Nietzsche took Schopenhauer’s notion of Will (artintelligence) and transformed it first into a Kunsttrieb (art drive, art impulse) and then into the Will to Power (Moore 2002). But Nietzsche took this notion one step further by connecting the art-drive with the theory of evolution. This is of considerable significance because evolution is the most creative process of which we know, it created the mind that now reflects upon it. (more…)
The romantic concept of genius is the foundation stone of the modern and postmodern concept of the “fineness” of fine art. Without it the ability of the fine art institution to create its canon of “great artists” and the capacity of the art market to sell faeces and urinals as precious objects would collapse. In order to understand the concept of genius, which has insinuated itself into the popular unconscious, we need to take a look at the phenomenon of romanticism which arose in late 18th-century Europe and had a very significant impact upon art of the 19th century, which in turn laid the foundation for 20th century modern and postmodern art. (more…)
I would like to draw your attention to a new website for the Kikit Visuosonic project http://www.visuosonic.org/ I was involved with KikitVisuosonic in its early stages and hence have some particular insight into its mission. Two artists are involved: Maurice Owen an Russell Richards. As with most significant art the founding idea was quite simple, to create an interaction between sound and interactive digital visualisation. From the beginning, however, this simple notion contained within itself the longstanding goal of attaining a Gesamtkunstwerk—a total work of art. (more…)
Humanity’s self-image was redefined in the modern era not by art but by the mass medium of photography. Take for example the photograph from the American Civil War reproduced here (click image left). Previously artists had mythologized war as heroic due to the fact that their patrons were the ones who waged the wars. But the photographs of carnage during the American Civil War (1861-65) represent one of the first occasions when the general population could begin to see war and human behaviour from a much more pragmatic and demythologised perspective.
The term ”quiddity” as used in art theoretical writing refers an aesthetic that places emphasis upon the objecthood, or objectness of the work of art rather than its representational or metaphorical aspect. Such emphasis is principally associated with American minimal art which was presaged by Robert Rauschenberg’s White Painting 1951 (artintelligence) and began in earnest with Frank Stella’s black paintings in the late 1950s. Stella’s black paintings were self-referential, they were paintings about painting. In this sense they paralleled the work of Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns who foregrounded the materiality of painting. There is also a family resemblance between the semiotic blankness of John’s American flag paintings and Stella’s use of black stripes.
This text is an extension of the post entitled “The Beginning of the End of Painting“, attempting to go deeper into the historical roots of the decline of painting. The notion of the “end” of painting possesses almost mythic significance due to the fact that for centuries painting was the principal defining feature of fine art. It was during the 1960s that painting lost its centuries-old lead, falling into the background, surpassed by new forms of art that could not even be defined firmly as sculpture, although they sometimes possessed a family resemblance to that medium. (more…)
In my last post I mentioned that I was disappointed to find that the venerable American art critic Donald Kuspit had beat me to the post with the title of his book “The End of Art”. Even before I read Kuspit’s book, however, I knew that it was antithetical to the position that I would take. Kuspit is follower of a conservative apotheosis of modernist abstraction theorised and championed by the influential American art critic Clement Greenberg. In this post I will engage in a critical enquiry into aspects of Kuspit’s position.
A couple of weeks ago the title for a book sprang into my mind “The End of Art” it seemed like a very good title for a book that I would like to write. I was rather disappointed, therefore, to learn that this book had already been written. But, of course, when I actually got hold of this book—which is by the art critic Donald Kuspit—it was not the book that I wanted to write.
Born in Germany 1968 Wolfgang Tillmans moved to London in the 1980s and began his career photographing “street culture, Gay Pride and the rise of the clubbing generation” (Reynolds) for lifestyle magazines The Face and i-D. He came into prominence as a fine artist in 2000 when he won the prestigious Turner prize, and the Hamburger Bahnhof survey exhibition includes a reconstruction of his Turner prize installation. (more…)
Athanasia Kyriakakos and Dimitris Rotsios’s remarkable video-sculptural installation Intron (click image left) was housed in the Greek pavilion on the occasion of the 50th Venice Biennale, 2003. Intron was a collaboration between Athanasia Kyriakakos and architect Dimitris Rotsios. What was noteworthy about this work is that it brought together a variety of innovative features. (more…)
Tatiana Trouvé’s sculptural installation (click image left) Black Polder [1] at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003 was memorable. Like a great deal of contemporary sculpture it plays with narrative in a non-narrative, quasi-abstractionist, mode. In this case the visual game was complex and rewarding. There is something especially fascinating about scale in the context of sculptural imagination. A practising artist constantly sees objects in her everyday life that she can transpose into sculpture.
