Istanbul Bienal (Translator’s Box)

Translator's Box (in the arch) at ex-Platform Garanti building,
Istanbul.

PAWNSHOP opens in China

via eflux:

Following its bankruptcy and closure in New York at the beginning of the global economic crises in February 2008, e-flux’ PAWNSHOP proprietors Julieta Aranda & Anton Vidokle will now try their luck in China. Starting this Wednesday, September 16th, the PAWNSHOP will open its doors again at the shop, Beijing, its inventory comprised of artworks, bought and sold.

the shop is a new experimental space in Beijing initiated by Vitamin Creative Space, seeking to engage with art as it comes into contact with, and grows from, everyday life. For the PAWNSHOP, the shop acts as site but also as facilitator and partner in this economic experiment, which is also an experiment in institutional relations to a project built around the dynamics of risk and profit.

Come browse works for sale by more than 60 artists, including: Ayreen Anastas, Julie Ault, Fia Backstrom, AA Bronson/General Idea, Cao Fei, Paul Chan, Rutherford Chang, Chen Chieh-jen, Chen Wengbo, Chen Wei, Luke Ching, Heman Chong, Chu Yun, Keren Cytter, Duan Jianyu, Michael Eddy, Claire Fontaine, Rene Gabri, Simryn Gill, Gong Jian, Diango Hernandez, Elaine Ho + Gao Ling, Karl Holmqvist, Hu Xianqian, Hu Xiaoyuan, Huang He, Huang Xiaopeng, Jiang Zhi, Jin Shan, Kan Xuan, Kang He, Lam Tung Pang, Lee Kit, Leung Chi Wo, Li Qing, Li Zhenhua, Lin Yilin, Liu Ding, Liu Wei, Liu Zhizhi, Lu Chensheng, Ma Yansong, Mian Mian, Olaf Nicolai, Pak Sheung Chuen, Martha Rosler, Anri Sala, Nedko Solakov, Sun Xun, Tang Yi, Wang Wei, Wen Wei, Doris Wong, Kacey Wong, Ming Wong, Xiao He, Xu Tan, Xu Zheng, Yan Jun, Jun Yang, Yangjiang Group (Zheng Guogu, Chen Zaiyan Suan Qinglin), Zhang Da, Zhou Tao and many more…

GRAND OPENING: 4 – 6 pm, Wednesday, September 16th, featuring a public conversation about garage sales, pawnshops and art galleries by Julieta Aranda, Anton Vidokle, Martha Rosler, Hu Fang & Michael Eddy; followed by an open discussion with participating artists and public.

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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

To Biennial or Not to Biennial?

(Unrelated) image held here

Bergen Biennial Conference, Norway
17th – 20th of September 2009

http://www.bbc2009.no /
http://www.kunsthall.no

The Bergen Biennial Conference will bring together an international group of curators, critics, artists and art historians so as to benefit from their discussions of their findings, and create the occasion to reflect collectively about the practice and potential of biennials as institutions. Based on an earlier Call for Biennial Knowledge the organizers of the conference have identified and explored existing knowledge from different regions of the world. The conference will be made up of lectures as well as seminar style workshops with young and leading experts in the field. It will be complemented with an extensive publication, The Biennial Reader, aiming to be an important resource, and including existing seminal texts on biennials from around the world as well as newly commissioned essays.

As scholars and curators have acknowledged, the history of exhibitions is both one of the most vital and, paradoxically, ignored narratives of our cultural history. And given the increasing role of biennials and other perennial exhibitions of contemporary art in contemporary culture, it seems all the more necessary to critically examine them today. The impetus to do so now comes in response to the Bergen City Council’s plans to establish a biennial for contemporary art in Bergen, for which the Bergen Kunsthall has taken up the task of organizing an international conference and think tank to study and discuss the status of the biennial as an exhibition model, and also to launch a debate concerning the plans for a biennial in Bergen.

Three Curatorial Collectives announced for Manifesta 8

		Manifesta 8, the European Biennial of Contemporary Art, will take place in 2010 in the Region of Murcia, Spain, in dialogue with Northern Africa. The curatorial team of Manifesta 8 is composed of: ALEXANDRIA CONTEMPORARY ARTS FORUM CHAMBER OF PUBLIC SECRETS TRANZIT.ORG

Tattered Outlaws of History

Dan Dubowitz & Fearghus O’Conchuir at Martello Tower, Skerries
Public art commission by Fingal County Council

The Martello tower at Skerries, all of the dozen on the Dublin coast in fact, are remarkable buildings: highly idiosyncratic now, and quickly anachronistic even when they were built first  in the nineteenth century.

