human existenciallity - we are more funny and similar then we think

if somebody is spelling the beans of human existence and the awkwardness of living through it, this someone is called olav breuning. just watch this two videos and you have a clue about how we still to go a long way to discover ourselves as weird humans that we are. exposing the tribal-like similarities between the swisses japaneses and papua-new-guinea locals and tourists everywhere he hits on the globe as a tiny little dot-like-village.we are trhough imagery bewn showel in out brains, every second, just to small to not be aware of our congeniality. and believe me he and brian had so much fun on doing it.

all my regards to brain kerstetter what a great performer he is.

home 1

home 2

visions of mr. fuller

'I'd love to go to the black market, if I only knew where it was!'

thanks to eurotopics we can read some of the views from Roger-Pol Droit on the economy. in ruff economic times like this it could be helpful to understand some of it's complex and tricky ways around us.

Les Echos - France | 26/11/2008
Roger-Pol Droit on the anchoring of the market

Philosopher Roger-Pol Droit writes in Les Echos newspaper about the concept of the market and how its significance has changed down the centuries with the emergence of financial markets: "'I'd love to go to the black market, if I only knew where it was!' a respectable woman said in France during the occupation, when barter trade was a necessity. What exactly did she mean? Apparently a market is first and foremost a location. A place people can go to. ... In short, a real location where people meet to buy and sell. ... Because the fact is that over the centuries markets became locations where demand and supply met and where prices were determined. ... The development of the stock markets in the 19th and 20th centuries did not alter this anchoring of the markets. On Wall Street or in the City of London ... securities and shares are now traded instead of calves, cattle, pigs and poultry, but people must still meet and prices must be agreed on. ... The global market seems no longer to have a physical location. ... And if no one knows where it is, it is easy to get the impression that the market, how should I put it ... has become black, for example."

art was not made for tv

but youtube is doing a good job so far. it is a showcase for great moments of art in a tv-format and art that was on tv. like this great performance of john cage in 1960.

dancing with the mind

that is what we can say about bill forsyth work and his legacy.

here we can see the krafting of "in the middle somewhat elevated" created in collaboration with sylvie guillem and part of one of his great works
"impressing the czar". that great soundtrack was composed by thom willems. it was premiered in 1988 and was a very good critic to the "man in the box". remember that TV was just starting to have its golden days. how much was this work a multidisciplinary achievement is a good question.



here a bit of the finish product

to make other see deeper you maybe need to "no show"

"when no means on" a show by melvin moti at the _mmk_zollamte_ in frankfurt is a rare opportunity to see and hear details on the journey of an artist in his desire to encapsulate the process and observation of an activity that we call art. fiction tangles into reality in the pieces that melvin moti produces. even art history is involve in his collection of thoughts and visual observations.
he has the ability to revel the intrinsic parts of the process of making art in a multidisciplinary age. he makes films to be heard.

the loud "le silence de lorna" film

the film "le silence de lorna" is a drama that is evolving in europe's daly reality. the use of woman as tool for trafficking drugs, as sex slave and in this case buying and selling identities in europe and around the world is a highly paid business. in europe the mafia knows how to take advantage of the need ones, from both sides, the rich and the poor europeans. the design of the movie done by the dardenne brothers is a quite inspirational piece for who wants to investigate movie making in the age of image saturation. this movie can make someone's heart and mind really tick loud.

comtemporary art in the re-modus

i just got this book from projectspace176 called past-forward which accompanies the exhibition curated by vincent honoré and a product of his residency at the zabludowicz collection in london. honoré's text _ a fragmented time_ is a trip into the artists practicies of today and their origins. in other words, the content of past-forward is just what we need to know and re_cap about the situation in which art production or re_production is at.

michael ned holte, contribution to past-forward titled_

frequently
unasked
questions

starts like this_

"what is it that makes today's art so different, so appealing?

what's appealing is that so little is different.
The contemporary is marked by a simultaneous and contradictory refutation and reiteration of the past. in other other words, it is all about the re-:
reduce,reuse,recycle,..(+77 re-verbs).realize they're super bad, repeat, repeat, repeat... "


another great piece in the book is
"corpse in reverse" (kiev exquisite) by raimundas calasauskas.

in a numbered limited edition of 1,000 this book designed by åbäke is a piece of gold not to say it is an art piece by itself. reading this book we don't even need to see the exhibition to realize how important this contribution is for the contemporary re_search.

manifesta 7 - hope in rovereto and hope

tatiana trouve. polder, 2007 installation and drawings series "intranquility".

poetry is all over rovereto, this old city gave the artists enough power to deal with europe the old and the changes that are coming through globalization and other cultural and socio-political exchanges.

that was very well expose by videos like "caregivers"2008 by libia castro and ólafur ólafsso. but in other note many artsits exposed just simple and ironical gestures like the videos from guido van der werve with the "Nummer acht. Everything is going to be alright" 2007 or "Nummer negen. The day I didn’t turn with the world" video.