Photography was largely spurned by the world of fine art for over one hundred and twenty years (the daguerreotype was invented 1839). There were some notable exceptions such as dada photomontage, surrealist photography and constructivist photography—but these were always on the fringes of the principal activities which were painting and sculpture. It was only in the 1970s when conceptual art began to use photography as a primary mode of expression that photography, finally, took centre stage. This became reinforced by the fact that conceptual photography segued in the late 1970s into the postmodern appropriation movement (Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine) that dominated the international art scene in the 1980s. (more…)
Pae White’s recent exhibition Too Much Night, 2008, (click image left) at Neugerriemschneider in Berlin, was attempt at a baroque installation. The overall “installation experience”, however, was not especially powerful. Installation art in the 1990s and 2000s has developed various effective strategies such as immersion, narrative, and exploration. This installation was not really immersive, it was too much like a shop window display for that. But it did have a non-linear narrative dimension that demanded some, but not a great deal, of exploration. (more…)
Christian Jankowski’s exhibition at Klosterfelde in Berlin should be of interest to anyone concerned with the aesthetics of kitsch. Kitsch if we remember was what the champion of classical abstraction, the art critic Clement Greenberg put forward as the antithesis of true art (Greenberg). Greenberg’s attack on kitsch was informed by Marxist aesthetics and one of the problems of Marxist aesthetics is that it cannot determine what ought to be the essential role of fine art in the context of capitalism. (more…)
It appears that the two principal forces keeping sculpture alive today are: firstly, the art market which always needs new objects to sell; and, secondly, the art education system which is largely unable to provide students with skills in the newer media that are more able to critically communicate in the culture in which we live. It was the sculptor Carl Andre who said why produce new objects when there are already too many, but if you can turn them into gold, and it doesn’t really matter what they look like, then why complain? (more…)
One of the more interesting works on view in the Neue Nationalgalerie was Mine, Ours, Everywhere II, 2008, by Isabel Lima. This consisted of a small square canvas (click image left) that carried various dirt marks on its surface which tied in extremely well with Thea Djordjadze’s enormous dirty window, which was one of the highpoints of the Neue Nationalgalerie aspect of the Berlin Biennial. One of the rather odd things about Mine, Ours, Everywhere II was that it was accompanied by a label. This was strange because none of the other works in the exhibition had labels. (more…)
There is a scene in Sam Mendes’ American Beauty, 1999, when Ricky Fitts (Wes Bentley) says to Jane Burnham (Thora Birch) ’do you want to see the most beautiful thing I’ve ever filmed?’ From the standpoint of an aesthetics of contemporary art this is actually quite a significant scene. (more…)
In the context of fine art the viewer means nothing. If a writer or filmmaker does not please the cultural consumer his or her work will fail. The same is true for music, design, architecture and the performing arts. There is no such economic imperative for the fine artist who only needs to please the art institution—a closed system with its own economic engine in the form of collectors, auction houses and state funded museums. What the average viewer thinks about art is irrelevant.
