Sunday, July 29, 2007

SPIKE -- The International Art Magazine


Spike art quarterly
Kaiserstraße 113–115
1070 Vienna, Austria
Tel.: +43 1 360 85 201
editionen@spikeart.at
spike@spikeart.at

http://www.spikeart.at



No. 3
KENDELL GEERS
IN FUCK WE TRUST, 2007

Silk screen print on paper
84 x 59,4 cm
numbered and signed
Edition 100 + 20 e.a.

Kendell Geers, an artist born in South Africa, describes himself as a "Terrorealist". His art makes use of the radical formal language of violence and pornography, but as a subtext it runs an intelligent system of references, often based on language and word-images, integrating quotations from art and mass culture – and leaving nothing to chance. His poster is covered with an allover based on reflections of the word "FUCK".

Saturday, July 28, 2007

Thursday, July 19, 2007

Saatchi's new art gallery

Charles Saatchi will announce a small artistic coup today. One of the wealthiest collectors in Britain Saatchi has secured a partnership with contemporary art auctioneers Phillips de Pury and Company which will allow free admission even to special exhibitions and touring shows, for which almost all national museums charge. When his old gallery in the former County Hall in London closed two years ago, after bitter disputes with the Japanese landlords, adult admission was £8.50. His prediction is that visitor numbers at the new gallery will grow from 600,000 to more than 1 million a year. The opening exhibition next year will be of Chinese contemporary art, including Wang Guangyi's Materialist's Art (2006). "Our role will be to concentrate on very new art from around the world, and feature rotating exhibitions drawn from the collection and occasionally from other sources," Saatchi said. "We hope that free admission will enable many more state schools to organise school visits and bring in more students who can't always afford normal gallery charges. Free entry can only help spread the interest in contemporary art."
The new space, off the King's Road in south-west London, has been delayed again, with alterations to the top floor bringing the total display space in 15 large rooms to 70,000 square feet.

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

John Szarkowski: 1925-2007


John Szarkowsi, who until his retirement, was the director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, was instrumental in making the world recognize photography as art. Szarkowski had a great case for being considered the most important force in modern American photography, the curator who insisted that photography was a contemporary art form as serious and demanding as painting, and who single-handedly took colour photography from the advertising pages of glossy magazines into the galleries.
In 1962, Szarkowski took over from the esteemed Edward Steichen as the curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He remained there for three decades. In 1967, he curated the New Documents show that featured the work of street photographers like Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander alongside Diane Arbus's arresting, and often shocking, portraits. Both Winogrand and Friedlander were arbiters of a new aesthetic in photography, their seemingly casual images of crowded streets, everyday scenes and ordinary people a direct contrast to the meaningfulness of 'serious' reportage. Szarkowski was the first critic and curator to identify, and to recognise the importance of, this new and radical aesthetic, which was resolutely downbeat but oddly illuminating. The New Documents show was controversial and caused consternation among conservative critics. It was nothing, though, compared to the chorus of outraged disapproval that greeted William Eggleston's Guide, which Szarkowski curated in 1976. "Mr. Szarkowski throws all caution to the winds and speaks of Mr Eggleston's pictures as perfect", sneered Hilton Kramer in the New York Times. "Perfect? Perfectly banal, perhaps. Perfectly boring, certainly." Today, Eggleston is perhaps the most influential American photographer of the last 30 years, his colour-saturated images of the surreal banality of the American south oft-copied but never equaled in their strangeness. "It demonstrated to a lot of young photographers not only that you could photograph in colour," Szarkowski later remarked of the accompanying book, William Eggleston's Guide, "but you could photograph the humble vernacular of your own life."
That, more or less, is where we live now in terms of contemporary photography, though the age of digital manipulation is upon us and the photograph is no longer simply a record of a transient or decisive moment, but something altogether more slippery and indefinable. Perhaps even duplicitous.
Anyone remotely interested in the trajectory of modern photography from Walker Evans onwards should certainly try to find Szarkowski's seminal book, The Photographer's Eye (1964), as well as his equally incisive study, Looking at Photographs: 100 Pictures from the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art (1973).
"One might compare the art of photography to the act of pointing," he once wrote, mischievously, adding, "It must be true that some of us point to more interesting facts, events, circumstances, and configurations than others." He pointed to the future too, unerringly, and with a confidence born of great critical intelligence, instinct and an eye for the humble vernacular of everyday life.

