the documenta nightmerish edition

i went to the documenta 12 which could be called the d13 or the nightmerish documenta edition.

seems that mrs. ruek and mr. buergel managed to hack kassel. lets be honest they do not like kassel. just look at the rice terrasse at the schloss wilhelmshöhe, it looks like a ecological desaster.

yes the circus came to town and put up its tent called pavillion auve, right there in front of the orangerie. this pavillion which became an art "kraempel laden" (german for big mix bazar with whatever in it. a little bit of everything but nothing really making sense as a whole). that must be the answer for one of the famous theory of the documenta 12 makers - das bloße leben - the naked life. they did show mediocre painting with naked bodies, that for sure.
what is hard to accept is the arrogancy of the curatorial duett in put up a hausfrau exhibition show - (housewife show) and try to disguise it as a feminist approach for a socio-political discourse in art.
if something good is coming out of the documenta is the magazine that is made out of 97 magazines around the globe and are not really in the hands of the curators. sorry i have to disappoint you. the work with the magazines is also very tight controlled by the main curators, so much, that some magazines were invited to be part of the documenta 12 but decided not to participate because they would have to be very critical to the documenta 12 itself and they would not be paid for their work as result of that .

never was the documenta, this is my 4th one, so unintelligent and boring.

but dont worry frankfurt is not that far from kassel, in the case that you must come to kassel you might as well stop by frankfurt and see better shows in this town, here is a list of some of them.


the kapital - blue chips and masterpieces at mmk with a great bonus _tino segal_ in the old costumes agency hall across the street. a join venture by the mmk and portikus are showing some new works from cattelan. one of the them is _frau c_ outside of the portikus.
in the portikus will be the IT TAKES SOMETHING TO MAKE SOMETHING
THE COLLECTION RAUSCH show. portikus



the pense sauvage - in the frankfurter kunstverein.

a. r. penk in the schirn - with john bock as bonus as well.

julia oschatz - hermitage heritage at anita beckers gallery

isabelle fein at parisa kind gallery

DRACULARISING at neue alte brücke

about radicality - with and by steve parrino

Parrino writes, "Radicality comes from context and not necessarily form. The forms are radical in memory, by way of continuing the once radical, through extensions of its history. The avant-garde leaves a wake and, through mannerist force, continues forward. Even on the run, we sometime look over our shoulders, approaching art with intuition rather than strategy. Art of this kind is more cult than culture".

palais de tokio is open _la marque noire_ a mega show with the best from steve parino.
palais de tokyo
more here
critical note with a nice postumus dedication

democracy is dead - viva la democracia

cristoph büchel managed again to get the americans to face their own contraditions. this time with the help, or not, of a museum. after stage the guantanamo piece _ "guantanamo initiative"_ an installation that proposes to take over the u.s. lease of the military base on cuba's southeastern coast and turn the area -- now used as a concentration camp for prisoners of war -- into a cultural center. the neo-conceptual artwork features an aerial photo of the base, several documents and representative copies of the annual lease payments from the u.s. government -- checks for a comical $4,085 (which the cuban government has been rejecting since the 1959 communist revolution)_in miami last year with gionni motti.
now is the massmoca the stage to another coup d'artiste.



oliver ressler is trying also to do his american democracy demontage with the fly direct democracy. this project is going around europe and probably will not make to the democratic side of the atlantic.

_a final note_
americans revealed, a long time ago, in funny comedy shows like the family monster, their views and true about their own democracy .

cape town - stockholm (on thembo mjobo)

michael blum will lunch his next project, a hörspiel (radio piece) and a book called _" cape town - stockholm (on thembo mjobo)". this will be broadcasted by swedish radio P1, may 17th, 22.05. more here at mobileartproduction the producers of the project.

here an interview with michael blum about the project.

