 |  |
Redaktion | 28.03.07
Ein Protestbrief an den kroatischen Kultusminister
Der in Zagreb und Berlin lebende Künstler David Maljkovic war eingeladen, auf der diesjährigen Biennale di Venezia die Republik Kroatien zu vertreten. Über die Qualität der Arbeiten des Künstlers kann man ja durchaus geteilter Meinung sein, manche Leute finden sie eher belanglos. Aber: Im Februar wurden zur Entscheidung, Arbeiten von Maljkovic für Venedig auszuwählen, noch ganz stolz klingende Mitteilungen verbreitet: »The Republic of Croatia is proud to present David Maljkovic’s Lost Memories from These Days at this year’s Biennale di Venezia, selected by Zeljko Kipke, organised by the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka and curated by Branko Franceschi.« Nun wurde der Künstler ausgeladen. Warum? Eine richtig klare Antwort darauf gibt es wohl nicht ... Kunst-Blog dokumentiert einen Protestbrief an den kroatischen Kultusminister Božo Biškupić.
Beitrag »Ein Protestbrief an den kroatischen Kultusminister« weiterlesen ...
Sue Hubbard | 18.01.07
Bad Art for Bad People
Jake and Dinos Chapman
Bad Art for Bad People
Liverpool Tate
Until 4th March
Like Laurel and Hardy, Flanagan and Alan, Gilbert and George, the artists Jake and Dinos Chapman have realised that being part of a duo is a good career move. The audience get two for the price of one and there is always someone around to act as a foil. The self-appointed bad boys of British art, they came to prominence as part of the notorious YBA generation. Now they have produced Bad Art for Bad People and the more they shock us, like pigs wallowing in their own muck, the happier they are. “We are sore-eyed scopophilliac oxymorons….our discourse offers a benevolent contingency of concepts, a discourse of end-of-sale remnants, a rationalistic hotbed of sober categories…” belligerently declares a mud spattered manifesto plastered on the gallery wall. But what are they really up to with their infantile penile-nosed manikins and their obsessive scenarios of death camp horror made from myriads of tiny plastic bodies like those used by small boys for air fix models?
Beitrag »Bad Art for Bad People« weiterlesen ...
Sue Hubbard | 17.01.07
Towards a New Utopia?
PUBLIC SMOG
A project by Amy Balkin curated by students of the
MA Curating Contemporary Art course at the Royal College of Art,
in collaboration with Peer
Peer, London
November 2006
The 4th November was the Saturday before the UN Climate Talks (COP 12/ MOP 2) in Nairobi (6th-17th November). There were demonstrations demanding urgent action on climate change all around the globe. Those taking part believe that only coordinated international action can avert the massive threat posed by climate change and that the failure of world leaders to act - especially the US under George Bush who failed to sign the Kyoto Protocol agreement - is threatening the very existence of life on earth.
Can art do anything to change the mindset of politicians or entrepreneurs who seem to care more about the status quo and making big bucks than carbon emissions? Or does it merely provide an impotent side show producing sanctimonious truisms for a middle-class audience not prepared to change their lifestyles? It’s one thing to nod approvingly at a work in the Tate, quite another to forgo that cheap airfare. To look at art seriously means a willingness to be changed but such epiphanies tend to be personal. Is Jerry Saltz, critic of the Village Voice, right when he says “Art can opine about hierarchy and demagogy, it can be a critic of the state of the world and the human condition. It can ask political questions… however it cannot …turn back global warming; it cannot change the world except incrementally and by osmosis.”?
Beitrag »Towards a New Utopia?« weiterlesen ...
Gastbeitrag | 14.09.06
Die Unhintergehbarkeit der Buchhaltung - 1. Fünftausend
von Manuel Bonik
An english version of this text is available at zg Berlin
Es gibt ein Loch in Brandenburg.Es heißt Berlin.
