viernes, 29 de octubre de 2010
La Bienal de Sevilla no sobrevive a la crisis
sábado, 23 de octubre de 2010
El Pais ::: Babélica Manifesta
Instalación Assembly instructions: (Tangential Logick, tangential Magick), de Alexandre Singh, en Manifesta 8.- Hasta su clausura, el 9 de enero, podrán ser visitados en la ciudad de Murcia tradicionales espacios expositivos y arrumbados edificios, abiertos expresamente para albergar esta babélica Manifesta. Emblemáticos inmuebles como la antigua oficina de Correos y Telégrafos y los dos primeros pabellones militares del cuartel de Artillería, se encontraban en estado ruinoso tras más de treinta años de abandono. También en Cartagena se ha abierto al público la prisión de San Antón, que este mismo año ha dejado de funcionar como tal. Las obras de arte se han acomodado en los desconchados interiores, lugares inhóspitos que el arquitecto Martín Lejárraga ha tenido que vehicular con escuetos remoces a las líneas argumentales de los tres equipos curatoriales para crear burbujas creativas en edificaciones que rezuman disciplina, reeducación y control moral. Hay cruces simbólicos entre espacios y okupas: los artistas exponen en el campamento militar y la cárcel y las imágenes digitales de los presos se proyectan en el Museo de Bellas Artes de Murcia.
Country Europa es el trabajo colectivo de autorrepresentación fotográfica, resultado de un taller impartido por Marcelo Expósito (Puertollano, 1966) y Verónica Iglesia (Buenos Aires, 1972) en el Centro Penitenciario de Murcia, en el que también ha intervenido Nada Prjla (Sarajevo, 1971), quien ha logrado que los presos se grabaran sin abandonar los muros. Otro artista, David Rych (Innsbruck, 1975), reproduce el encuentro entre presos y jóvenes ingresados en reformatorios. El resultado subraya las nuevas formas del poder: vigilar (sin) castigar.
La Fundación Manifesta, que ha dispuesto de un presupuesto de tres millones de euros para producir la programación, ha encargado a tres colectivos independientes la selección de artistas. Los proyectos anteriormente reseñados pertenecen al programa de Chamber of Public Secrets (CPS), amparado por Khaled Ramadan y Alfredo Cramerotti. Desde Copenhague y Oriente Próximo, a través de prácticas de producción en los mass media, fomentan diálogos que trasladan al dominio público el periodismo estético donde la realidad deviene artificio. "El resto es historia", es el lema de la estimulante propuesta que podemos iniciar en Cartagena desde el pabellón de autopsias con El proyecto de las baterías, de Laurent Grasso (Francia, 1972), artista que disecciona en sus trabajos los dispositivos de control y vigilancia, por lo que ha recorrido el litoral cartagenero buscando los emplazamientos militares que lo jalonan. Las vigilantes baterías observadas desde la costa y el zumbido de un submarino se transfiguran en inquietantes situaciones sociopolíticas. CPS también ha logrado abrir las puertas de la prisión de San Antón a los artistas con un permiso especial de la Secretaría General de Instituciones Penitenciarias. En la primera celda, un documental de Abed Anoud (Líbano, 1963) revela la sórdida historia del enclave con aportaciones de diversos protagonistas, entre los que destaca la erudición del historiador Pedro Egea. Este documento sirve de base para el recorrido guiado de Khaled Hafez (El Cairo, 1963), quien también presenta dos narraciones radiofónicas cuyo guión recorre la biografía de dos murcianos universales: los místicos sufís Abbul Abbass al Murci e Ibn Arabí. Podemos seguir hacia el fondo de la galería observando los murales pintados por los presos, allí nos encontraremos con la atronadora propuesta de Brumaria (Madrid, 2002). Descargas de metralletas, silbidos de ambulancias, turbias imágenes de guerra y un libro: Violencias expandidas. Lo resumo con la frase de Bertolt Brecht que fulminó a sus gestores: "La violencia es necesaria para cambiar este mundo asesino".
En la asociación de vecinos de Santa Lucía se exhibe una ampliación del Archivo FX de Pedro G. Romero (Aracena, 1964), seleccionado por los asamblearios Tranzit.org (Austria, República Checa, Hungría y Eslovaquia) cuyo plan expositivo se estructura en torno a un cuestionario de cuarenta preguntas denominado CET: Constitución para una exposición temporal. Sus conclusiones poscolonialistas y poscomunistas pueden verse en el cuartel de Artillería, cuyos pabellones han sido desescombrados por presos sujetos al tercer grado penitenciario que, en su programada readaptación social, han trabajado para la organización de Manifesta 8, según nos confirma la coordinadora general Esther Regueira.