In rovereto you can smell tradition and, as the curators wished, it is the best setting for a confrontation between tradition and the modern.
on this trail we will find in rovereto's central train station projects like the "disneylend express" sticker and other pieces trying to trick the minds of the locals not a easy achievement i would say.



tim etchells delivered a sweet project, in a literal meaning of the word ice-cream. his projects has an interest in the creative possibilities and restrictions of linguistic structures, cultural codes, systems and rules, all of which he approaches as both a subject of inquiry and a mode of operation. his project "Art Flavours" involves the creation of new flavors of gelato inspired by concepts and terms from contemporary art. Through a series of meetings between the artist, a local ice-cream maker and an art writer, the work is an encounter between popular confectionary and art practice. It plays with the possibility of translating languages and ideas from the specialized context of art into new tastes. City Changes , meanwhile, consists of 20 text works, beginning with a description of a city in which nothing ever changes. This initial text is repeated and rewritten to produce a sequence of 19 increasingly preposterous variations of this imaginary place.

when you red tim etchells wrinting on the wall you really enjoying to see the craftsmanship in a very precision of a real multidisciplinary artist at work. i saw his work first in In "The Travels" 2002 with "Forced Entertainment" theater company where the performers are more or less present as themselves, sharing time and space with the audience, telling, recounting, reading and constructing the performance from evidence gathered elsewhere.

in this solo project tim etchells do reveal a more concentrated poetic action that have some how a lot to do with hope in rovereto and many other places in the world today.

manifesta 7 and why we may need museums for the souls

at manifesta7 one of the best sections is "the soul or, much trouble in the transportation of souls" curated by anselm franke and hila peleg. anselm directs the extra city center for contemporary art in antwerp and hila is currently a PhD candidate in curatorial knowledge/visual cultures at goldsmiths college/university of london. this collaboration became a very intelligent work.

they "collected" and assembled works by artists and other muldiciplinaries practicioners like natascha sadr haghighian wich have made this video which shows dancer, choreographer and former microbiologist xavier le roy in conversation with ostheopath martina zeidler{more here}. 

the two videos by keren cytter, which did push buttons on local and european conflicts, historical and present ones by mentioning the poverty of the soul and the arrogance of european societies trough the centuries towards the rest of the world and in their own local realietie as well. keren cytter managed to do a time specific work. with artist like andree korpys and markus löffler and their video piece "villa feltrinell" we can see how history is always hunting the present and how we can use that to transport the troubled soul in discussion in the m7 project.{more...}. 

the choice of presenting a series of "museums works" _ "the MUSEUM OF EUROPEAN NORMALITY" by maria thereza alves, jimmie durham and michael Taussig ,"the MUSEUM OF LEARNING" by brigid doherty (more here..). 

in the top of it all this section of the manifesat7 does a constant research on psychiatric ativities in and on society. good example are The Museum Projective Personality Testing and  The Museum for Franco Basaglia (more here..).

this specific part of the exhibition can make us think about the real time and place for museum. the relation to human necessity of remembering or forgetting reality. the artists and researchers invited to be part of this section of the manifesta are some of the most intense and witty ones working today.

the artist of m7, coming from all over, the planet are not easy on the europeans or italians, by the way,  making this manifesta not an easy one to digest or even understand by locals but very important one for the intensify the art making as a scientific work almost.

the manifest7 index is a good publication to go along with the exhibition. the piece "regenerating memory" written by hedwig fijen, fabio cavallucci and andreas hepkemayer goes to the core of this project. the choice of the location was really good and important as well.

more later on  the "principle hope " in rovereto...

blu blog

news of the blu activities

1# HomeBodies exhibition

Investigation of possible experiences of a Space No. 7 by jonas jensen
book written in danish and english, 62 pages, 2008


finally is there

The first HomeBodies exhibition will open the 8th of August 2008 and run until the 13th of September 2008 at the Atelierfrankfurt, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Seven artists and one curator have produced this exhibition. Ola Bielas (Poland), Francisca Bancalari (Argentina), Keren Cytter (Israel), Teresa Gillespie (UK), Jonas Jensen (Denmark), Dirk Krecker (Germany), and Charlotte F. Smith (UK), have materialized works independently and or dependently within the HomeBodies framework created by Annabelle von Girsewald. The sculptural and audio installations, videos, and textual based works investigate alienation and displacement in relation to the concept ‘home’.