Wir leben mit und drin. (1) IRA SCHNEIDER
Verbunden mit dem Kunst-Boom der (Londoner und) Berliner 90er Jahre wurde Künstler zum Traumberuf, zeitweise war Künstler Berufswunsch Nr.1 unter deutschen Abiturienten (2). Die Akademie-Professoren des deutschen (jetzt in Abwicklung sich befindenden) Meisterklassen-Systems hatten nichts dagegen: die erhöhte Nachfrage war gut für ihr Geschäft. Und offensichtlich war die Situation von Studenten an einer Akademie introvertiert und isoliert genug, um ihnen das Gefühl zu geben und die Attitüde auszubilden, etwas je Einmaliges zu sein, etwas, auf das die Welt nur gewartet haben wird, wenn er/sie dereinst die Hallen der Akademie verläßt. Nicht aber nahmen sie wahr, wie sehr der Beruf des Künstlers eben die Exklusivität, die er durchaus einmal besessen haben mag, verloren hatte und, Berlin-katalysiert, zu einem Stereotyp geworden war. Das wird einem vielleicht erst mit dreißig ff. klar: dass man sich so individuell dünken kann, wie man will, und doch machen ein paar tausend Menschen der aktuellen 8.000.000.000 etwas, das dem eigenen Schaffen verflixt ähnlich ist. In Berlin leben nach offiziellen Schätzungen zur Stunde fünftausend professionelle (3) Künstler, hinzu kommen die, die’s noch werden wollen, und eine Dunkelziffer, und die nicht-professionellen, und dort draußen gibt’s noch viele viele weitere Tausende, und alle alle wollen sie Aufmerksamkeit, denn sie sind ja sowas von einmalig... – Will sagen: Die Galerien und Museen warten nicht ausgerechnet auf dich, und die Worte, die dein Tun, im Rahmen der vagen Sprache der Kunst, ziemlich genau beschreiben, sind schon so oft bemüht worden. Und die Galerien selbst sind ein Klischee geworden im Berlin dieser Tage, nächste Woche eröffnen wieder drei.
Beitrag »Die Unhintergehbarkeit der Buchhaltung - 1. Fünftausend« weiterlesen ...
Gastbeitrag | 02.08.06
HAVE YOU EVER DONE ANYTHING RIGHT?
Willoughby Sharp interviews Serkan Özkaya
Willoughby Sharp: Start and say "I am" to the camera, and "I´m from Istanbul" and stuff and "I´m in Berlin for my show."
Serkan Özkaya: Yeah, I´m Serkan Özkaya. Do you want me to talk about this piece here?
W.S. First start again, and introduce yourself. No one knows who you are or where you´re from or where we are. This would be in the very beginning of the tape.
Serkan Ozkaya vs. Willoughby Sharp
S.O. O.K, right. Let me introduce myself: Serkan Özkaya, from Istanbul originally, now in Berlin for a short period of time, and what you see here is this outside of the building which is called Kuenstlerhaus Bethanien, which is the place I have my studio and a room, and the show inside, where there is a gallery as well. The building was built as a monastery first.
Beitrag »HAVE YOU EVER DONE ANYTHING RIGHT?« weiterlesen ...
Sue Hubbard | 25.06.06
Kandinsky
The Path to Abstraction
Tate Modern, London
22nd June – 1st October 2006
There’s a tendency to think of Modernism as principally reflecting the rapid technological changes that occurred at the beginning of the 20th century exemplified by Futurist images of fast cars or the model for Tatlin’s famous unbuilt tower. But there was another strand. One that responded to the breakdown of conventional religion and the social and political upheavals that were taking place across the western world (including Russia) and looked to art (and some might say to psychoanalysis and quasi-religious cults such as Theosophy and spiritualism) to give meaning to contemporary existence in a way that Christianity had once done.
Beitrag »Kandinsky« weiterlesen ...
Sue Hubbard | 23.06.06
Howard Hodgkin
Tate Britain, London
14th June – 10th September 2006
Of all Baudelaire´s poems it is Correspondences, originally published in 1857 in Les Fleurs du Mal, that speaks most articulately of what he considered to be the task of the modern painter. It is a poem that particularly illuminates the work of Howard Hodgkin.
Beitrag »Howard Hodgkin« weiterlesen ...