Las propuestas de artistas más mediáticos se encuentran en el centro de Murcia en Correos. El irlandés Willie Doherthy (Derry, 1959), candidato en dos ocasiones al Premio Turner, ha presentado una decepcionante videocreación resuelta con una cincuentena de anodinos planos cortos grabados bajo uno de los puentes que cruza el río Segura, mientras Simón Fujiwara (Londres, 1982), ganador del Premio Cartier 2010, se acomoda a una arquitectura que rezuma tiempo por su deterioro para integrar una de sus falsas narraciones basadas en el descubrimiento arqueológico de un falo gigante hallado en el desierto. Estas propuestas son parte del comisariado de Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum, representados por Bassam el Baroni y Jeremy Beaudry, quienes rubrican su discurso electivo con el título Overscore (tachadura).
www.manifesta8.com
miércoles, 6 de mayo de 2009
Noticias: The Art Newspaper
Nazi-era stolen art located in Dresden collection
Reina Sofía and Prado strike historic loan deal
Greek panels in Vienna restored to former glory
Indonesian minister of culture’s public apology for destruction of archaeological site
UK museums profit from recession
Peter Brant and Stephanie Seymour put their contemporary art collection on show
International cultural property: how to find your way through the legal maze
Japanese treasures draw astounding crowds in Nara and Tokyo
Brandhorst Museum opens in Munich on 21 May
Government’s big push for French art with Force de l’Art 02
Rome’s MACRO museum of contemporary art reopens for Museum Night
Museums and the recession: there is an alternative to closure or selling off the collections—sharing
lunes, 20 de abril de 2009
Vocero: Inaugura la trienal Poli/Gráfica de SJ
Nota de Marina: hay errores/horrores - es Adriano Pedrosa, no Pedroza, y el nombre del otro curador es Jens Hoffman, no Jane.
Inaugura la Trienal Poli/Gráfica de SJ
ESCENARIO
18 de abril de 2009 04:00 am
Con una evolución sobre la otrora histórica Bienal del Grabado de San Juan, inaugura esta tarde, a las siete, en el Arsenal de la Marina Española del Viejo San Juan, la segunda edición de la Trienal Poli/Gráfica de San Juan del Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, destacando el tema de los desplazamientos del grabado en las prácticas contemporáneas, sobre todo en aquellas áreas nunca antes presentadas en este contexto dialéctico, como los grabados experimentales, la fotografía digital, las fotocopias, el vídeo, los performances y las instalaciones.
Con un equipo curatorial integrado por Adriano Pedroza, su director, Jane Hoffman, Beatriz Santiago y Julieta González, actual curadora del Tate Modern de Inglaterra, esta Trienal ya se ha hecho sentir desde antes de su inauguración con la producción de seis carteles, seis revistas tituladas "Número Cero" y del anuncio de 20 libros de artista ya comisionados. En esta edición, como se advierte desde su título, el grabado tradicional ha cedido a un concepto más amplio de arte poligráfico que incluye todo tipo de lenguajes artísticos.
"Según la conceptualización que de esta actividad hacen sus curadores, esta exposición reúne un grupo de obras que abordan la noción del archivo; y más allá el archivo personal, y su transición hacia la esfera pública. El archivo como construcción epistemológica no sólo ha sido el sujeto de análisis significativo por la crítica sino que también ha fascinado a los artistas.
De hecho, este arte conceptual y de instalaciones corre en reversa hacia el dadá y el surreealismo. ¿Qué era eso sino el poder que se tiene cuando se yuxtaponen al azar imagenes, fotos y el recuerdo de la memoria? Con ello, se crean unas instalaciones donde vas poco a poco depurando esos textos y llevándolos hacia una expresión que va desde un archivo personal hasta llegar a una expresión pública", expresó la Dra. Carmen Teresa Ruiz de Fischler, directora ejecutiva del Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña.
Para la funcionaria, quien entre sus créditos tiene la dirección del Museo de Arte de Ponce, el Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico y el Museo de la Universidad del Turabo, el poner en pie esta Trienal —aunque nunca formó parte de su organización— ha constituido un gran reto dado que ha tenido que poner en condiciones la planta física del evento desde poner a funcionar las facilidades de aire acondicionado, las paredes que no estaban preparadas para las exposiciones, así como el trabajo de ambientación de esta joya arquitectónica.
Se han unido para levantar la planta física del Arsenal los propios empleados de Servicios Generales del Instituto y la Brigada de la Administración de Corrección que se ha adherido dando el apoyo que se necesitaba. Como se recordará, fueron los mismos empleados del Instituto quienes restauraron las facilidades del Convento de los Dominicos para crear la Galería de Puerto Rico que alberga la colección de pinturas más importantes de Puerto Rico desde el siglo 17 hasta el siglo 20.
"Tenemos además trabajando arduamente, los siete días de la semana, al equipo de Patrimonio Edificado y al grupo de Artes Plásticas. Ha sido todo un reto porque acabo de llegar de un museo nuevo, uno ‘State of the Arts’, mientras ahora estamos reconstruyendo el Arsenal, con esas fabulosas bóvedas. Esta edificación hay que rescatarla, y mi deseo es que se abran todas sus puertas para exhibir arte de todo el mundo", dijo la directora, quien también estuviera a cargo de las riendas del ICP a principios de los años 80.