There are three main venues for the Berlin Biennial and in my last post I dealt with the main venue, the KW Institute. In this post I will attempt to tackle the work on exhibition at the Neue Nationalgalerie. However, my ability to do so is hindered by the fact that in this particular venue it was difficult to know who did what because there were no labels. Instead, the visitor is provided with a rather cryptic “map” in the Biennial leaflet. The map is populated by shapes that sometimes appeared unrelated to what was there; it is the worst mode of navigating an exhibition that I have experienced (click on thumbnail image left). (more…)
The most engaging works in the KW aspect of the 5th Berlin Biennial were predominently videos. I have already posted on the best of these and from the hits on YouTube you appear to agree with me that Ania Molska, is especially praiseworthy, and I would add Patricia Esquivias‘ Folklore #1 which becomes more significant (from a socio-aesthetic standpoint) the more I think about it. David Maljkovic’s video Lost Memories from These Days also deserves honourable mention, because it is a little social-critical gem, especially as we approach the fortieth anniversary of May 1968. (more…)
I found Manon De Boer’s contribution to the 5th Berlin Biennial Two Times 4′33″, 2007-8 significant not because I liked it—I thought it was tedious—but because it is an especially clear sign of the degeneration of conceptual art into pretentiousness, self-absorption, and repetition. This was not a work of art at all, it was a non-musical, non-performance with a banal attempt at art tacked on at the end. (more…)
In previous posts on the Biennial I have focused on video, in this post I will treat the work of Czech artist Katerina Šedá which was the best sculptural material on exhibition in the Biennial’s principal venue, the KW Institute. In addition, Šedá also had an apparently related grunge sculptural installation in the Skulpturenpark, which was accompanied by a document (see end of post) which suggested that it might have some kind of “social” aspect, although this was expressed in a very vague manner. (more…)
The most interesting works, in my opinion, at the KW institute—and indeed the Biennial as a whole—were videos and I have already posted on two. The next work I would like to treat is by Patricia Esquivias it is entitled Folklore #1, 2006. DVD 15min. This video is intriguing due to its mixture of anthropology, memory and absurdism. (more…)
Ania Molska’s two video projections W=F*s (work), 2008, and P=W:t (power), 2007-2008 were projected onto corner walls in the KW Institute so as to function as a single video installation. It was a very effective combination. (more…)
The sculpture and graphic work in the KW Institute aspect of the 5th Berlin Biennial was unimpressive, and I will demonstrate this with some images in a later post. But in these initial posts I will treat the more interesting aspects of what I saw at the Biennial. In the KW Institute the more involving work consisted mostly of video and photography. By photography I mean Kohei Yoshiyuki’s Park series taken between 1971-79, documenting sexual encounters in Tokyo’s Shinjuku, Yoyogi and Aoyama parks. (more…)
David Maljkovic’s video Lost Memories from These Days, 2006-2008 (6min loop)—exhibited in the KW Institute at the 5th Berlin Biennial, 2008—is quite a remarkable deconstruction of advertising spectacle. Like most quality art it is simple in conception. Instead of prostrating themselves in a state of orgasmic rapture on the cars in this particular advertisement-like mise-en-scene, the female models appear to be bored to death. (more…)
It is a little bit of a shock seeing the 5th Berlin Biennial’s so-called “sculpturepark” (click image left), and it has to be added immediately that there are things going on around the corner, a video about a woman who fell in love with the Berlin wall and a sound installation by Susan Hiller; one has to follow the Biennial map for the park. But this piece of wasteland is indeed a bona fide part of the 5th Berlin Biennial. As such, as visitors, we thought we would use the wasteland sculpturepark as an opportunity to make our own contributions to the Biennale: which I think is in the spirit of truly progressive contemporary art, view on: (more…)
This sculpture by Donald Judd (1928-1994) is a rather nice object. One could see it in the home or garden, perhaps, (if it is aluminium). But there is one problem, which is its price: around several hundred thousand dollars, some larger pieces go up to a million or even several million. That probably doesn’t seem strange, after all it is fine art. But Judd didn’t actually make his work, it was fabricated in a factory.