Sue Hubbard | 18.06.06
Around the World in 80 Days
ICA, London
and
The South London Gallery
24. 5. - 16. 7. 2006
Remember the image of David Niven trying to circumnavigate the world in a hot air balloon? Inspired by Thomas Cook´s first guided world tour, Jules Verne´s novel Around the World in 80 Days, written in 1872, on which the film staring Niven was based, pinpoints a moment in history when the modern globalised world was beginning to take shape.
Beitrag »Around the World in 80 Days« weiterlesen ...
Sue Hubbard | 16.06.06
Gary Hume - Cave Paintings
White Cube, London
26.05.06 - 01.07.06
I have a confession to make. I´ve never much liked Gary Hume´s paintings. Bold, ambitious and in-your-face they´ve always felt with their insistent reflective surfaces, to my mind, just too cocky by half. They were so very 80s. His early hospital door paintings with their puns on minimalism versus the real world, his "portraits" of celebrities such as Kate Moss and Tony Blackburn executed in shiny household paint, seemed, like the Thatcher´s Britain that had spawned them, to be all about surface rather than depth. With their brittle hard-edged colours and penchant for the tropes of popular culture they became emblematic of a certain artistic laddism. To look at Gary Hume´s dead-pan paintings was to sense that self-expression, doubt and vulnerability had been excised from the contemporary painterly lexicon.
Beitrag »Gary Hume - Cave Paintings« weiterlesen ...
Sue Hubbard | 29.08.05
A Ribbon around a Bomb
Frida Kahlo
Tate Modern, London
Until 9 October
Self-Portrait with Monkey 1938
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo NY
Bequest of A. Conger Goodyear, 1966.
© Banco de México and INBAL, Mexico, 2005
The personal is political. Thus went the credo of the 60s and 70s feminist movement. Feminists argued that sexual difference was produced through the interconnection of social practice and institution. The destabilising of traditional gender roles which saw women primarily as carers and mothers - financially disempowered, dependent domestic angels - was also part of the matrix that identified white male patriarchy as the root of both colonialism and world poverty. To explore the history of women in culture and art was to reveal how history itself was written; to expose it prejudices, its assumptions, its stubborn silences. Such investigations did not simply make visible the role of women in society but held up a mirror to the way society itself was constructed. Women, along with the poor, were its silent, disenfranchised victims. Neither group had a voice, neither had the power to determine the way their destinies unfolded. Women, before the age of contraception, were enslaved by their bodies to years of childbearing, miscarriages and abortions; the poor were enslaved to their landlords and bosses.
Beitrag »A Ribbon around a Bomb« weiterlesen ...
Sue Hubbard | 09.08.05
The Triumph of Painting - Part II
The Saatchi Gallery
County Hall, London SE1
Until 30th October
Dirk Skreber
It Rocks Us So Hard Ho Ho Ho 3 2002
image: www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk
Contemporary critics, art historians and artists alike must often seem to those outside the art world, when talking about painting, like family members gathered around the bed of a terminally ill relative discussing them as if they had already kicked the bucket, when, in fact, they are still breathing, albeit on a life support machine. The debate about the death and the viability of painting has been going on ever since the advent of photography and seems set to keep us all occupied for several decades to come. But if painting is in its death throes, its making a hell of a racket and refusing to go quietly. For down on the South Bank at the Saatchi Gallery, just when everyone had got used to dead sharks and things in formaldehyde there is another painting show. The Triumph of Painting Part II which follows on from the recent Part I. You have to hand it to Saatchi. Whatever you think about him he keeps us all on our toes, for who would have thought that he would have moved so seamlessly from Britart flippancy to German angst. Suddenly deep and meaningful is back.
Beitrag »The Triumph of Painting - Part II« weiterlesen ...