Ruiz de Fischler aclara que el tema de la palabra y/o archivo en esta Trienal es sinónimo de lenguaje tanto de texto como visual como de instalación.
"Por un lado, esta Trienal sigue el desarrollo de las Bienales latinoamericanas que tenía el Instituto porque tiene que ver con las imágenes impresas; pero quedó transformada desde la primera Trienal Poligráfica donde se abrió a los nuevos medios contemporáneos. Esta segunda, diría, es bien reflexiva. Y por eso mismo, va a necesitar las visitas guiadas para que ayuden a contextualizar esta presentación para el público que no es tan lego en estas materias", concluyó.
lunes, 13 de abril de 2009
reseña de Jerry Saltz sobre la trienal del New Museum
JESUS SAVESJerry Saltz
In the last years of the boom, numerous artists came to the fore who have their aesthetic heads up the aesthetic asses of Gerhard Richter, Andy Warhol, Richard Prince, Cady Noland, and Christopher Wool. They make punkish black-and-white art and ad hoc arrangements of disheveled stuff, architectural fragments, and Xeroxed photos. This art deals in received ideas about appropriation, conceptualism, and institutional critique. It’s a cool school, admired by jargon-wielding academics who write barely readable rhetoric explaining why looking at next to nothing is good for you. Many of these artists have sold a lot of work, and most will be part of a lost generation. They thought they were playing the system; it turned out that they were themselves being played.
The New Museum’s flawed but tantalizing new triennial, “The Generational: Younger Than Jesus” puts this kind of art behind us and points to what might lie beyond that recycling machine. It’s a big show, assembled by a big crowd: The New Museum asked 150 recognized artists, critics, and curators to recommend artists. They put together a list of 500 or so, and three in-house curators—Lauren Cornell, Massimiliano Gioni, and Laura Hoptman (a Millennial, Gen-Xer, and Boomer, respectively)—sifted through it to create the final building-filling show of 50 artists from 25 countries. A swell 564-page “artist directory,” showcasing the hundreds of artists who were seriously considered but didn’t make the final cut, accompanies “Younger” and makes this one of the most refreshingly transparent exhibitions ever organized. (It’s a kind of salon des réfusés in book form.)
All the artists here were born after 1976 (and are therefore under 33, Christ’s age at his death). Their generation is variously called the Millennials (is that a Pixar film? Or a pop band?), Generation Y, iGeneration, Generation Me, or (my favorite) Generation OMG! Most of the artists are not undiscovered—three have been on art-magazine covers already, and many have been in museum shows and have sold work to famous collectors—but few are well known in the United States.
“Younger” has its frustrating moments, and most of them occur when the curators conform too completely to biennial habit, choosing art that follows standard conventions of late-late-late conceptualism. (The fourth floor, in particular, is pretty inert.) Anna Molska’s video of two boys in gladiatorial jockstraps assembling a multipart black cube is cute, but it’s just one more commentary on early-twentieth-century art. Cao Fei’s formulaic forays into role-playing are flashy but only navel-gazing fun. Loris Gréaud’s turning spiral staircase is typical of the kind of art whose labels tell you more than the work does; in this case, we read that the title, Nothing Is True, Everything Is Permitted, Stairway Edit, refers to “an eleventh-century Nizari Ismaili mystical sect” and that the staircase “will never take you anywhere.” (The label fails to mention that the piece looks like a retail-store display.) Cory Arcangel is a good artist, but his chromogenic print of a color spectrum is a decorative one-liner. It’s tenth-generation art about art about the monochrome.
But then there are the tantalizers, and they make you see how art is changing. The show suggests that ideas about culture, ethnography, anthropology, and sociology, YouTube and Facebook, and science and documentary film have all become more important than October magazine postmodernism. Sociology is the new black. None of these artists is trying to advance the teleological ball or invent new forms. They’re investigating the whole world, not just the art world. Their work is less about how we affect time and people than about how time and people affect us.
That’s a welcome switch from the super-self-conscious, highly educated, insular art of the recent past. The best artists in “Younger” turn their gaze from their own belly buttons to gaze at other people’s belly buttons. They simultaneously occupy conflicting positions, are more sincere than ironic but ironic nevertheless, and see the world, not just art, as a living specimen. Better yet, they do this by violating the idiotic academic proscriptions against visual pleasure. (The theory folks disdain pleasure in art, all the while embracing it in their lives.) Their work has what theorist Gayatri Spivak called “radical vulnerability” and is an attempt to explore the substrata of knowledge and experience.