In a previous post I showed how painting began the process of its own elimination, or more exactly its transition from being one of the defining categories of artness, to becoming just one more colour on the artist’s palette. In this post I will outline the beginning of the end of sculpture as a defining category. The story begins with minimalism, or more precisely it begins with abstraction, which along with the Readymade was ultimately responsible for the subordination of painting as a defining category of what is or is not “art”. (more…)
Vicki Robertson kindly informed me of this remarkable situational intervention in Grand Central Station, New York. I cite it here as evidence that the ideas formulated by the Situationists in the 1950s and ’60s are still alive. (more…)
As we approach the fortieth anniversary of May ‘68 here is a relevant juxtaposition of image and text, a quotation from Sadie Plant’s The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age: “A staggering abundance of commodity choices is offered, and identification is demanded not with a single commodity but the commodity system itself: it is the spectacle as a whole which is advertised and desired. The lights, the opportunities, the shops, the excitement: the attraction of capitalist societies has always been their glamorous dynamism, the surfeit of commodities and the ubiquity of choice they offer. But in practice, anything can be chosen except the realm in which choice is possible. One can choose to be, think, and do anything, but as the roles, ideas, and lifestyles possible within capitalist society are allowed to appear only to the extent that they appear as commodities, the equivalence and homogeneity of commodities is inescapable in the most private aspects of life. The shops always carry everything except the thing one really wants; they are ‘full of things’.” (Plant 1992: 24). Andreas Gursky’s photographs average $100,000 a piece. (more…)
The 1960s was the period in which deconstructive art came into ascendency and painting lost its grip as the principal medium of fine art. But we can trace the evolution of this development further back. Certain individuals pursued the deconstructive turn in the 1950s, notably Robert Rauschenberg and Yves Klein. And, as always, we can trace the genealogy back further into early twentieth century art; specifically, to Cubist collage, Kurt Schwitters’ trash paintings, Dada’s philosophy of “anti-art”, the Dada and Surrealist concepts of chance, automatism, and montage, as well as the Duchampian Readymade. But, perhaps, the first icon for the mythic “end of painting” was created in 1915 when Kasimir Malevich produced his Black Square painting. (more…)
One of the stranger pieces exhibited in the Italian pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale was Mario Garcia Torres’ What Happens in Halifax Stays in Halifax (In 36 Slides), 2004-2006. This work consists of 50 black-and-white slides which advance slowly into one another via a dissolve effect, the whole show lasting nine minutes. At Venice the projection was very dark which intensified the notion that these images had possibly been discovered in a shoebox.
In 2001 the Scottish artist Martin Creed won the prestigious Turner Prize for his work Work No. 227, The Lights Going On and Off, 2000. The award was greeted by a furore of protest in the British press, and not only the tabloid press. One wonders why we are still surprised by works such as The Lights Going On and Off. (more…)
Willie Doherty’s Non-Specific Threat, 2004, is a simple and powerful single channel, video projection. The camera moves in a circular tracking shot around a tough looking baldheaded man with a gold chain around his neck and a denim jacket. The mise-en-scène appears to be a derelict warehouse. It’s the kind of place which might be chosen for the purposes of torture and/or murder. As the camera tracks slowly around this threatening presence a male voiceover, disembodied from the central figure, makes a series of cryptic statements punctuated by pregnant pauses. For example: (more…)
Ever is All Over, 1997, consists of two overlapping video projections (2 min 38 sec). I saw this at the Beyond Cinema exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof Gallery in Berlin in 2007. There are two aspects of the video on the left there is a landscape with rolling green fields populated with an exotic flower popularly known as the Redhot Poker (Kniphofia uvaria). This idyllic landscape, with its connotations of paradise, is projected at an angle to create some anamorphic distension that contributes to its dreaminess as does a lyrical, musical soundtrack provided in collaboration with Anders Guggisberg. (more…)
Video can quite effectively create a highly immersive effect when it takes on a sculptural dimension. Take for instance Ergin Cavusoglu’s Point of Departure, 2005, a multi-screen video installation with an array of screens designed to allow the viewer to ‘walk into the picture’. (more…)
In 1990 Tom Friedman took a container of red eraser shavings and scattered them on the floor in the shape of a soft-edged circle. How do we understand this gesture as art? One of the things that we can do is look for precedents. Below is a typical target painting by Kenneth Noland on the right of it a painting by Mark Rothko. (more…)
Tom Friedman’s work has the ability to fascinate due to its conflation of simplicity with complexity, the mundane with the metaphysical. This aspect of his work is particularly evident in Untitled (Total), 2000, which was made by cutting up nine identical cereal packets into small squares which where then matched up against each other as if one were putting together nine identical jigsaw puzzles, but in three dimensions, creating a considerable spatial problem. In an interview Friedman noted: “It took me a while to figure out how to do this, but it’s based on matrices.” (in Cooper 2001: 27). This statement is informative because it indicates a significant understanding of mathematics, in particular the application of matrices to geometric transformations.
