Utopia ongoing

See here
(Thanks to Andrew)

On Technological Devotion

The fact is that the world is divided between users of the Macintosh 
computer and users of MS-DOS compatible computers. I am firmly of the 
opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. 
Indeed, the Macintosh is counter-reformist and has been influenced by 
the ratio studiorum of the Jesuits. It is cheerful, friendly, 
conciliatory; it tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step 
to reach -- if not the kingdom of Heaven -- the moment in which their 
document is printed. It is catechistic: The essence of revelation is 
dealt with via simple formulae and sumptuous icons. 

Everyone has a right to salvation.
Umberto Eco
Mac History
Image held here 

Utopia Matters

Utopia Matters: From Brotherhoods to Bauhaus

January 23–April 11, 2010 at Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin

Following World War I, avant-gardes turned to the utopian notion of harmony they saw in abstraction and optimistically endeavored to ameliorate society through art and design. Utopia Matters: From Brotherhoods to Bauhaus will examine a sequence of international case studies from the early nineteenth century through 1933, when the Bauhaus closed in Berlin and the ascendancy of Fascism and Stalinism curbed or negatively reframed artistic endeavors, and investigate the evolution of utopian ideas in modern Western artistic thought and practice. It will address the movements of Primitivism, the Nazarenes, the Pre-Raphaelites, William Morris and Arts and Crafts, the Cornish Colony, Neo-Impressionism, De Stijl, the Bauhaus, and Russian Constructivism. This exhibition is organized by Vivien Greene, Curator of 19th- and Early 20th-Century Art at the Guggenheim Museum. This exhibition will travel to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice on May 1, 2010. A fully illustrated catalogue with essays by Greene, noted historian Russell Jacoby, and design historian Victor Margolin will also accompany the exhibition.

Utopia and the Everyday

27th November 2009 – 14th Fenruary 2010 at Centre of Contemporary Art, Geneva

This exhibition invites various local players (associations, schools, etc.) to collaborate with artists and collectives who work within the contact areas between art and educational methods. These knowledge exchanges allow contemporary art and its institutions to become a privileged space for emancipation, transformation and educational experiments. Collaborations between artists and partner publics will be carried out in different projects, outside the Centre’s premises, and presented subsequently at the Centre. They will highlight the social, political, and environmental dimensions of these practices.

Curators : Katya García-Antón and microsillons

Image: László Moholy-Nagy, AXL II, 1927 held here

When the wind changed, the smell of chocolate wafted over the playground

Bournville was a model village created to house Cadbury workers, although most of the houses are now owned by the Bournville Village Trust rather than the company itself… Quiet and relatively crime-free, Bournville is too tranquil to host an insurrection, but there is a revolutionary mood afoot in the wake of Cadbury’s decision to accept Kraft’s £11.9bn offer. The local BBC radio station hasn’t played an American song all week and although Cadbury employees are reluctant to talk, it is impossible to find anyone who is in favour of the deal.

James Robinson, Bournville, the town that chocolate built, writing recently in the Guardian. Photo by Christopher Furlong/ Getty Images

Spatial City: An Architecture of Idealism

Spatial City: An Architecture of Idealism

First Exhibition of the Frac Collections in the United States – 2010

Institute of Visual Arts (Inova), Milwaukee, February 5 – April 18; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, May 23 – August 8; Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, September 10 – December 26

http://www.frac-platform.com

Spatial City is an art exhibition inspired by the theoretical architecture of Yona Friedman. Friedman’s ideas, disseminated in the aftermath of World War II, have influenced subsequent generations. French thinkers and conceptual artists have responded to his designs as philosophical constructs worthy of exploration, explication and confrontation. While Yona Friedman’s “utopia réalisable” informed the framework of the show, the selection of artwork reflects the cycling and recycling of optimism and cynicism in postwar culture. Artists in the exhibition are responding to society’s complex problems: the failed utopian social experiments that resulted in the dehumanizing conditions of Brutalist architecture, the rise and fall of totalitarian states, the tensions resulting from post-colonial immigration, and the destruction of the environment in the name of progress.

Don’t Stare So Romantically*

* Bertolt Brecht, early banner for a theatre play: Glotzt nicht so romantisch!

Image: Eileen Gray’s E1027, France (Sarah Browne, 2009)

Typographic Utopias

Société Réaliste: Hexatopia, betűkészlet, 2009

TYPOPASS-CRITICAL DESIGN AND CONCEPTUAL TYPOGRAPHY at Platán Gallery, Budapest. Organized by Dorottya Gallery and tranzit. hu with the collaboration of the Polish Institute.

How does critical design emerge, the attempt to counter consumer culture with a social consciousness with the intention not only to serve customers but also to shape visual culture, even the whole of culture and society? The project focuses on typography, a visual language that can be interpreted both in the field of art and design. The exhibition presents the historical and contemporary projects and publications from the boundary of design and the visual arts in three groups: Typographic Utopias, Anti- and Parallel Design, Subversive Design.

Porto/ Utopian

Images: ruined shopping mall outside the university; pyrite
[fool's gold] at the university geology museum.
Photographs by/ copyright Sarah Browne, with the kind
co-operation of the Utopian Studies Society.

10th International conference of the Utopian Studies Society,
Europe, at the University of Porto, Portugal, July 2009.

What Utopians Eat

Selection of food and drink consumed at the 10th international 
conference of the Utopian Studies Society, Europe, at the 
University of Porto, Portugal, July 2009. 
All photographs by/ copyright Sarah Browne.

Allora and Calzadilla at Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin

Allora & Calzadilla, How to Appear Invisible, 16mm film on HD, 2008

The two new works shown by Allora & Calzadilla are the latest in a series of commissioned works that extrapolate on the unfolding historical and social dynamic of the Schlossplatz, the site of the temporary kunsthalle.

Pleasingly, it is the large expanse of the Kunsthalle that is left essentially vacant, with the film work being installed (unfortunately poorly) the entrance area adjacent to the bookshop:

Allora & Calzadilla’s new work ‘Compass‘, 2009, conceived specifically for the Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin, creates a new spatial and acoustic experience. Dividing the Kunsthalle horizontally, a level is introduced, inaccessible to the viewer and reducing the grand exhibition hall to less than one third. Visitors can only hear the vibrations and sounds of an a capella dancer performing a choreography above their heads. The otherwise empty exhibition space is turned into a huge resonating chamber.

The film is quite beautifully shot on 16mm film, if a little indulgent and overly long in places, documenting the last days of the demolition of the Palast der Republik in late 2008. Its saving grace is its protagonist, a German Shepherd dog who is wearing a headcollar made from a plastic KFC bucket. His curiosity and interestedness, and that of the camera that follows him, distinguishes the film from so much other film work made in recent years that takes Berlin/ communism/ modernistic interiors as its subject and beautiful/melancholic as the mood for its sumptuous, elegant and detached panning shots. The KFC bucket, protecting the dog from licking his wounds, is presumably also a discomfort, an annoyance, and a hindrance to proper vision. However the metaphor isn’t overplayed, and as is typical of Allora & Calzadilla’s work, there is that unique and satisfying contrast between functionality and political poetry.

Exhibition at Temporäre Kunsthalle, Schlossplatz, Berlin-Mitte, July 11th til September 6th 2009