A number of artists delight, but several blew me away. Cyprien Gaillard’s riveting 30-minute video, Desniansky Raion, with its pulsing soundtrack by the amazing French musician Koudlam, gives us beautifully choreographed footage of two huge gangs of Russian “underground fight clubs” squaring off and charging, then beating the crap out of one another, in a St. Petersburg housing complex. Next, in a public-housing project on the outskirts of Paris, we see a fireworks display over a building that is then blown up. Finally, we see footage of an ugly, snow-covered Kiev apartment block shot illegally from a miniature airplane. It’s an amazing video, a harrowing record of ancient rituals’ being revived in new ways in unexpected places, and a picture of our new cities of ruin.
Reseña -Younger than Jesus - The New Yorker
Their Generation - “Younger Than Jesus” at the New Museum.
by Peter Schjeldahl / The New Yorker
How will upcoming artists respond to the down-going economy? They will make a point of entertaining themselves on the cheap, often in groups, and self-consciously, as members of an ingenuity- and drollery-loving generation that was weaned on the Internet and is game for the bust of the boom in which it was reared. So testifies “The Generational: Younger Than Jesus,” the New Museum’s arduously titled, newly instituted triennial, which presents work by fifty artists, from twenty-five countries, who have yet to blow out thirty-three candles on a birthday cake. The show is low-budget bubbly fun, for the most part—and noisy, what with all the videos and sound pieces. Its star, for me, is Ryan Trecartin, an American artist based in Philadelphia, who orchestrates a shaggy installation in which scripted, digitally eventful videos (catchable on YouTube) feature madcap, often sexually ambiguous performers enacting phantasmagorical dramas in squeaky voices at very high speed. The plot, if it can be called that, of one video concerns quadruplet girls whose father has told them that he wanted only triplets; two of the sisters resolve the familial anxiety by merging into one. Another winner is a Frenchman, Cyprien Gaillard, with a spectacular video, accompanied by a soundtrack of ghostly anthems, of brutalist apartment blocks in Ukraine (aerial views), Russia (the scene of a gang fight involving hundreds of young men), and France (a building at night spewing a lovely fireworks display before imploding—the occasion is a planned demolition, it turns out—in clouds of dust pierced by searchlights). One probably could tease political implications from Gaillard’s architectural travelogue, but its pith, in the context of the show, is sheer youthful alacrity. What is being done in new art? Whatever the hell anybody feels like doing.
Unsurprisingly, “Younger Than Jesus” has dicey aspects. Start with the idea of sorting artists by age. One of the show’s crew of staff curators, Laura Hoptman—writing in a catalogue packed with sociological essays, including charts of trends in substance abuse and sexual behavior—admits that generational analysis is akin to reading horoscopes, which are “suspiciously nonspecific, although we long for them not to be.” In the abstract, every new generation is pretty much like the one that came before it: struggling Oedipally with its forebears, embracing the Zeitgeist, and otherwise reactivating stock patterns, meanwhile being fawned upon by marketers. If there is anything unique about today’s young, it may be a precocious alertness to how such rhetorical typecasting and economic targeting work. This generation even usurps the process, by innumerable online means. Gone are the days, in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, when deconstruction-smitten academics and artists toiled to share their discovery that media and institutions are—get ready—manipulative. Viscerally sophisticated young artists are more interested in playing with materials and contexts that are purely gratuitous, or, at least, too anarchic or too desultory to be marshalled for or against any commercial interest or political tendency. It’s a timely shift, given that, this year, sales of almost everything, very much including art, are down, and that, last year, theoretical politics were obliterated by the real thing. The only sorting system for artists that matters—according to individual quality and influence—will prevail, in time, over fashion. Not that there’s anything wrong with fashion. Novelty keeps us spry, and it cleans up after itself by being gone in a minute.
For a sense of how fast and erratically the current art culture is moving, consider that just last summer the New Museum mounted another international roundup, “After Nature,” selected by one of the “Jesus” curators, Massimiliano Gioni, which heralded a revival of humanist sentiment and existential anguish, notably in figurative sculpture and staged photography. We were led to expect a darkly serious trend in art. What happened to that? Partly, the contrast involves mere repackaging. Gaillard’s imploding building, a whoop in its present company, would likely have seemed apocalyptic in proximity to a film in the earlier show, by Werner Herzog, of burning Kuwaiti oil wells. But the museum’s side step to upbeat theatricality doesn’t feel arbitrary. It is at one with the distinctly fresh attitude of much of the work on view, which may be regarded as either laudably nimble or deplorably spineless. Remember Gilda Radner’s character Emily Litella, on the old “Saturday Night Live,” who chirped “Never mind!” when misunderstandings that had sparked her angry rants were pointed out to her? Thinking of that joke helped me focus on a quality of whipsaw humor that is rife in “Jesus.” Call it “never-mindedness,” a sort of booby-trapped cocksureness, foreseen by Nirvana. In Trecartin’s work, soulful sincerity may own up at a moment’s notice to being bedevilled nihilism, or just a manic hedge against boredom. The different tones flicker rather than blur. All are in force, all at once. You wouldn’t think that a state of mind so self-sabotaging is sustainable, short of clinical insanity. But there it is, brightly and breezily.
