Wednesday, December 30, 2009
BEST BOOK:
Artist's book
In his new artist's book, Wyn Evans refers to two ground-breaking publications of the last century: 'Un coup de dés jamais ln'abolira le hasard – poéme' from 1914 by French poet Stéphane Mallarmé, and its 1969 'translation' by the Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers. Wyn Evans' lavishly designed tribute contains just a single sentence, the one he used for the neon work made on commission to deSingel. Each letter was cut out of paper with a laser and the words were distributed irregularly over the whole volume.
Cerith Wyn Evans, '. . .' - delay
32 pages, 24.7 x 32.5 cm, 500 copies, numbered 1 to 500; published by deSingel in association with Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter Kőnig, Cologne; ISBN: 978-3-86560-722-5.
BEST MAGAZINE:
Occulto
Adherents of Discordianism believe in the power of chaos. They deny that the kosmos has order or, even less so, harmony.
They will claim: "We believe this! And its contrary as well!".
They define their cult as a religion, disguised as a joke, disguised as a religion.
The great recession that has dominated this past year is in some ways an offspring, a failure of the deterministic principle. How could a system that claims to be based on scientific foundations implode in such a way? How much, and in what way, is scientific knowledge actually deployed in the management of the planet?
As Massimo Sandal explains, the movement of objects in space is a deterministic system on paper but swerves and generates chaotic models that no brain, human or electronic, is able to predict. Occulto is a magazine about variables gone awry and stories that take an unexpected turn. The algebraic revolution of the 20th century starts with the brief and tragic life of a young French Republican in the post-Napoleonic era. An English non-fiction writer is trying to persuade us that the entire world is in the hands of an élite of alien reptiles; what would happen if we believed him? An American scholar at the beginning of the 20th century left us an endless and indecipherable archive of his obsession with unexplainable facts. A small sliver of the disillusionment and fears of post-war Germany takes refuge in the mountains of Piemonte, in northern Italy, and spawns a daunting religious community.
If it is true that where the light is brightest is where the Fecal secretly rules, then we must look elsewhere. The best weapon against sane opinions and triumphant competence is still to trip it up, as Adorno suggested over 50 years ago.
This is why Occulto is nothing but a magazine, disguised as a joke, disguised as a magazine..
BEST SHOW:
Trisha Donnelly at MAMBO Bologna
Curated by Andrea Viliani
The guiding principle behind Trisha Donnelly’s new project for MAMbo is the desire to render both the museum and the visitor’s experience of art captivating. The spatial and temporal elements of the exhibition are enlivened by evocative dilations and juxtapositions of architectural, visual and audio elements designed to create a narrative that operates on several semantic levels. The first work in the show is a small, black and white photograph (all works untitled; all 2009) of a female face partly obscured on one side by a soap bubble: the delicacy of this unfocused photo looks like a Donnelly’s invitation to the viewer to approach the exhibition with an inquisitive mind.
Ex-aequo:
Fantastic Tavern: The Tbilisi Avant-garde
Presented by Casey Kaplan
June 25, 2009- July 31, 2009
Reception: June 25, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm [Add to Google Calendar]
Curated by Daniel Baumann and AIRL
Fantastic Tavern: The Tbilisi Avant-garde is an exhibition as a book. It presents an introduction into Georgian Modernism, a highly significant yet overlooked period in art history. Since 2004, Swiss curator and art historian, Daniel Baumann, has collaborated with the Arts Interdisciplinary Research Laboratory (AIRL), a group of Georgian art historians and artists, on an annual celebration of international contemporary art and culture in Tbilisi. Here, Casey Kaplan is pleased to introduce their newest collaboration to New York.
From 1918-1921, Georgia declared its short independence as the Democratic Republic of Georgia, and Tbilisi became the “Paris” of the East, where an inspired community of artists not only developed unprecedented creative practices but also collaborated to produce astonishing works of art. During this time, members of the avant-garde in Russia fled Moscow and several key figures from this group made their way to Tbilisi. Their union with the Tbilisi avant-garde along with others from the International community marks a short but crucial period in Georgia’s rich history that eventually led to the development of films, stage designs, theatrical performances, musical compositions, literature, sound poetry, magazines, books, paintings and sculptures, all of which form what is referred to today as “Georgian Modernism”.
