context
A nine-day festival of experimental music at the ICA, ‘Calling out of Context’ comprised an exhausting programme of gigs, discussions and workshops in the lower galleries, with the upper galleries converted into open recording studios where artists and musicians were invited to record a track in the space of a day (many of which are streamed on the ICA website). Curated by Richard Birkett and Jamie Eastman, the tightly packed week and a half saw performances and contributions from avant-garde mainstays (The Red Krayola) and artists’ bands (Ei Arakawa’s Teppich, Luke Fowler’s Rude Pravo, Melanie Gilligan’s Petit Mal), through to recent…
by Frances Morgan and Sam Thorne on 04/12/09 | No responses | Read More
Tanzkongress 2009
Congresses (and conferences) are always two-sided affairs: in the first place, they promote themselves as committed to creative, theoretical and curatorial innovation; at the same time, though, they are hot-houses of networking, and class-action efforts to gain access to funding streams. So it was at the second edition of TanzKongress, held two weeks ago in Kampagne in Hamburg.
The inaugural TanzKongress took place three years earlier, to celebrate the procurement of an 11 million-Euro national ‘Tanzplan’, or budget allocation, for Germany. Repeating the achievement was on the agenda this time around. Towards this end, the…
by Daniel Miller on 23/11/09 | No responses | Read More
Nature and Anti-Nature
‘I thought you didn’t believe in God,’ says one of the characters in Margaret Atwood’s 2003 novel Oryx and Crake. ‘I don’t believe in Nature either,’ the young scientist Crake replies, ‘or not with a capital N.’ Atwood’s latest novel, The Year of the Flood, makes a return to both Nature (with a capital ‘N’) and to God. The Year of the Flood centres around God’s Gardeners, an eco-religion which constitutes one pocket of resistance to the corporate capital that dominates the novel’s near-future universe. The Gardeners’ vision of Nature-as-God is striking in contrast with the memorable description of nature in Lars von Trier’s recent…
by Mark Fisher on 23/10/09 | No responses | Read More
To Biennial or not to Biennial? Pt. 2
Each afternoon would feature a choice of two dialogues: that first day, I attended the conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist and Anri Sala on the influence of biennials on art production and site-specific work. As we took our seats, Sala punched a key on his open laptop and an instrumental version of The Clash’s ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go’ (1981) began to fill the room. As the crowd, relaxed from lunch, giggled, Obrist launched into his thesis: ‘We think biennials should create reality’, he said in his rapid, double-time delivery. Sala started a slide show of works from the 2nd Tirana Biennale (2003)…
by Quinn Latimer on 13/10/09 | No responses | Read More
Roger Ballen
Russian creativity, a mesmerising record of innovation derived from absurdity and degradation, looms large in the mind of South African artists and writers. Perhaps it is the shared wretchedness of the lived circumstances in these two countries. In a 1967 Paris Review interview, Vladimir Nabokov, a self-styled ‘obscure novelist with an unpronounceable name’, decried his former homeland’s ‘unredeemable inequities’ and the ‘petty bourgeois smugness’ of Leninism – a critique that has a ring of truth in South Africa, present and past.
Boarder (2005)
J.M. Coetzee, recently shortlisted for a possible third Booker Prize, is perhaps the…
by Sean O'Toole on 12/10/09 | No responses | Read More
Charles Harrison (1942-2009)
Charles Harrison, who died in August after a long illness, aged 67, was best known in his later years as an art historian, a prolific writer and a brilliant teacher. But in a career that spanned five decades he was also an incisive critic and editor, an occasional exhibition organizer and a long-standing contributor to the work of the Art & Language group.
It was my good fortune to encounter Charles when I began art school and he was employed as a part-time art historian at Watford College of Art, in 1973. He was, without doubt, the most influential, inspiring and demanding teacher…
by David Batchelor on 05/10/09 | No responses | Read More