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Douglas Gordon: Between Darkness and Light. Works 1989 - 2007


Douglas Gordon, Feature Film, 1999, Video installation; DVD (transferred from 35 mm film), running time: 122 min., DVD player, 2 projectors, sound system, Dimensions variable, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, film still: Courtesy of the artist.
Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg
Hollerplatz 1
38440 Wolfsburg, Germany
Once you become immersed in one of Douglas Gordon's video installations (b. 1966 in Glasgow), it can be very difficult to extricate yourself from its hold. Whether they involve seemingly familiar images, sequences or music from the films of Alfred Hitchcock, historical documentary footage of patients from psychiatric institutions - making the viewer more like a voyeur than a detached observer – or elaborate film productions, his works make recollected material appear familiar and strange at once. Here, good and evil, life and death, guilt and innocence, the banal and the sublime are closely entwined, and sometimes cannot be separated. Douglas Gordon uses a wide range of artistic and filmic techniques to explore the ambivalent sensitivities of human nature: images that have been vastly enlarged or reduced, reflected, inverted, endlessly repeated, speeded up or slowed down, or are brought (temporarily) to a complete standstill.

Thursday, July 05, 2007

Fischli & Weiss

"WILL HAPPINESS FIND ME ?"

Rudolph Stingel: “épater le bourgeois”



Whitney Museum of American Art
June 28, 2007 - October 14, 2007

Employing such materials as rubber, carpet, painted aluminum, Styrofoam, and paint, Rudolf Stingel's work questions and disrupts the viewer's understanding and experience of an art object. Although Stingel's work does not always involve paint on canvas, it continually reflects upon some of the fundamental questions concerning painting today, including authenticity, hierarchy, meaning, and context. He brings together the ordinary and the religious to show the viewer that they are the ones creating the meaning and importance of certain objects and rituals. Stingel is a fascinating figure in terms of his investigationof painting and his use of unconventional materials. He also uses materials to engage with notions of decoration. His approach expands upon and challenges traditional ideas of painting and sculpture.
In 2005, Stingel disguised his art dealer and gallery owner as a somewhat familiar celebrity by using the methods of a shrine and placing her portrait in the center of an empty well lit gallery. With such focus and celebration viewers assumed she was someone important. In which Stingel creates an opportunity to ask several questions. How do we decide who or what is worthy of such immaculate representation? How should this space be used and what belongs here? In a more sculptural piece by Stingel, a Buddha becomes an artist or an artist becomes a Buddha with multiple hands and tools for crafting. To an artist these processes are spiritual rituals, ones capable of providing enlightenment for both the maker and the viewer. In another work, what could be seen as an instructional poster for cooking (yet another process to be revered) is hung and viewed as fine art. In revealing the methods and representations we use in order to signify that something or someone is more important or more sacred, Stingel is able to create an icon out of just about anything. The banal becomes infused with meaning, and he is not the only one creating it, we the viewers are just as much a part of this process, the process of communicating through art.
In this show at the Whitney viewers are invited to participate even more by drawing on the foiled walls of one room and your portrait being reflected along with raised gold brocade patterns in a shimmering mirrored floor of another. The shiny beautiful environments draw, even those who would rather scoff, in long enough to think about the art. By commanding us to work, to do our job as the viewer, we become engaged and his art succeeds on all levels.
Stingel has just finished a show at the MCA (Chicago) ending in May and was also shown in the 2006 Whitney Biennial. Stingel was born in Merano Italy in 1956, and he continues to live and work in New York City.

Tuesday, July 03, 2007

WEIWEI'S WORK FALLS IN STORM

Ai Weiwei's monumental sculpture Template has collapsed after a short but violent storm in Kassel. As Der Standard reports, the 12 meter (39.4 foot) tall wooden structure—the most photographed work at Documenta 12—is made with doors and windows from houses that have fallen victim to China's building boom.
Ai seems undisturbed by the destruction. "It's better than before," the artist told the newspaper. "Now the force of nature becomes visible. And art becomes beautiful only through such emotions." Hours after the sculpture collapsed, a buyer was due to inspect the work for purchase. "Now, the price has doubled," said Ai.