Apropos of insanity, a video by the Scotsman Luke Fowler, one of several “Jesus” works that channel nostalgia for radical art and culture of the past, incorporates documentary footage from the psychiatrist R. D. Laing’s notorious Kingsley Hall, a therapeutic community that he operated in East London from 1965 to 1970. Laing treated schizophrenics by encouraging them to develop, rather than suppress, the cracked logic of their thoughts. One may reject the notion that madness is somehow liberating (I do), but it’s a fact of experience, familiar from Outsider art, that painful dissociation can produce impressions of aesthetic cogency. Fowler has fashioned a fugue of linguistic non sequiturs that weave an unsettling spell. Another video montage, by Tigran Khachatryan, an Armenian, intercuts rushing crowd scenes from classic Soviet films by Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov with news coverage of political riots and shots of contemporary skateboarders and other incautious youths engaging in “Jackass”-style, at times plainly bone-breaking behavior. It ends with a young man, naked, masturbating to orgasm while maintaining a facial expression of unruffled calm. The shock of ultimate excitement coextensive with disinterested detachment is never-mindedness in spades.
So far, I’ve mentioned only works in video, for a compelling reason—video is by far the predominant medium of adventurous young artists today. There are a few paintings on hand in the show; the best are by a Pole, Jakub Julian Ziolkowski, whose surrealistic imagination and formal inventiveness invite, and actually survive, comparison to Picasso. “The Great Battle Under the Table,” a summary in minuscule detail of the Napoleonic wars, teeters on the verge of mere comic illustration, but there is a demonic oomph about it—endorsed by neighboring pictures, evocative of Francis Bacon and Philip Guston—that postpones judgment. The show offers photographs, too, in social-documentary and conceptual veins—the most impressive are staged street scenes, in woebegone Paris suburbs, by the Algerian Mohamed Bourouissa—and some sculpture of the jury-rigged-junk variety that the New Museum celebrated in its inaugural exhibition, “Unmonumental,” in 2007. But, four decades after the first portable videotape recorder became available, video has become a studio tool that’s as second nature as pencils. Little by little, it has stolen fire from film, photography, theatre, concert performance, painting (with projections as murals), drawing (with animation), and, of course, television, exhaustively unpacking the history and the semiotics of the home screen. Video’s only weakness has been commercial, as a product hard to commodify. But that handicap may be barely noticeable in the present art market.
One other work must be noted: a book, “Younger Than Jesus: Artist Directory,” edited by the show’s curators, and published by the New Museum and Phaidon Press. Artists in the show, and about four hundred and fifty others who didn’t make the cut, each get a page of reproductions and description. All were recommended by an advisory cohort of roughly a hundred and fifty curators, critics, and artists from around the world. Phone-book bulky, the tome is an instant memorial to today’s international art network. In coming years, it will likely serve curators, dealers, and collectors as a Sears catalogue of inexorably older-than-Jesus talent. There’s something sickening about the scale of the art-mediating infrastructure that the book represents, advertising more stuff than one might ever get around to looking at, let alone valuing. Out there in the night, while we sleep, incredible quantities of art are being carted around, archived, and so on, because it is somebody’s job to do those things. Can we please not think about that?Trienal del New Museum - reseña de Artnet por Charlie Finch
The title of the New Museum's survey of young folks' art, "Younger than Jesus," is, of course, incomplete. It should be "Younger than Jesus Was When He Was Crucified," but don't think that an alternative title should be the Who's mantra from "My Generation": "hope I die before I get old," for these artists definitely wish to live and prosper. It is how they wish to do it that is so curious.
If the implications of "Younger than Jesus" are followed, the museum and gallery-going experience as we know it will disappear. The New Museum itself is nothing more than a giant Xbox, and the art within it arranged without any sense of individuality or distinction. Paradoxically, when I wandered the show on Good Friday, most patrons were lined up in front of the elaborate wall cards, each delineating the artist's "praxis," the museum's characterization. This is the texting generation, so why not?
La fenêtre
2005
Musée national de l’histoire et des cultures de limmigration, CNHI
The art itself ached for anonymity and the cover of the crowd. Many of the conventions of World of Warcraft are observed, especially role-playing and costume. I particularly enjoyed Mohamed Bourouissa's color photographs of boxers from the Paris banlieues. As subjects of the new media and its future successors, the Jesus art cohort is sincere to a fault and irony free. Thus, Loris Gréaud's black staircase (a direct if unknowing steal from Alice Aycock's famous piece at Storm King, not to mention Brancusi’s Endless Column) tells us (via the ubiquitous wall text) that, "everything is permitted" and celebrates the 11th-century Hashashi cult of Islam, right under a wall sign declaring that the piece is in the New Museum’s Dakis Joannou Gallery, named after the protean Greek collector.