MAGDALENA MALM: Cape Town - Stockholm (On Thembo Mjobo) is a story about the character Thembo Mjobo. It revolves around Thembo Mjobo and describes the relationship between Sweden and South Africa during the apartheid regime. How did you become interested in this topic?
MICHAEL BLUM: I think that I initially bumped into it while reading about Olof Palme and his assassination 20 years ago, and the South African trail. There were also some Henning Mankell novels and research for past projects on South Africa's liberationmovement and Swedish social-democracy which informed me a great deal. But above all, I should mention my fascination with post-apartheid South Africa. The shift from the apartheid regime, often compared to Nazi Germany, to the Rainbow Nation is something unique and incredible. Imagine Jews peacefully seizing power in 1945 Germany and
governing with the Nazis! I don’t want to indulge in a religious or psychoanalytical reading of the situation, but it’s an absolutely fascinating phenomenon. Forgiveness was a very efficient weapon, even though amnesia proved even better. Gradually since 1994, National Party (the party of apartheid) members and representatives have enrolled in the ANC to the point that the NP has dissolved into the ANC, and it officially ceased to exist after it got only 2% of the vote in the 2003 election! There were people who understood that their own interest implied a fair treatment of their oppressor, and a ruling minority who understood that in order to keep power, they had to give it up. Of course the situation was much more complex (specific economic and geopolitical factors), but still civil war was avoided, and South Africa turned into the most positive role model for the Middle East and other conflict areas.
When you invited me to develop a project in Stockholm, it appeared that it would be interesting to dig into the Swedish support of the Southern African liberation movements from a Swedish perspective. Scandinavian countries, and Sweden above all, supported these movements more than all other countries together - politically, financially, morally - developing over time very intimate relationships with them. But this very recent history has already vanished. Most of the Swedish protagonists are still around, yet their story remains untold. One can see the results of Swedish support in South Africa, but I was curious about the effects that those relationships had had on Sweden itself, a country that is more or less the complete opposite of South Africa. Interestingly enough, a series of books published by Africa Groups of Sweden is about to come out. There is obviously something in the Zeitgeist that is calling for a re-evaluation.

MM: The project consists of a radio programme and a book. Why did you choose those forms of expression? And what is the difference between the book and the radio piece?
MB: The nature of your invitation, which was not linked to an exhibition space, left the field of possibilities wide open. I wondered what would be the best medium for such an enterprise. It obviously could have been an academic book, a novel or a documentary film, three options which I considered. But I was more interested in experimenting withforms of narration and challenging notions of truth and authenticity, not by deconstructing an existing narrative, since there wasn't any, but by creating a singular form for a new narrative.To the terms radio piece or radio programme, I prefer the German Hörspiel, which literally means 'listening play'. It is both generic and playful and refers to an existing tradition. So in the case of Cape Town – Stockholm (On Thembo Mjobo), the Hörspiel is an actual sound document, an interview with a former member of the intelligence community who provides us with information on Mjobo, while the book is an overview of the context he lived in. The piece remains circling around the same story, not merely told from two individual perspectives, but rather on two complementary scales. The book is not a plain non-fiction book, but really an experiment in storytelling, where information is provided in its research context with documentary accuracy, but is very open to interpretation.

MM: The project you did for the last Istanbul Biennial, A Tribute to Safiye Behar, offered a new angle on recent history in Turkey. In the same way the Thembo project does this with Swedish history. What were the reactions in Turkey?
MB: I wouldn’t draw a parallel between Safiye and Thembo because these are very different stories, two opposite ways of re-interpreting history. In Turkey, you have the overly constructed myth of Atatürk and of the young nation's birth, and my project was about deconstructing the myth (of course, it had many other aspects but let me just mention this one). In Sweden, it’s quite the opposite situation: hardly anyone remembers something that has taken place, so my intervention instead consists of building a narrative which doesn’t really exist yet. As for the reactions to the Tribute to Safiye Behar… in Istanbul, as anywhere else, reactions are rarely what you expect them to be. Of course, the true Kemalists, mostly by means of the daily Cumhürriyet, expressed their hostility as expected, but the piece was generally well received and seriously considered. Even conservative newspapers did a fair reading of it. Until lately, I liked to think that it had contributed to the movement for an open debate about recent history in Turkey. But the recent murder of Hrant Dink has reminded me of how precarious things are.