HomeBodies began in early 2007 as a student project of the London Consortium. Annabelle von Girsewald’s call for artists developed into a two-day HomeBodies Conference at Birkbeck College, London 2007 where 12 international academics and artists presented papers and works responding to the transformation of ‘home’ and to Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space. Bachelard’s phenomenological and psychological interpretations of the house and in particular Jung’s dual image of the cellar and attic were explored.
The process-orientated project has continuously evolved into a global altermodern explanation of ‘home’ devoid of nostalgia.

“HomeBodies” originates from the American word homebody meaning a person who prefers pleasures and activities that center around the suburban home and especially the basement. This is the starting point for the project yet in reverse, the displacement of its 20th century meaning. Therefore not feeling ‘at-home’ becomes a program in effect. The program aims to include multiple positions within the HomeBodies complexity of place-making while struggling with the foundation of its constructions to comprehend the correlation between the body and the home. The project accepts the danger of our habitat remaining in the dark rather than giving in to desire to see in entirety.

Exhibition opening 08.08.2008, 8 - 10pm

open tuesday and friday from 5 to 8pm
saturday from 3 to 6pm

or by appointment

atelierfrankfurt
hohenstaufenstrasse 13 - 25
60327 frankfurt ma main
kontact@atelierfrankfurt.de
tel. 069-7430377-1

some photos here
http://www.new.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2003697&l=479a5&id=1002720313

who or what is killing art ???

here a very good entry from graham coulter-smith in his blogg artintelligence.net. a really interesting take on the donald kuspit's book “The End of Art”.

some of graham's views are very "new yorke art world" views, but never-the-less it is a very good material for a semester study in our age of multidisciplinary art practices. this is my first contact with the _artintelligence.net_ and i like it. all respect. graham is a teacher and have done a lot of research and he enjoy put it into writing.

all things considered, i would say that even if we do love the the _situationist_ attitude of getting life and art mingled we should be always careful not to kill art or get confuse about some basic differences that does exists between those lets say "fields". otherwise it may give room for really bad exhibitions or shows - maybe we show talk, next, about the difference between these two terms "exhibitions" and "show" so much used in art. we might get some answer about the justification of the entertainment and shock-value in contemporary art. maybe that could be the real possible reasons of the killing of art in a very near future.

death is lively then ever

we can't have enough of death imagery
and pleasure principle are doing it at its best.
with so much war and conflicts around the planet death still reining in life, art and fashion.

so much imagination

video drawings or paintings in motion, what is this all about. maybe you can tell us.

here is a good example "muto" done by blu.

or letter A


this works have a strong appeal as video but do they held the beauty of drawing or action painting-like that they actually try to produce. 

the question in basel is, finally, “How would contemporary art be without video?”

and i  would say "how about the computer animation and computer manipulation in contemporary art practices"? as they invite hans op de beek to talk about the video in comtemporary art in basel this week.

science artists where are they

is there many like cornelia hesse-honegger a science artists out there these days?

some how they are in between the art and crafts. they were in the past much more regarded as artists. are they today still be able to claim the artists status?

with the advance of technology in imagery making i think they almost lost that artistic status.

thanks very much for iori wallace for the tipp about this artist and her achievements .

waiting for godot in new orleans by paul chan

paul chan realized this project for creative time.

mammals are strange humans

astrid rieger makes that very clear in her films

the _i am man parade_

the parade can begin


the idea from simon danny to break some glasses, total of eight big plates was awesome.

just look after for his art, great stuff.

what a great parade, even the rain that came down not one day before and not and day after could stop the sunny energy of the parade. it was just one hour, from portikus to the mmk in frankfurt. arto lidsay did a great job. we felt like in a brazilian carnival without a samba school.


ayaka okutsu did design and coordinated the whole costume making for the event and she was one of the main organ of the parade. ayaka drawing and works soon will be all over.




philosophers, including udo kittelman looking like a pro-smoking in european streets demonstrator, and scientists like ilja karilampi and agassi bangura, were looking very serious but daniel birnbaum kept them cheerful all along the way.




we had some very surprising and risky performances like the one by jorma foth


it was a bit like a circus, but what else, it is a _kunst parade_ but is was artists parade afer all.