Elements of freedom and dissent are absent, and the viewer hungers for any esthetic form, such as Kristen Brätsch's purple velvet manikin, sharing space with Ryan Gander's tracksuit-wearing museum employee, a live model who looked like a Jesus as uncomfortable with prying eyes of museumgoers hungry for the one identifiable piece from the show's advance publicity as the original Jesus was on the cross.
What's remarkable about this show is how neat and clean everything is, even the innumerable AbEx ripoffs by artists too skill-deprived to name, as primly displayed as those of a fourth-grade classroom. The black candles of AIDS-3D's altar with the letters "OMG" in blue neon is the only evidence that there was ever any political content in the art of New York. In fact, such an era is mocked in Matt Keegan's canvas Barbara Kruger, which prints the name of the artist over and over, Barbara Kruger-style. Plainly, Keegan prefers the subject of another of his pieces in the show, 23 Girls Age 22, a grid of photographs which might reference Gerhard Richter's Student Nurses, but is far more obliterating in its indifference to its subjects.
For months, I have been meaning to write a piece called "The Death of Fine Art," but couldn't quite compel myself to believe it. After touring "Younger than Jesus," I believe it. I have never seen a show like it before. It is antiseptic, safe, death to hierarchies of taste and distinctions of talent, and yet determined to neutralize our eyes with an overload of useless information. Apparently the 50 artists in the show were chosen from 500 finalists, any 50 of whom could be exchanged with the others.
If the message of Christianity is that the risen Jesus becomes the Christ, the Kerygma, embodying the whole of humanity, then the message of "Younger than Jesus" is that Picasso and Koons and Sherman have died and turned the whole universe of young artists into pulsating collective. It is a prospect externally disturbing for us oldsters, but a survival cocoon for the youth within. The butterfly has become a caterpillar.
CHARLIE FINCH is co-author of Most Art Sucks: Five Years of Coagula (Smart Art Press).
On the fourth floor of "Younger than Jesus," works (from left) by Kerstin Brätsch, Das Institut (Kerstin Brätsch and Adele Roeder) and Adam Pendleton
AIDS-3DOMG Obelisk
2007
"Younger than Jesus"
Matt Keegan23 Portraits of 22 Year Olds
2008
"Younger than Jesus"
domingo, 12 de abril de 2009
Para comenzar a discutir:: De trienales, El New Museum y la Poli/grafica de San Juan dos modelos a evaluar
Chu Yun, "This is Lacy," 2006, a living sculpture installation with sleeping person at The New Museum Triennial. More Photos > Young Artists, Caught in the Act
The sweet bird of youth, alert as a robin, hungry as a gull, alights once again in Manhattan with the inauguration of “The Generational: Younger Than Jesus” at the New Museum, the latest local survey of contemporary art — this one a triennial — to challenge the pre-eminence of the Whitney Biennial.
The show is large, buzzy, international in scope and age-specific. As the title implies, only artists 33 or younger were considered for inclusion, a restriction that could be ruled age-ist in a court of law, but it’s business as usual for a museum ever conscious of its clientele.
Big-statement surveys generate big expectations: they will tell us what and who is hot, important, exciting. What we get in this case is a serious, carefully considered show, but one that, apart from a few magnetic stand-alone entries — a killer video by Cyprien Gaillard, an animation by Wojciech Bakowski, a madcap Ryan Trecartin installation — feels awfully sedate and buttoned-down for a youthfest. Kids R Us it ain’t, but that’s O.K.
Youthfulness doesn’t carry quite the cachet in the art world that it did a decade or so ago. The routine of dealers hustling talent straight from the classroom has made exhibitions of 20-somethings the wearying norm. Nor does “international’ have much glamour any more. Art fairs have seen to that.
So it’s no surprise to find that, even with the introduction of some new names, “Younger Than Jesus” feels familiar, like a more-substantial-than- average version of a weekend gallery hop in Chelsea and the Lower East Side, right down to the token Asian and African imports.
The show was put together very fast; in a year. The initial selection was done Facebook-style, with the curatorial groundwork outsourced to 150 art world experts — artists, critics and teachers — who submitted names of artists for consideration. Three New Museum curators — Lauren Cornell, Massimiliano Gioni and Laura Hoptman — made the final cut of the 50 artists, with the critic Brian Sholis assigned to create a resource center to supplement the show. (It’s on the museum’s fifth floor and well worth a visit.)
Most international surveys are assembled this way. The positive difference in this case is that all the sources are credited by name, and the runner-up artists — nearly 500 — are included in a book called “Younger Than Jesus: Artist Directory,” a kind of exhibition in print, and a terrific idea.
The exhibition catalog is also a compendium, mostly of musings from the popular press on Generation Y, or the Millennials, with each curator contributing necessarily impressionistic profiles of a generation still very much in formation.
Characteristics assigned to these artists include having a second-nature relationship to digital media; a preference for sentiment over irony; an aesthetic interest in reorganizing existing materials rather than trying to invent from scratch; and so on.