MM: Thembo Mjobo is the story of a fictional character, but based on real events. He could have existed. In the project real events and documents are intertwined with a fictional narrative. What do you want to achieve by using both fiction and documentary material?
MB: Fiction can be more real than what we sometimes take for granted. Isn't Thembo Mjobo more real than ... Michael Jackson, for instance? I have the methodology of an historian, but not his ethics. What's particular here is that most of the protagonists (supporters, victims, and perpetrators) are still alive. This is very recent history. So I had to be careful, and make sure that the share of fiction that I was injecting was coherent and didn't offend any living person. You don't want to get into trouble with people you respect or admire. That's why there's so little fiction left in the end. I had to focus on Mjobo because he was the perfect person for the narrative, the most Swedish South African ever. I didn't want to talk about Sweden and South Africa at large, but about a personal experience, namely how a geopolitical situation can be perceived and experienced from a single perspective.

air and site specific installations

an air tunnel or "Plastikluftdurchgang" was constructed to allow the air to go through a home without invade it. that is what
carl palm did at exhibition-space TSCHOPERL in frankfurt. we will have more on that, with carl himself, later on.

to realise this work carl had to remove the windows for the entire time of the installation. that mean britta and klaus, the residents of teh space and producers of the exhibition, must endure the elements. april in germany is know for be a very funny weather month.



carl is back from chine, and here is what here want to say about his site specific work "Plastik Luft Durch Gang"

"Plastik Luft Durch Gang" has its starting point in a sculpture, constructed out of plastic foil, metal strings and screws, forming and following the measures of the two connected window, sized down in three steps thru the possibilities and physio- practical restrictions of the apartment, the inhabitants living conditions and a special care for the air.

I thought of the construction as a possibility for the air to transport thru the building in both directions without mixing with the air from the inside. I like the thought of separating something un- separable, dreamlike, magical thought or feelings giving you the sense of something impossible and awkward. Constructed with partly raw material and in some cases in a brutal way. The installation takes over almost the hole space/ apartment and suggests the visitors to move around and under it if they want to experience its total size or function.

A note on the two doors leading out of the apartment told people to keep the doors closed to enhance the fact of separation of air which created a super warm, low oxygen- leveled space with torture like beautiful sights and sound of the fresh air flowing freely thru the passage, from one window to the other without helping anybody on the inside with the air they needed.

how artists are dealing with the real war and the media war

at dictionaryofwar.org we can watch a video with dan perjovsch showing how he deals with the media and the war.

he just start or finished a project in the moma called_ what happened to US. i been asking myself that question for a quite while.

why surrealism and dadaism still alive

thanks to andrew hu



thanks to
www.cyriak.co.uk/



the original idea


the answer video

what makes new art so worthy

the new exhibition in mmk in frankfurt really make some people think, what make artworks, that are very new, to get such an attention curatorial and moneywise? one thing for sure, when you see the works of simon dybbroe moller next to some many great artists and not only next to it but reflecting upon these young old masters like donald judd, walter de maria, jo baer, warhol's "white disaster II", jim dime's "black bathroom #1" to mention some, we see that at the moment is there a good production of art that has its focus in the quality of the discurse that they try to evoque and not their formal terms alone, which is the most case in the art jungle we can find in every other art fair and bienalle.
in this case with - kapital - blue chips and masterpieces - the new exhibitonat MMK goes farther to realce the excellent colleting hand from a privite and professinal eye of rolf rick. rick was a gallerist and collector of rare qualities. just to mention two special picks of him, the works from steven parrino and barry le va.

frankfurt is establishing itself as an art vortex in the last few years. not only that here are so many artists working in such a qualitative manner, like simon moller, but the discurse around the art production has been very accentuated. artists like willem de rooij, simon starling and mark leckey are working in the art academy here.
we can also thank, that people like daniel birnbaum is in town, if you read his new book chronology lunched last fall, you will know what i am talking about. because in the ultra production of everything, including art, in this moment and time, there is so many_ do not needed_ productions out there.

in the end what make new art so worthy is the masterpieces that inspired the make of the new art.


video of the piece by elain sturtvan. a copy of felix gonzales torres piece in a room by carl ostendarp decorated with warhol, lichtenstein and wesselman.

gazira babeli solo exhibition at odyssey in sl

this is the first exhibition of gazira babeli in second life, she was borned in sl last year. all the information and details about the exhibition are at hand in sl.

to see the exhibition go to ( remember that to see or experience anything in second life you must be a resident).
odyssey

here a review in german at kunst-blog

we will miss sol lewitt, that for sure

some nice thing written about an excellent artists

04/12/2007 - countytimes.com

Sol LeWitt, a Modern Master, Left a Vibrant Mark on the County

By: Nancy Barnes

"Actually, [artist] Eva Hesse, she introduced me to Sol," said sculptor and Roxbury resident Tom Doyle Monday of his 55-year friendship with Sol LeWitt, as the recent death of the art world giant elicited memories from the Connecticut native's Litchfield County associates, both old and new.

