Friday, March 30, 2007
Kimberly Clark
FOOLISHNESS AND PASSION MAKES US LIVE
Kimberly Clark plays with her own emotions…
In a hysterical way the artist’s collective uses
clichés surrounding them: sex, party, booze, violence,
art, mythology, poetry…
Kimberly Clark mixes all these ingredients to slick
installations, in which they express their love-hate
relationship with the world they live in.
It’s 'Art with pleasure' created with passion.
Kimberly Clark is the name of the artist collective
consisting of three female artists: Josepha de Jong,
Ellemieke Schoenmaker and Iris van Dongen. Many of the
sculptures they make are inspired by ‘nocturnal
escapades’ of the women in the streets of Rotterdam,
recorded on photographs. The work they are making
right now for an exhibition in TENT Rotterdam, for
example, with the working title 'crusade, Rotterdam', is
based on two women climbing to the top of a heap of
construction waste lying in the street. One of the
women is carrying a piece of beam, the other one iron
curtain rails. The composition of the women is that of
a crucifix. A combination of trash, abundance and
devotion.
The art works consist mainly of 3 dimensional ‘human
figures’ combined with ready-made objects. Kimberly
Clark wants the works to express rawness through the
mains of humor. In a way you could say the
installations are autobiographical. At least the
artists can identify with the subjects they chose.
That explains why the collective often takes ‘the
woman’ as their point of departure. They contradiction
between the beauty of women and the rawness of the
subject creates vulnerability but at the same time
female heroine and power.
CARPE NOX
Lorna Simpson
Talking Pictures
by Vince Aletti April 2, 2007
Lorna Simpson makes photographs and films that deal with race, gender, and identity, but if that sounds forbiddingly polemical, you’ve got the wrong idea. The work in her elegantly spare mid-career survey at the Whitney never gives off the chill of haute conceptualism. From the beginning, Simpson has tempered formal sophistication (typically, a multipart arrangement of photographs and text panels) with teasing and provocative ambiguity. Her work is poetic, layered, and tantalizingly open-ended; it never tells us what to think (much less what she thinks), but it won’t allow us to slip mindlessly through its grasp. Images of hairpieces, full lips, black glass vessels, and the bodies of black men and women whose faces are turned away or otherwise obscured are fraught but surprisingly playful. If the mysteries hinted at in her films are less immediately intriguing, it’s only because they often flirt with the conventions of romantic or historical melodrama. Always going her own way, Simpson remains a model for artists who want their audience to think as freely as they do.
Monday, March 26, 2007
ARMEN ELOYAN
WIM PEETERS ON ARMEN ELOYAN
Who Killed Bambi?
WHAT is it exactly that turns Armen Eloyan’s matchstick, inflatable figures, smoking cigarette butts, drinking beer or soda from cans, and wandering aimlessly, into such powerful mementos? Is it the emptiness that lurks beneath our corporate values of security, stability and state of mind? Eloyan stands out in creating a cartoonesque vision of a classless, ageless and ‘revolutionless’ society where free will is expressed by means of the remote control. His agitation with the universalising, egalitarian promises of anodyne peace, shows us a post-historic condition that is radically different from the one that was promised to us by postmodern theory.
Armenian painter Armen Eloyan’s star is rising fast. His first gallery solo show at Bob Van Orsouw in Zurich was astounding and at last year’s Frieze Art Fair in London collectors were cursing the waiting lists, desperate to lay their hands on paintings that were already shipping to faraway destinations. Eloyan turned 40, yet only recently has his career taken a definite turn through exposure at the Kunsthalle Bern and at Van Orsouw. Today galleries and museums are standing in line around the block of his Zurich studio.
Eloyan’s paintings draw upon the endless imagination of a fantasy world, yet they are dirty, loud and grotesque in every true sense of the word. If there were to be some kind of Dionysian moment identified in contemporary culture, Eloyan’s work would not be part of it.
He is able to appropriate and successfully manipulate all the identifications that such a recycling entails: scale, impasto, roughness, even machismo. Eloyan is definitely no Apollo with a brush either. There is an anti-puritan impulse that overthrows the romantic ideals of painting as a politically correct environment.
Canvasses range from small to monumental. One character has a dick-shaped nose and wanders around in a birch tree forest. Two guys in a living room, one wearing a high cap, the other one a cap with a flap sit back in a sofa staring at an empty television screen. Maybe there’s football on. References to television, art history, propaganda, advertising and popular music all have an equally important role in the shaping of his project.
Who Killed Bambi? is the title of a Sex Pistols song that was originally the title of the first ever Sex Pistols film to be directed by the legendary Russ Meyer in 1978. Meyer never completed more than a day and a half of footage, worth only a minute in the 2000 feature The Filth and the Fury. Much like Meyer’s footage, Eloyan’s paintings contain explicitly unseductive, overtly transgressive overtones. His tableaux are constructed in a relentless, grotesque way and they envision the subversion of the banal, founding fantasies that are constructed by mainstream ‘imagineering’. The benign, soporific creatures of animation movies and fairy tales, alongside the rock and roll heroes of juke box bars, conceal the often brutal and violent underpinnings of clichéd role models in society. Eloyan adds an interesting pitch in this relationship between a fantasy world and our own lived experiences. Could it be that he is denying the legitimacy of a fantasy world that is radically different from the one we are inhabiting?
