searching for gold in some of my favorite artists...

Ouvroir d'Univers Potentiel

MULTIVERSE TABLE at First OuUnPo MEETING in Rome at MACRO 23.1.2010

OuUnPo: Meris Angioletti, Daniele Balit, Yane Calovski, Cecilia Canziani, Jacob Dahl Jürgensen, Adrienne Drake, Mark Geffriaud, Raimundas Malasauskas, Darius Miksys, Jacopo Miliani, Daniela Paes Leao, Samon Takahashi, Stephen Whitmarsh


Contributions of:
Alessio Ascari, Lorenzo Bruni, Antonia Ciani, Caroline Corbetta, Giulia di Lenarda, Piersandra di Matteo and Snejanka Mihaylova, George Henry Longly, Nazli Gurlek, Luigi Iandoli+Guest, Teresa Macrì, Federica Matelli, Marco Mazzoni, Francesca Pagliuca, Peep-Hole, Caterina Riva, Annalisa Rosso, Alessandra Sandrolini, Fatos Ustek, Veronica Valentini, Jonas Žakaitis



Dearest,
As may you know, this fall-winter I attended a workshop among Rome, Skopije and Paris with a group of curators and artists.
The workshop has the multiverse theory as conceptual framework.
You can find some details of the workshop in the attachments.

Now in January I decided to organize a small presentation/project, that is going to be shown for the final result of the workshop in Rome.
The idea is to ask to my working-network to submit a contribution at the idea of multiverse.
I did this kind of presentation for the introduction of a workshop that I organized myself in Istanbul.
Your submission is very free and open to your choice; the only restriction is the format (photocopy or something that can be photocopied).

Your contribution could be very free and spontaneous and as in the previous workshop could be:
_a text you wrote or you want to write
_an image
_ a text written by someone else
_a sentence or a quote
_a email
_a selection of books, films or artists
Or even better something else
Something that you might relate to the topic of the multiverse with a total personal approach.

Of course I am not asking you to go in the deep analysis of the topic, also the approach, that we decided to follow during the workshop, was very open to the influences and the suggestions coming out from the theory better than the theory itself.

If you are interested in to take part of the project with your simply but very precious contribution I would be extremely happy.

Please do not hesitate to contact me for further details and if you don't feel to participate there is no problem for me.

I am looking forward to hear from you

With all my best

Jacopo

EMPTY RESTAURANT IS PART OF THE BIBLIOTEQUE OF HALLE 14
http://www.halle14.org/bibliothek.html

HALLE 14 is a non-profit art centre. It is a place for the presentation of contemporary art and a space for reflection and communication.

The five-story, 20.000 m2 building HALLE 14 is situated in the area of the former Leipzig Cotton Spinning Mill. Since the beginning of the 1990ies, artists, gallerists and other creatives have built a productive and lively community which provides an inspiring set for HALLE 14 which now consists of about 100 artists and 12 galleries.

The restoration of HALLE 14 is part of developing it into an art centre with a wide variety of projects and activities connected to contemporary art. The most important object for 2008/2009 is the leaking roof. Its restoration is an essential step towards the goals of HALLE 14.

HALLE 14 is supported by the Federkiel Foundation and the Leipziger Baumwollspinnerei Verwaltungsgesellschaft mbH. Individual projects are funded by friends and patrons of HALLE 14.

The genius and the boys

Carleton Gajdusek was one of the world´s greatest genius, and also a man who has been convicted for having sex with a foster-son.

Carleton Gajdusek discovered a completely new form of infection - the human mad cow disease among cannibal Papua New Guineans.
He is a scientist and a hero of other scientists. He is also someone whose friends and family are from a variety of cultures, different social classes, and from all over the world - subsistence farmers on Papua New Guinea, billionaires in New York, top thinkers in the Ukraine, Nobel-prize winners all around the globe, the young intelligentsia of China.

Carleton Gajdusek claims himself to be a pedophile on the same lines "as Jesus Christ". According to the FBI, he has adopted 57 children from Papua New Guinea, Micronesia and elsewhere, and brought them up at his home close to the National Institutes of Health, close to Washington DC.

This documentary film explores an extraordinary 20th century life, full of contradiction. How is it that humans can switch within milliseconds, between total intelligence, and total self-delusion? What is the nature of true exploration?

