The Rabbit Master

A fairy tale for the family.
Cheers Mofa.

TransDance:2

If you happen to be in Cairo this Friday...

"TransDance, initiated by HaRaKa in 2008, is a series of mini-festivals of a transdisciplinary nature, focusing on dance and movement. It comes as a product of the long research project CONNECTIONS which aimed at raising critical questions around mobility, trans-cultural dramaturgies and transdisciplinarity in the production of contemporary dance.

HaRaKa and 100Copies would like to invite to TransDance:2--an evening of improvised dance and music, exploring relations between Sound and Movement, live and unpremeditated, with four musicians/composers and three choreographers/dancers invited to the stage: Adham, Hassan Khan, Reem Hegab, Shaimaa Shokry, Mahmoud Refaat and Nina, Karim Lotfy."

Venue: Rawabet Theatre, Hussein Mimar Street, Off Mahmoud Bassiouny St., Downtown, Cairo (Next to the Townhouse Gallery)
Date and Time: Friday, July 18th, 2008, 7pm

"Weasels ripped my flesh!"

"On the graphic arts front, TASCHEN has released the wonderfully over-the-top Men's Adventure Magazines, the definitive look at the male equivalent of the graphic romance novel. Sure to be a guilty pleasure, this exhaustively colorful tome depicts an idealized vision of the 1950s manhood, when fearless macho guys could dispatch Nazis, communists, gang members, pedophiles, nymphomaniacs and man-eating caterpillars with equal measure."
-Daily Variety, Los Angeles, United States

Art? Design? Science?

Museum Kills Live Exhibit
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
New York Times, May 13, 2008

"Art is deathless, the poets say. Unless it isn’t.

One of the strangest exhibits at the opening of “Design and the Elastic Mind,” the very strange show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York that explores the territory where design meets science, was a teeny coat made out of living mouse stem cells. The “victimless leather” was kept alive in an incubator with nutrients, unsettlingly alive. Until recently, that is.

Paola Antonelli, a senior curator at the museum, had to kill the coat. “It was growing too much,” she said in an interview from a conference in Belgrade. The cells were multiplying so fast that the incubator was beginning to clog. Also, a sleeve was falling off. So after checking with the coat’s creators, a group known as SymbioticA, at the School of Anatomy & Human Biology at the University of Western Australia in Perth, she had the nutrients to the cells stopped.

Though she has said “I felt cruel when I turned it off,” Ms. Antonelli said in the more recent interview that it was, essentially, a simple decision tinged with a bit of regret. “It was the only piece in the show that was alive,” she said. “It really was an amazing piece.”

Oron Catts, director of SymbioticA, said in an e-mail interview that he “particularly liked what happened at the MoMA,” with its slightly Frankensteinian sensibility of “life growing out of control.” The need to shut the exhibit fit in with the group’s overarching goal “to present the end of our projects in ways that remind people that these works are/were alive and that we have a responsibility towards the living systems that we engage in manipulating,” he wrote. Besides, he added, “the piece was able to regain some of its irony that was lost” when it was put in the context of what he characterized as an “optimistic design show.”"

(G)HOST IN THE (S)HELL

DIDIER FIUZA FAUSTINO/BUREAU DES MÉSARCHITECTURES
May 14 - June 28, 2008

"This May, Storefront will inaugurate a solo exhibition of French artist and architect Didier Fiuza Faustino and his Paris-based practice Bureau des Mésarchitectures (Mathieu Herbelin, Cláudia Martinho, Tony Matias, Guillaume Viaud). Faustino's largescale onsite installation (G)HOST IN THE (S)HELL, designed specifically for Storefront for Art and Architecture, will occupy the entire body of the gallery and engage its iconic façade by temporarily interrupting its role as movable, morphable barrier. Using chain-link fence as a medium to entirely encase and isolate the facade's panels, (G)HOST IN THE (S)HELL will explore the complex role that barriers and thresholds play in defining and creating public and private space, ideas central to Faustino/Mésarchitectures' work."

The Back-of-the-Envelope Design Contest

Designed by Robert A.M. Stern, Dean of the Architecture School at Yale University, The George W. Bush Presidential Library will be located in Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas. The construction of the building is likely to cost $500 million.