BEST FILM:
A Serious Man
A Serious Man is the story of an ordinary man’s search for clarity in a universe where Jefferson Airplane is on the radio and F-Troop is on TV. It is 1967, and Larry Gopnik, a physics professor at a quiet midwestern university, has just been informed by his wife Judith that she is leaving him. She has fallen in love with one of his more pompous colleagues, Sy Ableman, who seems to her a more substantial person than the feckless Larry. Larry’s unemployable brother Arthur is sleeping on the couch, his son Danny is a discipline problem and a shirker at Hebrew school, and his daughter Sarah is filching money from his wallet in order to save up for a nose job. While his wife and Sy Ableman blithely make new domestic arrangements, and his brother becomes more and more of a burden, an anonymous hostile letter-writer is trying to sabotage Larry’s chances for tenure at the university. Also, a graduate student seems to be trying to bribe him for a passing grade while at the same time threatening to sue him for defamation. Plus, the beautiful woman next door torments him by sunbathing nude. Struggling for equilibrium, Larry seeks advice from three different rabbis. Can anyone help him cope with his afflictions and become a righteous person – a mensch – a serious man?
BEST ARTIST:
STERLING RUBY makes richly glazed biomorphic ceramics, large-scale spray-painted canvases, poured urethane sculptures, nail polish drawings, various forms of collage, and hypnotic videos. His work is a form of assault on both materials and social power structures. He takes his subject matter from a wide range of sources, including marginalized societies, maximum security prisons, modernist architecture, artifacts and antiquities, graffiti, bodybuilders, the mechanisms of warfare, cults and cult members, and urban gangs.
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Friday, December 4, 2009
Where?
Limited copies of EMPTY RESTAURANT are available at:
Kaleidoscope, Milano IT
Galleria Buenos Aires 10
20124 Milano Italy
tel. + 39 02 365 355 63
fax + 39 02 365 361 17
www.thekaleidoscope.eu
info@thekaleidoscope.eu
Printed Matter, New York USA
Printed Matter, Inc.
195 10th Avenue
New York, NY 10011 USA
Telephone / Fax
212 925 0325 telephone
212 925 0464 fax
David Lamelas and Hildegarde Duane
The decades-long collaboration of Lamelas and Duane began in the late 1970’s when there was flowering of video art led by the Long Beach Museum of Art and local artists. Lamelas & Duane over the years of their collaboration have taken many difference scenerios including: Arabs & Jews, the Contras, Marcos & Imelda, The Dictator homeless (long before Saddam), the NRA and the gas crisis.
The Dictator ,1978, the first of these collaborative videos, depicts a Barbara Walters type character, played by Duane, interviewing the title character who was loosely based on Peron and Castro, played by Lamalas. Themes in these videos include the battle of the sexes, transformative power of the media, ironic twists of fate and an uncanny ability to predict the future. Styles have ranged from TV interview to documentary, film noir, short story and installation.
Lamela’s individual work explores the nature and influence of media. Duane’s works as a multi-media storyteller. These videos of Lamelas and Duane are an examination of power and glamour via social satire. Lamelas & Duane’s work has been exhibited at MOMA New York, the Whitney Museum, MOCA, Hartford Atheneum, ICA Boston, Long Beach Museum of Art, Centre Pompidou Paris, Museo Tamayo Mexico City and various other museums and galleries worldwide.
THE BOX- Los Angeles
The new project by Lamelas_Duane is currently shown at Gaudel de Estampa, Paris
PARIS
Hat Right Nose Bright Clock Right
Rabbit wrong
Glasses Right Eye Bright Shoes Right
Owl wrong
Dress right Mouth Bright Ring Right
Fish wrong
The light
is going
out and in
turn off
Turn on
Eye Enlighted Mouth Enlighted Nose Enlighted
Man Invisible
( A short excercise after a section of OuLiPo)
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