"He was very comfortable. He was very self-possessed and self-assured. He was very, very self-assured," Mr. Doyle said of Mr. LeWitt. "It was never cold. I never felt he was cold. It was not over-intellectualized. It was not confrontational. It was very understandable," he said of a body of work that remains inextricably intertwined with serial, repetitive minimalist art and the conceptualist art that, in short order, flourished.

At mid-career, Mr. LeWitt introduced printer's ink colors into his geometric schemes. Subsequently, the waves and grids that covered walls and Mr. LeWitt's more modestly sized goauches gained their palette from the basic hues of reds, yellows, blues and also black.

Born in Hartford, Mr. LeWitt, who died last Sunday at age 78 in New York from cancer, grew up in New Britain. While spending his later years at his home in Chester, he exhibited at the New Arts Gallery in Litchfield.

"'You have to see the new Sol LeWitt exhibition. It's phenomenal. There are 30 new works in this show,'" Tony Carretta, who owns the New Arts Gallery, has recalled a visitor to Litchfield County as saying. The exhortation, he continued, was met with, "Where is it, at the Met or MOMA? The reply was 'No, it's ten minutes from here, across from the Bunnell's Farm at New Arts Gallery.'"

"His whole philosophy was, the concept was more important than the actual thing," said Mr. Carretta, who noted Monday he had invited Mr. LeWitt to do the show that elicited the visitor's response with its 30 gouaches and models for large, site-specific structures. Mr. LeWitt also participated in some of Mr. Carretta's group shows, among them his highly touted exhibition on drawing.

"To me, he was part of the last generation of modern masters. Those were the guys that made an impact in the art world in our age. They had a very definite direction that they were exploring, and it changed the whole dynamics of the art world. Since then, it's kind of been a regurgitation of what came before. ... They were young artists that were coming through that were redefining what art was. They were all part of the same circle," he said, thinking back to the Abstract-Expressionists who put America on top of the heap in the art world in the 1950s, with American Pop and then minimalist and conceptualist artists like Mr. LeWitt following.

Mr. Carretta described Mr. LeWitt as a "pretty down-to-earth, regular guy. You would not know if you met him his stature in the art world. When we did go to lunch, he usually talked about his kids. He was a regular guy."

Mr. Doyle met Mr. LeWitt in the early 1960s when Mr. LeWitt was working on his acclaimed "Muybridge Series," works that were named after the British photographer Eadweard Muybridge, who studied sequence and motion. He recalled the work schedule the young artist, who then worked as a night receptionist at the Museum of Modern Art, maintained.

Up at 5 a.m., according to Mr. Doyle, he would work until noon, and then make his way up to MOMA, visiting different people.

"I used to get him to help me do things," said Mr. Doyle, who observed that persons have traveled to Europe to avoid helping him move. "I think he helped us move when we moved from Fifth Avenue to the Bowery. That was a marathon," said the sculptor, whose large, stretching works require heavy tools.

Mr. LeWitt went to Europe after earning his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Syracuse University. There, he saw works by the Old Masters. Living in Italy in the 1980s, color began to infuse his works-among them, pieces in an exhibition Mr. Doyle saw in Amsterdam.

"These were Piero della Francesca colors," Mr. Doyle said, referring to the Early Renaissance painter who loved geometry and to whose palette, he said, Mr. LeWitt gave an Umbrian cast. "[Mr. LeWitt] transported the rooms by the way he used the forms. It wasn't drastic or upsetting. It was very beautiful," he said of an artist whose early structures were created of white enamel and whose wall drawings, of which 1,200 were executed during his lifetime, extended across surfaces primarily in graphite and white.

"Once he was able to move from minimalism and keep his center, it wasn't like a big jump," said Mr. Doyle of Mr. LeWitt's capacity to maintain one sensibility throughout his long career.

According to Mr. Doyle, however, Mr. LeWitt's private collection was eclectic. "It was very universal. It was what he liked."