A brief glance at the show makes one thing clear: most of its participants are committed multitaskers. The artists Tala Madani, born in Iran, and Jakub Julian Ziolkowski, from Poland, do oil-on-canvas pictures of a conventional sort; Emre Huner, from Turkey, combines painting with animation; the German-born artist Kerstin Brätsch uses hers as performance aids; and the New York artist Josh Smith treats his like prints, churning out dozens of pictures at a time and stacking them for distribution.
Ryan Trecartin uses paint cosmetically, as an extreme form of makeup. Applying it directly to the body, he transforms himself and the other performers in his videos into frenetically walking, talking surrealist abstractions. Born in Texas in 1981, Mr. Trecartin is probably the best-known artist in the show, though with his extroverted, look-at-me spirit, among the least representative.
He’s certainly one of the most versatile. A blogosphere baby, a child of the chat room, a YouTube native, he shifts effortlessly among realities while pushing sculpture, film, performance, music and language — so much language — through digital scramblers and mixers. There is some danger of his motormouth wizardry sliding into shtick, but right now it’s mesmerizing.
Some of the more interesting pieces in the show share its hyped-up mode. A rapid-fire video by the Armenian artist Tigran Khachatryan alternates scenes from Sergei Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin” and clips of skateboard catastrophes to rethink the concept of revolution. A short, impressive film by the Israeli artist Keren Cytter has characters spitting out malign non sequiturs in the quick, jerky sequences.
In a live audiotaped performance, the British artist Tris Vonna-Michell begins telling a story at a leisurely pace, then gradually accelerates the delivery until the words turn into a coloratura stream of leaps and repeats, all the while holding the narrative thread. The burst of applause that greets him at the end is fully earned.
The show has a generous amount of performance, some of it, as in that case, recorded. Two male models in space-age bikinis wordlessly rearrange chunks of black abstract sculpture in a film by the Polish artist Anna Molska. In a video by the British artist James Richards, a speech instructor delivers a soundless lesson in lip reading.
Live performance has a particular chic at present, and the show has some of that too. The most spectacular example, Liz Glynn’s “24 Hour Roman Reconstruction Project, or, Building Rome in a Day,” came and went before the opening. With a team of collaborators and a ton of cardboard, this American artist erected a model of the Eternal City in the museum’s lobby, then destroyed it, in one dusk-to-dusk marathon. A video of the whole process is on view.
Two other performances are continuing and almost invisible. The Chinese artist Chu Yun has hired women to sleep, one at a time and with the aid of medication, on a bed in the center of a gallery for the run of the show. The British conceptualist Ryan Gander has asked that whatever museum guard is on duty in the museum’s fourth-floor gallery wear a white Adidas track suit marked with embroidered spots of blood, fake evidence of a story of violence that we can invent.
The Millennials appear to be a story-loving breed. There are lots of narratives, implied or spelled out. There is Mr. Vonna-Michell’s, of course, and the scripted but inscrutable emergencies in Mr. Trecartin’s videos. Katerina Seda, a Czech artist, filmed her depression-crippled grandmother making drawings of household items, thereby regaining an interest in life. Both the film and the drawings are on view, crucial components of a family drama.
Through collages of newspaper and magazine clips, the artist Matt Keegan documents the tangled politics of the America he grew up in as a child in the 1980s, when President Ronald Reagan and AIDS shared the news. With the wise omniscience that marks much of his work, he seems to be asking how we keep the lessons learned from this particular history alive and usable.
Emily Roysdon, a founder of the feminist collective LTTR (Lesbians to the Rescue), asks similar questions more directly, out loud. Her silkscreens-on-wheels are movable props for impromptu speeches, by her or by anyone moved to give one. Like certain other young American artists — Ms. Cornell writes about them in her astute essay — Ms. Roysdon makes art and activism one thing: you make history by living it, saying it, giving it form.
Those forms are pretty awesome in the extraordinary video by Mr. Gaillard, a French artist born in 1980. His three-part visual essay in aestheticized violence opens with a slowly building fight-club clash between two crowds of young men; continues with a fireworks display over a French housing block minutes before it is demolished; and concludes with a jittery flight above Soviet-era apartment towers that stand, crushingly huge and blank, in a bleak Russian landscape.
More often in this show, though, history is internalized, a state of mind, half-hallucinated, as it is in the animated film by Mr. Bakowski, an artist from Poland, who accompanied his flickering watercolor images of toilets, tired feet, detached sexual organs, rotted fruit and faded flowers with a half-whispered litany of spoken phrases. The results are reminiscent of William Kentridge’s films on South Africa, but also suggested a string of diary jottings that end with a prayer: “Dead Angel God Mother, Care for us Dear Queen. If only there was no evil, illnesses and cripples.”
The apocalyptic tone of this piece, and of Mr. Gaillard’s, was sounded in an earlier exhibition, “After Nature,” which Mr. Gioni organized last summer and is still the best thing the museum has done since its move to the Bowery. It drew its power primarily from its imaginative generational mix of artists, with undervalued figures like William Christenberry and Nancy Graves at one end of the spectrum, 30-something figures like Klara Liden and Tino Sehgal on the other.