Ceal Floyer’s work takes the Readymade aesthetic to its logical conclusion. For Nail Biting Performance, 2001, she walked onto the stage at Birmingham Symphony Hall immediately prior to the beginning of a concert and bit off her fingernails into the microphone. This performance was hosted by the Ikon Gallery Birmingham (England) and an Ikon Gallery text reports: “Her ‘nail biting performance’ took stage-fright as its subject, the artist, bit her fingernails into a microphone for five minutes. The sight of her alone amongst the musicians’ empty chairs, accompanied by the amplified sound of nervousness, was affecting and tense.” (Ikon). (more…)
Isa Genzken’s installation for the German pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale, 2007, was a tour de force in the genre of grunge chic. One had an intimation of this even at the doorway of the pavilion courtesy of a massive pile of German Vogue magazine offprints of an article on Genzken’s show. (more…)
This post is a critical analysis of an Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (England) publication From Arkhipov to Zittel: Selected Ikon Off-Site Projects 2000 — 2001. I think that it is a particularly interesting document because it cites numerous instances that operate at the edge of art, and some that, in my opinion, teeter over the brink into the oblivion of non-art.
I came upon this image in a student’s essay, no year was given but it is a sculpture by Louise Bourgeois, the title is also uncertain, perhaps it is “Do you love me? Do you love me?” because that is carved on the sculpture’s base. The significance of the work, for me, lies in a quotation related to the work which the student found and which, I believe, raises an interesting issue. (more…)
The video footage provided below consists of an extract from a major presentation given by Toshio Iwai at Ars Electronica: Simplicity the Art of Complexity, in 2006. In this segment he gives insight into the inspiration for his remarkable visual-musical interfaces such as his gallery-based interactive visual music installations, his compilation of such ideas into Electroplankton for the Nintendo DS and his invention of a new visual based musical instrument the Tenori-On, which Iwai developed in conjunction with Yamaha (link 1 [uk] link 2 [global]). (more…)
Where do we draw the distinction between vision and sound? To those of us not endowed with the gift of synaesthesia (although more, or even all, of us may have aspects of this talent at the level of unconscious cognition) that question might seem easy to answer but the distinction is becoming blurred. Note how some of the most outstanding pieces of “sculpture” at the Munster Sculpture Project 07 were actually sound pieces. I refer to Suchan Kinoshita’s Chinese Whispers installation and Susan Philipsz’s The Lost Reflection. (more…)
Pablo Valbuena’s Augmented Sculpture v. 1.2 is a remarkable synthesis of modernist-minimalist sculpture and video projection. Strangely this fascinating piece was not shown at the main Ars Electronica 2007 exhibition space in the OK Centrum Gallery but was instead relegated to a rather decrepit building on the streets of Linz. Fortunately we wandered around the town long enough to stumble upon it. (more…)
The German-Venezuelan musician Niobe’s (Yvonne Cornelius) performance at Ars Electronica in 2006 was a voluptuous combination of electronic music, video projection and soulful vocal prowess. The videoscape painted a sin city collage with casino signs and high rise buildings drifting by as one drove through the nightscape yearning for the next sensual fix. Niobe was a powerful presence on stage and pushed the theme of potentially fatal sensuality extremely well, dressed in black with an extravagant headdress that was reflected in the videoscape in the recurrent image of a silhouetted female dancer. (more…)
In another post I wrote about the “Documenta 12 effect” deploying a Baudrillard-like methodology of pessimistic futurology. The endpoint of the fictional Documenta 12 effect is a Pruitt Igoe-like demolition of the institution of fine art: which from an anti-capitalist standpoint may not be such a bad thing. (more…)
