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Noted
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In tempo di crisi le gallerie più intraprendenti si impegnano nella ricerca. È così che nasce Astuni Public Studio, un progetto col quale la Galleria Enrico Astuni a partire da ottobre 2009, nel suo nuovo spazio inaugurato lo scorso gennaio a Bologna, presenta una serie di iniziative nell'ambito dell'arte contemporanea curate da alcuni dei migliori critici italiani e stranieri: una proposta che non ha fini diretti di mercato, ma punta ad indagare nuove modalità espositive e di comunicazione dell'arte.
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Voices
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| There are always multiple ideas that I could choose from when I am making another piece of work. As boring as it may seem, I choose it very logically and mechanically. I simply choose the idea from my notebook that is the least like the work I just made. It acts like smelling salts, wakes me up, and puts me in a position where I have to start thinking from zero again. The jump from, say, being a tailor to making a fictional feature film to architecturally designing an art school based on Bentham’s Panoptican, is massive but means that I find myself in a place that is so unfamiliar that I push myself to reassess everything. As painters may use color, I use “stuff.” |  | |
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Skin
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Haizan Shaw’s Red Flower Girl is composed of large, stiff, ellipses of crimson gather round each other, colonizing into bunches, pointing in, at other times proudly growing outwards. Caught in these different stages, these ranging moments of the flowers give the piece a still movement. These crowding clusters of petals orchestrate the photo’s atmosphere, providing the viewer with the sense of a floating and wavering delicacy. Perhaps mimicking the movement and feeling of the surrounding plant life, the nude that takes center stage amongst them translates some of the same notions. Lying, ever so elegantly and modestly over herself, with the same grace of a Renaissance nude, her form sings the similarly smooth melody into the photo’s composition.
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Reviewed
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Filling Chace Center to the brim, the largest gallery at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Museum of Art in the City of Providence, Inner City comprised an astonishing array of architectural-scale models and tiny figurines fashioned entirely out of clay. All the little male people—the sculptor’s version of Everyman—strikingly similar in their facial and bodily characteristics, bring to mind countless crowd scenes found in old Depression-ear Hollywood movies. A collaboration of New York ceramicist Arnie Zimmerman and Lisbon architect Tiago Montepegado, the convoluted twists and turns of this bustling model city readily invite reflections on the history of man.
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Performance
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Art should be in the streets surprising people, not necessarily in galleries or museums.
Art should be part of everyone’s daily journey into work.
Art should make us laugh and catch people unaware.
Art should show us something that we can all understand.
Art should make us think effortlessly.
Art should question its own what-ness. |  | |
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Skin
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| My work is about how artificially identities are constructed, and how it is possible to undermine the myths of social conventions such as the political borders, languages, religions, and last but not least, art. The tool used is just to take to the extreme the logic contained on them. I put into dialogue drawings, photographs, videos, and installations where myself, other people, or even live animals orchestrate performative acts that confront the symbols, myths, and metaphors of the foundations of Western patriarchal dominance. The use of satire within my practice produces a moral ambivalence, which unsettles any fixation on a historical victimization of women, concerning their social visibility and mobility in the public sphere. |  | |
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China
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To me, performance art is not only a medium or material to create with, but also a reflection of an artist who keeps his independent spirit and creativity. In 2001, China’s Department of Culture Supervision released an article that states, “Violent or pornographic performance art is prohibited in public.” However, what is pornographic or violent is vague and hard to define. The majority of performance art stems from the human body. At the same time, poignant sarcasm is what characterizes performance art. The criticism from the government has given the public the impression that performance art is unhealthy. The Chinese art market has been growing rapidly since 2003, but performance art is still not accepted by the market.
