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.'"

Arundhati Roy at Bogazici University

Bogaziçi University, Istanbul, Department of History and Department of Political Science and International Relations present 2008 Hrant Dink Memorial Lecture on Freedom of Expression and Human Rights.

Arundhati Roy
"Listening to Grasshoppers"

January 18, 2008, 15:00, Albert Long Hall (BTS),
South Campus
The talk will be presented in English.

Old / New Routes

过去/现在 -- 通道
中亚录像展
OLD / NEW ROUTES
A selection of Video Art from Central Asia
BizArt Art Center, Shanghai
Exhibition Dates: January 12th – 20th, 2008.
Curated by Stefan Rusu. Under the auspices of Defne Ayas.

The Old/New Routes project is an exhibition and publication that explores the nomad specificity of the Islamic states after the collapse of Soviet Union. An overview of the present situation of the Central Asian context by an external viewer becomes imperative; this compiled visual material by guest curator creates a retrospective look at the internal processes of the social-political evolution and cultural background.The idea behind the project is overlapping networks and the relationship between these two traditions—the archaic-nomad one and the present-day post-industrial culture—that provides a synthetic equation and cumulates an extraordinary cultural load. In such way the practices oriented toward the re-use of tradition become the necessary tool for articulation of contemporary art discourse that establishes the nodes of resistance to inertia, apathy and historical amnesia. The project consists of an exhibition Old/New Routes to take place in Shanghai, China at BizArt Center and a publication under the same title. With these actions we intend to deepen and open the process of cultural exchange between China and Central Asia, with a special focus on video production from Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.

Participating Artists: Abilsait Atabekov, Erbolsin Meldibekov and Alexandr Ugay from Kazakhstan, Veaceslav Ahunov, Serghei Ticina from Uzbekistan, Ulan Djaparov, Gulnara Kasmalieva & Muratbek Djumaliev from Kyrgyzstan

About the Curator:
Stefan Rusu is artist and freelance curator based in Chisinau, Moldova currently he is working as project coordinator at the Center for Contemporary Art/Chisinau. In 2005/2006 he attended the Curatorial Training Program at Shtichting De Appel from Amsterdam where he co-curated Mercury in Retrograde (www.mercuryinretrograde.com).

Exhibitions: educational?

"[...] I abhor the supposition that exhibitions should be informative or, god forbid, educational. Is the work of Godard or Hitchcock or Beckett or Lecompte or Adams or Ashbery or Kiley or Gubaidulina or Serra or Koolhaas or Starck or Westwood or Cragg or Reed or Koons educational? These works, and all of their cousins, are full of ideas--bold, provocative, shuddering ideas-but do they teach us something?

We should never confuse the fact that cultural practices affect us, change us, stimulate us to think and see and hear and feel differently with the supposition that they teach us anything. Once something teaches you something, it thinks for you. This is a point that eludes even the promising young mess specialists and punk whippersnappers à la Obrist, who, for all of their bravado, continue obediently to inscribe their work in the service of the Big Idea. Rotton once said, 'I may not know much about music, but I know it ain't got nuffin' to do with chords?' Worth remembering."*


*Jeffrey Kipnis, "Who's afraid of gift-wrapped kazoos? Dedicated to David Whitney," in What Makes a Great Exhibition, ed. Paula Marincola (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Center for Arts and Heritage, 2006), pp. 97-98.