and the crowd in the rain was a very elegant one with style of their own as you can see below,




the torso from ryan siegan-smith with the several parts cut off and parade along side by side in was really intense. there was the man. here you can see ryan in as silver super hero and magni and nake man on the right.


at artsite.tv is a really good video of the event.
enjoy it as much we did.

thanks to avi dehlinger for the great photos of the event.

the globalized crystal ball and "if everyone wants a better world, why don't we have one?" question

bahram sadeghi will continue his search for an answer to the question "if everyone wants a better world, why don't we have one?" the result will be presented during the evening. part six of the visual foreign correspondents is a work by the Israeli artist ronen eidelman. he will be present to introduce his work.
thanks to ozz for the tip.

sound grabbing

amy granat and the materiality of film

it is very nice to see today somebody using film in such an elegant way like amy granat does. the works of amy granat are very much in tune with the materiality of film. her use of old material as appropriation or her use of the film negatives to construct new images give us a great insight in this old but ever changing media. in her solo show at basis in frankfurt give us a good idea how much still there to be explore around this fine beauty that is "film" itself. in one of her installations she creates a celebration of the fine moment of the film leftovers. black and white film may sounds nostalgic but it is a great way to see the future of the film abstractionism that is yet to come to the big screens or maybe will stay in the small screens and black cuber for ever. maybe amy will be able to bring it to the big screen one day. her drawings and big photo images are also part of this great show. amy works remind us of the great the tradition of film pieces by viking eggelin, like symphonie diagonale to mantion one of his masterpieces of 1927.



in the art side we have him with "anemic cinema" ,1926



what strikes me in the work of amy granat is the fine tuning that she is able to perform in combining the old and the new films technics. her installations are not made using film projectors in an eternal loop mode, they are visual sculptures.

below is amy granat at work in her installation at the "confort moderne" show in paris.

how to make a button by and with miranda july

remember that girl that gave us _Me and You and Everyone We Know_, she is back at vbs.tv
here it is all included sculpture, performance, video and installation.

california video just arrived at the getty and a bit online

the getty center in l.a. just opened the california video exhibition. it is showing videos from a to z of californian artists made in the last 40 years. true gems can be seen there. even if you can not see the whole videos online. you can have a idea about the exhibition and go and get the video somewhere else. it is a good survey. videos like _lot 63 grave c_2006 by sam green, _losing: a conversation with the parents_1977 by matha rosler, _masse of images_1878 by ulysses jenkins and _big wrench_1980 by chris burden just to mention a phew. have fun.

"you tube variations" dontneed.org screening for licher filmtage frankfurt

"you tube variations" by anonymous is a selections of material found in the internet where film and art are mixed or are put together sometime by chance.

kung fu fighting

dontneed.org will be on

today monday the 3.3.2008

dontneed.org will celebrate its launching from 8pm on***

come and join us at oppenheimerstr. 43,  frankfurt am main

there will be a live interview with boris the "bunny releaser" and kaspar knigge direct from copenhagen 'Ö'Ö'Ö' and we will be able to watch jorma foth "calling gregorio". hanna hildebrand will be around talking without words. ayaka okutsu will chat with saul judd, the lights will be by lasse schmit hansen, videosounds by duft punk and duft champ by ilja karilampi spacial energy appearance by agassi bangera.

great shout to mathias wollin*, kolja remke*, adreas dehlinger*, shane munro*, dana munro,* christian tonner, sascha hanssen* micha,* lasse schmidt hansen,* städel academy,*

the best art magazine around

vice is really doing the job. the kids at vice are doing an awesome job in reporting. from all over and about all kinds of interesting material from miserable street kids that are trying to survive or more likely to kill themselves as earlier as possible in odessa because their own  misery to the people that leave in the in cemetery in sierra leone. nothing new but the way they do correspond to fashion of skull and bones. that we are experiencing everywhere.

just out vice 02.08 interview with dan colen 

dan colen tell about his works.

richard prince give us some ideas about his work.

swoon at the moma

in berlin, may 2005, was the last time i saw swoon.



swoon post her art in walls all over the world.
now she had the opportunity to talk about her work in the moma.

regarding her work and artists that choose to work in the streets remains always the question, is possible and necessary to translate the work into a institutional or white cube setting?

beyond art

is hay in art a banal or a serious subject? alan ritch has been writing and posting a lot about it.

how about arborsculpture how serious is that art form if, acctually, it is one? or it is just design. somehow it has a long traditions tradition. here a nice piece in cabinet magazine about it.