Holding its own design contest on the Presidential Library, The Chronicle of Higher Education invited its readers to submit their works on the backs of envelopes. Here is the link to some beautiful one-liners.

From the Critique of Institutions...

"Representations of the 'art world' as wholly distinct from the 'real world,' like representations of the 'institution' as discrete and separate from 'us,' serve specific functions in art discourse. They maintain an imaginary distance between the social and economic interests we invest in through our activities and the euphemized artistic, intellectual, and even political 'interests' (or disinterests) that provide those activities with content and justify their existence. And with these representations, we also reproduce the mythologies of volunteerist freedom and creative omnipotence that have made art and artists such attractive emblems for neoliberalism's entrepreneurial, 'ownership-society' optimism. That such optimism has found perfect artistic expression in neo-Fluxus practices like relational aesthetics, which are now in perpetual vogue, demonstrates the degree to which what [Peter] Burger called the avant-garde's aim to integrate 'art into life praxis' has evolved into a highly ideological form of escapism. but this is not just about ideology. We are not only symbols of the rewards of the current regime: In this art market, we are its direct beneficiaries."

Andrea Fraser, "From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique," Artforum, vol. 44, no. 1, September 2005

Where We Are Now

"Where We Are Now is a network of cultural, educational, and activist organizations and individuals dedicated to developing coordinated strategies to raise people’s awareness of the multitude of art political activities in New York City. Our goal is to demonstrate how powerful critical voices still exist, ones that cry out for global justice, agency and participation. Using the pivotal moment of the 2008 presidential election, we share a sense that the times have changed and are ours to claim. Through activities as diverse as art exhibitions, days of decentralized action, street performances and pedagogical conferences, we seek to gauge the status of the political in contemporary art, and consider how we may act as resources to one another and to other communities within and beyond New York City.

Where We Are Now hosts monthly network-wide meetings, as well as working group meetings for each of the three working groups--Conference and Pedagogy, Communications, and Arts in Action. The larger network-wide meetings are held on the first Wednesday of every month, from 6:30-8:30pm at the assembly hall of Judon Church by Washington Square Park. The first hour is a network-wide meeting with updates about endorsed projects, report-backs from the three working groups, and discussion. In the second hour working groups will break-out for smaller working meetings. In between monthly meetings, working groups hold meetings in various locations in the city, to plan for the Where We Are Now conference, day of arts in action, and other network projects."

Vortex of Silence

Reading 'Vortex of Silence', by German art historian and critic Doris von Drathen, is definitely refreshing. Criticizing the inadequacy of art history and aesthetic categories to approach and understand the artistic production, the book suggests that the works of art should be embraced as "entities of otherness". The reader is easily drawn into von Drathen's analysis of 24 artists, including Marina Abramovic, Jean-Pierre Boltanski, Louise Bourgeois, Pedro Cabrita Reis, Ann Hamilton, Rebecca Horn, Anish Kapoor, Agnes Martin, Giulio Paolini, Giuseppe Penone, and David Tremlett, with an emphasis on Aby Warburg's theory that rejects aestheticising art theories as "barren word-mongering." In short, the author argues that works of art should be read through lenses pertaining to larger existential and ethical questions.

Last Thursday, when I was wandering among Jasper Johns's flags, targets and Catenary series at “Jasper Johns: Gray” exhibition at the Met, the comments of the museum-goers that I overheard were only about the "background that looked like Rauschenberg" and "figures that recalled Willem de Kooning." Thinking of my own "gaze" and listening to aesthetic commentaries about the works, I stood mutely and smiled.

Although reading the book is not easy at all, the after taste is quite satisfying.


(Thanks, Melis.)

Paola Antonelli talk on TED

Talk: Paola Antonelli: Treating design as art

"Paola Antonelli, design curator at New York's MOMA, wants to spread an appreciation of design, in all shapes and forms -- and to remove any stigma of it being considered mere decoration. She takes the TED2007 audience on a whistlestop tour of some design exhibitions she has organized, including 'Mutant Materials,' 'Workspheres' and 'Safe.'"