Sue Hubbard | 09.08.05
The Art of Tracey Emin
Edited by Mandy Merck and Chris Townsend
Thames and Hudson
ISBN 0-500-28385-0
She’s come a long way, has "Mad Tracey from Margate”, the girl with ‘big tits’, who bunked off school, shagged older men behind the beach huts, had an abortion or two and famously walked out of a TV interview drunk. Not only does she make mucky beds for the Tate, turn up at all the best private views dressed to kill in Vivienne Westwood, have a posh house round the corner from Gilbert and George, appear on the cover of every glossy magazine but she has even been guest editor of the Guardian weekend colour section. Now a clutch of critics and academics has written a book of essays about her, The Art of Tracey Emin. Soon there will be a course in some university department in “Tracy Studies” and her transformation into cultural ‘icon’ will be complete. Madonna watch out!
Beitrag »The Art of Tracey Emin« weiterlesen ...
Gastbeitrag | 01.08.05
Between Lead and Gold
by Mark Gisbourne
Mark Raidpere - Isolator
The Venice Biennale - Estonia
Palazzo Malipiero
12.06.2005 - 06.11.2005
Passport Photo
Lead Sign
The biochemistry of human life and desire, and therefore the seat and cause of human emotions, owes a great deal to the analogous condition and complex traditions of the alchemical imagination. However, this analogy does not intend to valorise the implausible practice of alchemy, but rather in the familiar sense of alchemical thinking creating a personal secret knowledge that both confers and develops an uncertain hermeneutic confusion as to what is being said or expressed.(1) It is analogous to that which we might call our daily struggle to grasp and communicate with the incommunicable dwelling within ourselves: the mysterious and inexplicable mutations of our human feelings and how we might begin to translate them. For in some ways those feelings we direct towards ourselves, as well as to others, always remain - to some non-definable extent - in a state of estranged incommunicado. And, so it is with all human life, its secret feelings and emotions, since there are thoughts thought but unspoken, and imagined feelings of the transmutable mind that are still somehow not (or, at least not yet) easily realisable through the tongue of transference.(2)
Beitrag »Between Lead and Gold« weiterlesen ...
Marco Venezio | 09.06.05
La Biennale di Venezia - 51. Biennale von Venedig
Aktualisierungen finden Sie am Ende des Artikels
Tino Sehgal im deutschen Pavillon
"At the moment the notion of ’political art‘ seems to be experiencing increasing relevance, a notion, which in my view is as obsolete as it is tautological. Of course there are artists who are explicitly politically motivated and others who are not. But neither intention changes the fact that artistic production - like all acts - is always political and critical as well as affirmative towards something in being a performative re-affirmation of, or deviation from, certain existing circumstances. My question would rather be what is the specific ’something‘ a certain work of art is critical towards, what structures is it affirming and what does this position imply politically. Considering my personal point of view, (most) object related work a priori affirms structures that I am politically sceptic of, since it mirrors, is involved in and thus promotes the historically prevalent mode of economic production, the transformation of material.
Beitrag »La Biennale di Venezia - 51. Biennale von Venedig« weiterlesen ...
Anette Dekker | 04.05.05
what’s in a name
The synaesthesia of sound, smell, image and light has become a prominent feature in our day-to-day life. When we walk into shops and cafes or stroll along the street, our various senses are under constant assault. People get overwhelmed with musical beats accompanied by flickering lights and video and digital imagery, all of them trying to keep up with the music. These happenings come together in the club scene where the sounds merge with light, images, smoke, and even smell. After the popularity of the Disc Jockey (DJ), the Video Jockey (VJ) entered the club scene in the late 1980s. The term VJ was popularised in the beginning and mid-‘80s by television broadcaster MTV. A few years before, the end of the 70s, the term was introduced by the crew of the Peppermint Lounge, a popular dance club in New York. The performers wanted to distance themselves from the stuffy video artists that were part of the art- and cultural scene in New York.
Beitrag »what’s in a name« weiterlesen ...
Kunst-Blog.com, Copyright 2005-08. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.
Soweit nicht anders angegeben liegen die Rechte bei den jeweiligen Autoren und Künstlern, die die Urheber der Beiträge sind, und bei Kunst-Blog.com. Für Webseiten, auf die von dieser Site aus verlinkt wird, sind ausschließlich die Betreiber der jeweiligen Angebote verantwortlich.