Reviews after the BBC broadcast June 2009

The Times:
What was impressive about the film, however, was that its knee did not jerk in easy outrage. The boys came from a society where paedophilia was a rite of passage. Only very few of them have, apparently, anything but loving memories of Gajdusek. Was it, Lindquist´s wise commentary implied, worse to import another country´s mores to America than to impose American standards on foreigners? For most of Gajdusek´s peers - including the sinologist Judith Farquhar, the neurologist Oliver Sacks, and Robert Gallo, who discovered HIV - what Gajdusek did in bed seemed largely irrelevant. But Gajdusek cannot be let off.

The Independent
...Carleton Gajdusek was a name unfamiliar to me before I watched Bosse Lindquist´s engrossing Storyville documentary, The Genius and the Boys. I learnt that Gajdusek was a brilliant Nobel Prize-winning scientist, born in New York in 1923, who discovered the particles that cause mad cow disease. ....a conviction for the sexual abuse of children having wrecked his once-illustrious reputation....


Original Title: Gadjusek - the genius and the Boys
Genre: Documentary
Duration: 84'
Year of Production:2009
Producer: Bosse Lindquist
Produced by: Eight Millimeters AB and SVT

SPECIAL THANKS TO allen grubesic that told me about the documentary.

WET

What Was WET?

The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing was published in Venice and Santa Monica between 1976 and 1981 by Leonard Koren. An invaluable brief introduction by Bedford McIntosh seems to be the only online resource celebrating WET, hence the creation of this survey, a repository of cover thumbnails and indices of each issue.

Reoccurring WET features included Dribble; Places; Non-Human Life Forms; Food; Architecture; Fashion; the Last or Back Page; and of course, Gourmet Bathing. Frequent contributors to the magazine, among many others, were Matt Groening (text, hardly ever cartoons), Kristine McKenna (interviews), Philip Garner (drawings of implausible inventions) and Bob & Bob.

Regular advertisers included KROQ; the 9:30 music club in DC; LA restaurants like Nucleus Nuance and the China Club; various Melrose boutiques like Cowboys & Poodles, Industrial Revolution, Neo 80, Camp Beverly Hills, and the Soap Plant; plus Trash & Vaudeville in NYC.

http://www.thedocumentaryblog.com/index.php/2009/08/07/dont-you-forget-about-me-a-documentary-about-john-hughes/

from Mirror Phase blog

http://mirrorphase.tumblr.com/

Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi

Milan-based filmmakers Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi are renowned for their accomplished work with archival footage derived principally from the 1910s and 1920s. Thoughtfully juxtaposing images through editing, Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi also invariably re-photograph their material, adjusting the film's speed, adding tinted color and spare soundtracks, and reframing the image to focus on key details. Such meticulous manipulation encourages spectators to read the selected footage, instead of simply watching it, so as to consider not only what the images mean, but how. Much of the work is explicitly political, and grounded in the idea of the cinematic apparatus as a detached observer of modernity's vast upheavals: Colonialism, World War One, statelessness. To what extent, the films ask, is this dispassionate gaze able to critique modernity, and to what extent is it complicit in the upheavals, or at least complacent?

Such questions about the function and resonance of the cinematic image are given particular force by the physical decay of the aging footage preferred by Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi. Often foregrounding the incomplete or distorted parts of the image, the filmmakers point to the contrast between the apparently implacable gaze of the camera and the vulnerability of its material support, a disparity that, in turn, reveals the gap between the compulsive force of political power and ideology on the one hand, and the bodies of the workers, soldiers and colonized submitted to it, on the other. The seeming imperviousness of the cinematic apparatus and the ideologies that deploy it—colonialist powers, authoritarian states—all depend nevertheless on a mutable material base, and on the contingencies of history.

The spare and intense films of Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi wring both irony and a strange, mournful beauty from the bodies on display in the images they select, bearing witness to the ravages of time and the destructive power of the European nations and their armies.

BEST BEST BEST

Best Music:

The XX

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 YOUTUBE VIDEO:
Do You Love Me ? / Bendaly Family عائلة بندلي


Recorded in Kuwait 1978
الغناء : رينيه بندلي

زوروا موقع عائلة بندلي الرسمي

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 SUIT:
Jil Sander

Best R.I.P

My fighting fish OLA

and...

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 UNKNOWN PERSON:
Taylor