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China
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| Because of greed, human beings always want the best interest for themselves, and not for others. Unfortunately, this seems to be regarded as the drive for human progress. The world today cannot bear any more of humans’ greed. People are exhausted by their own never-ending desire and caught up in this vicious circle. If things come from void and eventually return to void, what is there to be gained in this material world, what can we actually change? When art comes to a point where only the concept lives, art reaches the point of abyss. But art would not really end. In a piece of work, what is left or what can really be presented? |  | |
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Voices
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The Ishihara Color Test is the most common clinical test for red-green color vision deficiencies in humans. It comprises 38 plates, each containing a circle of dots randomized in color and size, which form a number that is visible to people with normal color vision. However, the number in the dots is invisible, or difficult to see, for those with a red-green color vision defect. But, like mirages and memories, the Ishihara numbers are just optical phenomena. Each shows an image of things elsewhere, where refraction and reflection coexist and, to some extent, can be captured on camera. My project, Attentional Landscapes, undertakes quasi-scientific experiments by photographically stripping and manipulating intended meaning and function.
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Noted
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| Creating large-scale, calligraphic-style graffiti paintings, on solid fields of mostly gray, tan, or off-white colors, Hungarian artist Karl Stengel, courageously goes beyond the given and familiar, pioneering new techniques and materials in order to expand his own vision. While Stengel’s paintings have the swirling energy of many abstract works, they also suggest something quite different: the murmuring of numerous voices beneath each layer. The artist’s work has changed greatly over the years, and is seldom truly abstract. |  | |
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Performance
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The Museum of Modern Art presents Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present, the first U.S. large-scale museum retrospective of the artist’s groundbreaking performance work, from March 14 to May 31. Internationally recognized as a pioneer and key figure in performance art, Marina Abramović (Serbian, b. 1946) uses her own body as subject, object, and medium, exploring the physical and mental limits of her being by creating pieces that require her to withstand pain, exhaustion, and discomfort in the quest for artistic, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual transformation.
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Curated
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| LUMAS opened its doors in 2004 in Berlin. Now, six years later, 11 galleries exist worldwide promising to offer affordable and quality photographs and digital art. Positioning themselves amongst galleries that typically sell small editions of three to five pieces, large-format photographs for steep prices and the reproducible, or widely available poster art that is not signed or attributed to a single artist—LUMAS has found its niche. At LUMAS people find strictly limited editions of 100 pieces. In return everybody pays only five percent of what has to be paid in a traditional gallery. But people are still investing in A-list names like David Armstrong, Michel Comte, Wolfgang Joop, Edward Steichen, and Marcel Wanders. |  | |
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China
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By Lugu Lake the Mosuo people have their unique funeral, which is a very interesting subject to me, and this interest has to do with the early deaths of my parents and my sentiments toward life and death. I am attracted toward the matrilineal family pattern. My drifting lifestyle made nowhere home; there is no more attention from my mother; the places I have been are all foreign to me. I’ve lost my parents; I’m still drifting; no one understands the loneliness and bitterness I’m suffering. I have been longing to reunite with my mother, but she’s intangible. I want to call home, thousands of miles away, but it would never be answered.
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Curated
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| David Merritt’s works have a subtle aesthetic and conceptual strength. He examines the relationship between the visual and the aural, particularly as they co-exist in language. The exhibition david merritt: sham at the Art Gallery of Hamilton features his drawings, rope sculptures, and video. Though these media offer diverse visual manifestations, Merritt’s theme is pervasive. He has been working with the semiotic concerns of language, meaning, and indexicality for several decades. His minimal and delicate aesthetic is highly memorable and consistent across media. Merritt derives the content of his “chart drawings” from databases of popular music. |  | |
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Skin
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Traveling frequently, Cecilia Paredes is inspired by the many locations and cultures she encounters. Her travels and deep immersion in a variety of cultures has given her a nomadic-like perspective that informs her work. This condition is partly the result of her choice to divide her time between North and Central America as she fully pursues her career as an artist. Her itinerant existence is reflected in her art as she wanders, and in a metaphorical sense, portraying her many selves. She views the concept of origin in a literal and poetic sense. Her art lies in the methodology of investigating possibilities of where her origins lie. From that basis, she uses a blend of sculptural forms and photography to convey a vision of her mutable identity.
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