The collaboration between Dubowitz and O’Conchuir – visual artist and dancer/ choreographer – over the last two years departed from this initial curiosity. The resultant work manifests in the Skerries tower as a 12 screen video installation, to be regarded from a single point of view on a platform built for visitors. Each screen shows a single slow panning shot from the canon position in each of the twelve towers, coolly surveying the remains of each tower’s interior architecture and the view beyond, from chic inhabitation to rugged folly. Ah, Portmarnock golf course, says a visitor at my shoulder.

The Incidental Person

Art and Social Intervention: The Incidental Person

Also forthcoming at apexart: The Incidental Person, curated by Antony Hudek;

The “Incidental Person” was coined by the British artist John Latham (1921-2006) to qualify the status of an artist involved in non-art contexts such as government or large corporations. This exhibition expands on Latham’s original definition of the Incidental Person to include those persons for whom all aspects of life – political, social, esthetic, professional – are integrated into a unified whole. The new Incidental Person can be an artist, but does not need to be since for her or him meaningful production is not the exclusive property of any one member of society: the Incidental Person can be anyone as long as each of her or his actions partakes of a larger, unified life practice. The exhibition argues that the Incidental Person stakes out a new position, outside of the 20th-century triad Joseph Beuys-Marcel Duchamp-John Cage. Unlike the latter, the Incidental Person does not seek to solve the “art-life” or “mind-body” problems. Instead, she or he fails to see them as problems at all, since for the Incidental Person art, life, mind, and body cannot be understood in opposition to one another. But this does not mean that the Incidental Person declares that anything can be art, as Duchamp suggested with the readymade. Rather art itself becomes subsumed under a larger, all-inclusive category of motions or things that bear the elusive imprint of Incidentality. And while the Incidental Person shares Beuys’ interest in pedagogy, she or he eschews the self-mythologizing of the avant-garde: if you do not recognize the Incidental Person walking past you in the street, this is probably because you have yet to learn what makes their life-practice Incidental – and vice-versa. This exhibition bring together persons formerly known as “artists”, “writers”, “technicians”, and “bureaucrats”, who imbue their everyday existence with Incidentality. In particular, the exhibition will underscore aspects of the Incidental Person’s life-work that do not appear obviously “artistic”, thus becoming a pedagogical forum to learn how to recognize and act out the potential behind seemingly disparate gestures, regardless of their professional or aesthetic tags.

Amateur Hour: Unprofessional Development

Published here on a-n.co.uk: Joanne Lee writes in praise of the amateur art critic.

'Raspberries', Joanne Lee, 2009.

 According to the art historian James Elkins, art criticism is in worldwide crisis. He says that there is more of it around than anyone can read, and that it is ‘massively produced’ but yet also ‘massively ignored’: its readership is ‘unknown, unmeasured and disturbingly ephemeral.’ In his pamphlet ‘Whatever Happened to Art Criticism?’ Elkins wishes instead there was more interaction between contemporary criticism and the ‘serious’ work (he means the kind done within universities and academies) of art history, art education and aesthetics. Criticism, he seems to believe, ought to be something best left to professionals of a certain stripe, people who can be trusted to do it properly. I’m not sure I agree: rather than pursuing Elkins argument about the relative quality of journalism or academia – both of which seem dogged by the repetitions of already familiar positions – I want to step sideways out of the fray in order to recognise the virtues of critical writing done by those who do not want to consider themselves professionals of either field. Here I find a more improper criticism, one that is unafraid of the partial and temporal, and one able to amplify the pleasures and possibilities of real-life critical conversation, as it takes place in studios or across dinner tables.

In The Medium is the Massage, Marshall McLuhan suggested that the professional tends to ‘accept uncritically the ground rules’, remaining ‘contentedly unaware’ of the all-pervasive environment in which these have been established. By contrast, the amateur is not constrained by the prevailing purview, and so is potentially able to operate beyond such norms. This can simply be because, as historian Daniel Boorstin once recognised, an amateur ‘need not be a genius to stay out of ruts he has never been trained in’, but this kind of benign ignorance need not be the only rationale for such a position: instead it could be that amateurs are able to risk doing things differently, to think in alternative ways to the acceptable mainstream, because they can afford to fail – after all, their professional ‘career’ isn’t on the line.

Before the Show

Cleaning loose pile from the carpet…

Quite a journey from the clean graphic below.

Just Some Videos

The new gallery at the National College of Art and Design opens with a superb show by Phil Collins: see here for more info about the inaugural season.

Visiting a few weekends ago I was told (quite apologetically) at the front desk, ‘Well there’s no art here as such. Just some videos.’

So it seems the mediation programme has a way to go yet: it is really a shame that staff who have worked in the institution for twenty or thirty years, or more, are so uninformed as to the kind of cultural products it sends out into the world. And also instructive that the role of gallery ‘front desking’ is perhaps something that should not be underestimated in terms of the specific training that is required (vocabulary; interest; the ability to ‘put a face on yerself’) .