Among Mr. LeWitt's last major exhibitions was one organized by the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford entitled "Incomplete Cubes," in which 122 aluminum cubes were placed throughout the museum's permanent collection, as well as a retrospective organized by the San Francisco Museum of Art that traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago as well as the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

"He was very unassuming. He had a great internal presence. He had a very calming effect on people. He was very stable and trustworthy," said Mr. Doyle, who also praised Mr. LeWitt's generosity. "I'll miss him a lot."

how about criticise art while making fun of your own teacher

michael eddy and a friend made a whole exercise on that with really good drowings as result. what you think? this type of criticism works today. some how the results are really funny but with serious food for thought as well. but could it be contra- productive? or not a good idea? in a time where everybody is kissing asses in the art bussiness world.

sound grabbing

for sounds and more sounds
talk with riccardo mantelli but anyway he is coming in your way in rl and sl.
i came across riccardo in second life, and i can tell one thing, his sounds are coming strong in different ways
visually and audible. grabb it in his website www.riccardomantelli.com.

taste of things to come

peace demonstration by the performance group second front and friends in second life. the demo performance took place in the warzone last monday, the 14 of march 2007. more about it here www.slfront.blogspot.com and www.slfront.blogspot.com.

"to slide away from visuals and get deeper."

david hammoms attack again, check this village voice article by jerry saltz on davi's new show at L & M Arts in new york.

At L & M, Hammons adds his considerable feel for absence. Over the last 40 years this artist has made installations that entailed leaving a lot of galleries empty or semi-empty, notably the gigantic Ace Gallery in New York, which in 2002 he cast in total darkness, providing tiny blue flashlights with which to navigate, or his 1998 installation at the Kunsthalle in Bern that entailed a bluish light and the music of Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, among others. Hammons has said that he wants "to slide away from visuals and get deeper." At L & M, not only does Hammons do this; along the way he conjures thoughts of shamanism, politics, consumerism, animism, genre painting, animal rights, and jokes. Here, we're treated to a sensibility as barbed, serious, maybe fearsome, and as passionate as any in the art world.

read the resst of the article here
http://www.villagevoice.com/art/0710,saltz,75946,13.html

contemporary art and freedom

this work, that you posted with the email invite for your show at www.stock7.de/index_2.htm sounds very interesting john. could you tell us if it is a critic comment on the relation between art and museum or how art can became a prisoner instead of staying as a free thought or action which is the desire of most of real good artists for centuries.
duchamp, for sure, likes the thoght that everytime some bory goest to piss it can have an personal encounter with art in blisstful way.
more about john von bergen art here www.jvonb.com
to see his comment just go to comments.

julia oschatz and aliens

dingbatz.net

for good eletronic music mix, here we go patrick raddatz from dingbatz.net check his site for some good e_mix.

contemporary art in jerusalem

a visit to the israely museum in jerusalem can give you a good view about the contemporary art situation in the global art trading.
a real good choice from europe to us and middle east make up the most of the new aquired works. one of the many works is an installation from aernout mik _called organic escalator, 2000_, see video below. michael elmgreen and ingar dragset are part of the new work with a quite poetic installation work called _ somewhere in the world it's four o'oclock; just a single wrong move: blocking the view_, 2004 . the collection is very diversified exploring very simple subjects like computer animation to complex social relations. another installation work (or not) is _the jungle book project_, 2002 by pierre bismuth. some youngester just crashed to get a nap in the space. not a bad ideia, actually. the israely museum in jerusalem is more like a city.

jeremy millar - zugzwang (almost complete)

just back from a lecture by jeremy millar at the staedel art academy. jeremy just talk about his latest project _ zugzwang (almost complete). what a great persuit around the posssibilities of investigate the work of an artist like marcel duchamp and at the same time make a hommage to him. i would repeat what simon starling, who invited jeremy, said about the film and center piece of the whole project which bares the same title, it is simply a master piece.
the exhibition took place in the metropole galerie last september in folkestone in the english coast. where md did came to visit, as chess player, in 1933.

jeremy show in this cinematrographical peace a mastering in directing, editing the text material and had a great help in the narration done by the very good reader pierre huyghe. if you have the chance, in the future to see _zugzwang (almost complete)_ dontmiss it.

fantastic butt and more

remember those guys that brought us the butt mag,
they are are doing a great job bringing us the _fantastic man mag_ and more.
i just have one thing to say _ fantastic