The two younger artists, both Millennials, are hot market properties, probably too hot for this conspicuously low-key group show (though both appear in the “Artist Directory”). Mr. Christenberry, born in 1936, and Ms. Graves, who died in her 50s in 1995, are underappreciated figures, with long-developing, multifaceted careers. It was the combination of new and old that made “After Nature” work, gave it a psychological unity and resistant texture, lifted it above business as usual.
“Younger Than Jesus” doesn’t have a comparable sense of unity, texture or lift. It is, despite its promise of freshness, business as usual. Its strengths are individual and episodic, with too much work, particularly photography, making too little impact. But my point is that beyond quibbles about choices of individual works, it raises the question of whether any mainstream museum show designed to be a running update exclusively on the work of young artists can rise above being a preapproved market survey. Removed from a larger generational context, can such a survey ever become a story, part of a larger history? (The same question applies to museum exhibitions that leave young artists out of the picture.) I’m asking. It’s a complicated subject. I don’t know the answer.
In any case, a generational challenge has already been taken up elsewhere. A small commercial gallery called BLT, on the Bowery across from the New Museum, has announced that its May exhibition will consist exclusively of artists born before 1927. Louise Bourgeois, Lucian Freud and Ellsworth Kelly will be among the participants. The show will be called “Wiser Than God.”
martes, 31 de marzo de 2009
Noticias: The Art Newspaper
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His campaign suggests he will focus on communities, education, and grass-roots organisations but there are many unanswered questions. Here we survey the policy areas where the new President is likely to take a stand
Chelsea galleries visit Havana
U.S. dealers challenge Cuba embargo in test of new president's cultural policies
Dr. Michael Dixon becomes chairman of the National Museum Directors' conference
miércoles, 11 de marzo de 2009
Bienal de Artes Visuales de La Habana
Tomado de Primera Hora:La Bienal de Artes Visuales de La Habana tomará la ciudad en unos veinte espacios donde expondrán más de un centenar de artistas representativos de diversas expresiones y estilos, indicó una fuente del comité organizador.
"Va a tomar la ciudad de una manera muy fuerte y eso es un sello que la distingue", dijo a Efe el curador principal de la Bienal, Nelson Herrera Ysla.
La Bienal será inaugurada el próximo 27 de marzo y sus promotores esperan la presencia de 140 artistas participantes e invitados de 56 países.
La cita llevará el lema "La integración y resistencia en la era global", en alusión a la unión sin perder la identidad propia, indicó Ysla.
Las obras de la muestra proceden de América Latina y el Caribe, frica, Asia y Medio Oriente y, en menor escala de Norteamérica, Europa y Australia.
Además, fuera del programa de la Bienal, el Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes ha anunciado la exposición "Chelsea visita a La Habana", compuesta por obras de los fondos de galerías de Nueva York, y en la que interviene un grupo de unos 40 artistas estadounidenses.
El conjunto abarca grabados, esculturas, instalaciones y obras en vídeo de creadores como Uta Barth, Delia Brown, Carrey Maxon, Paul Pfeifer, Laurie Thomas, Andrew Moore, Matthew Ritchie, Tina Barney y Ed Ruscha, entre otros.
En el marco estricto de la bienal, las obras ocuparán toda la red de galerías de la ciudad y estará diseminada en unos veinte espacios de La Habana, explicó el especialista.
Como novedad, anunció los talleres que dictarán artistas como el puertorriqueño Antonio Martorell y la cubana Tania Brugueras.
Entre los invitados confirmó la presencia de León Ferrari (Argentina), Sue Williamson (Suráfrica), Hervé Fischer (Francia y Canadá), Pepón Osorio (Puerto Rico), el fotógrafo Paulo Bruscky (Brasil), Darío Escobar y Regina José Galindo (Guatemala), y Abraham Cruz-Villegas (México).
"Sigue siendo una bienal que tiene la característica de que mantiene una presencia amplia, de toma e intervención en la ciudad", agregó el miembro del comité organizador.
Señaló que la Bienal está aún en la fase de preparación de los locales en el complejo de fortalezas coloniales Morro-Cabaña, donde estará el núcleo central, dedicado a los artistas invitados, como ha sido habitual desde 1994.
Otras ocho exposiciones individuales e igual cifra de colectivas están previstas en espacios del centro histórico de La Habana, la Casa de las Américas y el céntrico Pabellón Cuba.
Destacó la presentación de las muestras "Inquietud lúdica", dedicada al diseñador japonés Shigeo Fukuda, y otra al fotógrafo colombiano Fernell Franco, ambos fallecidos.
http://www.bienalhabana.cult.cu/
domingo, 1 de febrero de 2009
Julieta González nombrada curadora del Tate Modern
Elespectador.com - artículo en periódico colombiano