Hu Xiaoyuan’s installation A keepsake I cannot give away, 2005, (photo-detail on left by Michael J. Hussman) was given a great deal of prominence in Documenta 12 and for good reason, she is a genuine discovery. The only previous exhibition I can find for her is in 2005: Mahjong–Chinesische Gegenwartskunst (Chinese Contemporary Art) at the Kunstmuseum Bern (Artfacts). I have criticised the curation of Documenta 12 because a lot of work on exhibition either wasn’t very visually inspiring or was presented with such minimal labelling that crucial contextual information was kept from the audience. This was not really the case for Hu Xiaoyuan’s work although, given that she was a new name, a little more context than the no frills–name, title, date, medium, size–label would have been welcome. (more…)
In another post I referred to the “Documenta 12 effect” which refers to the manner in which the artistic director of Documenta 12, Roger Buergel, attempted a transvaluation of fine art by focusing on work that was visually uninteresting. The pieces exhibited by Alejandra Riera and Ueinzz at Documenta 12 fit into this category. Yet they are of great value because they point to a possible end to the erosion of category “art” initiated by the viral impact of the Duchampian Readymade; due to the fact that they indicate a point at which we can justifiably state “this is not art”. (more…)
Yoshimasa Kato and Yuichi Ito received honourable mention in the category interactive art for their work White Lives on Speaker, at Ars Electronica 2007. Remarkably the artists responsible for this fascinating work are 25 and 24 years old respectively. As the video (VIDEO CLIP) demonstrates the work entails hooking up a member of the audience to an electroencephalograph and feeding the subject’s brain waves into software (Max/Msp) that transposes them into audio frequency output that can power a heavy-duty loudspeaker.
Combing through my photo-documentation Documenta 12 I stumbled upon the work of Hito Steyerl. I did not know anything about her when I encountered her work at Documenta 12, but researching for this post I now think Steyerl is one of the few gems in that extremely flawed exhibition. But when I saw the work she exhibited at Documenta 12 it did not make a big impression, and I did not spend too much time with it. This is not especially surprising, however, due to the fact that her video projection was exhibited in an atrium. In retrospect, it is almost mind-numbing to think how a curator (in this case Roger M. Buergel) could throw away one of the small number of potentially interesting works in his show by positioning it so badly. (more…)
I am revisiting my folder of photographs and videos taken at Documenta 12 in order to begin an archaeological investigation of why such a major exhibition failed. One of the theories evident in the reception of Documenta 12 is that many of the artists were unknown. One can take this at face value, but there were artists in the exhibition who are well known and some who, although less known, have acquired a significant degree of recognition within the Euro-American art system, one such is the Indian documentary filmmaker and artist Amar Kanwar. (more…)
Susan Philipsz’s The Lost Reflection, 2007, is a sound installation under the Tormin Bridge (Torminbruecke) on Lake Aa that was commissioned by the Munster Sculpture Project 07. It was one of the most outstanding contributions to the 2007 Sculpture Project. The fact that another sound work by Suchan Kinochita, was also outstanding indicates that sculptural installation is beginning to lose its grip after over fifteen years of sharing aesthetic ascendancy with video art. Some of the weakest pieces in Munster this year were fag ends of endless sculptural installation variations on the Readymade theme. (more…)
Rebecca Horn’s Der Zwinger was a rerun of a site-specific, immersive installation Horn had contributed to a previous Munster Sculpture Project and which was resurrected for the 2007 Sculpture Project. The venue was an historic building and part of the documentation accompanying the exhibition included a photograph of the building from the Nazi era, the caption for the photograph draws the viewer’s attention to the swastika in the front window. (more…)
Annette Wehrmann’s contribution to Munster Sculpture Project 07, Aaspa: Wellness am See (AaSpa Wellness by the Lake) consisted of a simulated building site. Her work can be understood as a symptom of a more general aesthetic zeitgeist in which artists express a desire to be socially useful and immediately deconstruct this outrageous yearning. (more…)
Minimalism just won’t go away, in spite of the surge of grunge that accompanied art of the 1990s. The Swedish artist Jacob Dahlgren (b. 1970) shows just how minimalism can be revitalised by lev