Wim Peeters Is An Independent Curator And Critic Based In Antwerp
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Steve McQueen
Steve McQueen's tribute to Britain's war dead features stamps bearing the soldiers' faces. Why wouldn't the MoD help him?
Adrian Searle
Monday March 12, 2007
Going to Iraq was a frustrating business from the start for Steve McQueen. The artist was flown to Basra and then not allowed to go anywhere. "I knew I'd be embedded with the troops, but I didn't imagine that meant I'd virtually have to stay in bed. It was ridiculous. We went to see some schools the army was rebuilding. I could talk to the guys but that was it." McQueen was told that if he wandered off on his own, he'd get no support. "It was too hostile an environment. Obviously for the military you are just a token artist. You're in the way."
Article continues
He was in Iraq for six days as the UK's official war artist, not nearly enough time to get acclimatised, or to begin to know what to do. The plan was that he would present work the following year. The war escalated, and McQueen still had no project, no film, no plans. The US military was approached to see if McQueen could visit Iraq again with them. The plan fell through. "Obviously, it was going to be impossible to make a film. I was living and breathing the fact that I didn't know what to do every day.
"I was thinking of something else, relaxed, sticking a stamp on my tax return in Amsterdam. The stamp had a picture of Vincent van Gogh on it. And then it hit me - a stamp has a beautiful scale, the proportions are right, the image, it is recognisable, and then it goes out into the world, who knows where. Perfect. Wonderful."
The result was For Queen and Country; unveiled in the Great Hall at Central Library, Manchester, it's a co-commission by Manchester International Festival and the Imperial War Museum. McQueen has used a large oak cabinet with sliding vertical drawers to present 98 sheets of postage stamps. Each sheet depicts a different member of the armed services who has died in the conflict, and each sheet tells us who is depicted, and when they died. The sheets are presented in the chronological order of the deaths. "Every time you pull out a sheet of stamps, there is something in the physical contact and intimacy you have with each sheet of images, and the time it takes to look at them, before replacing them and moving on. But the real point is to have the stamps made available for use."
The Royal Mail's director, Allan Leighton, has turned down a request by McQueen to have the work turned into real commemorative stamps. McQueen mixes exasperation with an acknowledgement of the absurd humour of dealing with officialdom.
"The Ministry of Defence were polite about the idea of the stamps. I gave the MoD my idea, and this man asked me, why couldn't I do a landscape? I said, 'Are you telling me you are ashamed of these people? A landscape? Hello?'
"Then they tried to stop me getting in touch with the families. So we hired a researcher. Of the 115 families we tried to contact, we got 102 responses. Four said no, and 98 said yes. We had a sort of cut-off point. We didn't want to ask people who had suffered their losses too recently. You need to give people time to grieve. And I know it is one thing to show your son or daughter in a cabinet in a library, another to put them on a stamp that you can buy and stick on a letter. But I think the majority do want it. When the families came to the unveiling, it was one of the most humbling experiences of my life. People were very moved.
"This is the hardest thing I ever did," says McQueen, who was first invited to be the war artist by the Imperial War Museum's Art Commissions Committee in 2003. "Even after four years, we are not there yet. The problem is that you think people are supporting you, then you discover they're not." Resistance to McQueen's project has taken the form of delay, back-tracking and obfuscation. As soon as one obstacle disappears, another is invented. The artist went to see Leighton to discuss having the stamps used for real. "The temperature dropped as soon as we walked into the room. The next thing you know, you're on the street."
What isn't obvious is where McQueen stands in relation to the war. "Like everyone else in the country, I have my feelings about the war. But the project is the project. Strangely, it seems that for those who are against the war, my project is regarded as a good thing. For people who support the war, it is regarded as a good thing too. It is not pro or anti-war. This work is like a sphere - roll it this way, roll it that way. In the end, it is an art work.
"When we hear about all the men, women and children killed in Iraq, we are numbed to it. I'm pointing out that these people are all victims, too. What happened to them all was a consequence of their participation. The MoD try to say that such and such many soldiers died in action - they don't include or count all the people who died in friendly fire, in traffic accidents and so on. Some were suicides. They chopped them all out. They deleted them. They're all part of this war.
"Nor do I think that soldiers have to have been manning a gun emplacement with one arm tied behind their back and doing a double somersault in order to be remembered or to get a medal. An 18-year-old kid gets killed by a landmine or catches a bullet. He has contributed his life."
Logistically, how many different stamps can there be? "Why not use all of them? What's the problem? All first class. The Royal Mail will make money. Give some to the families."
A recent McQueen exhibition in Paris included an installation, Pursuit. In a dark basement, the walls were lined with mirrored plastic sheeting, and a screen in the middle of the room was lit by odd flickers that bounced off the walls. You lost yourself in the occasional reflections that come at you from all sides. There were sounds, as if someone were fighting their way through tangled undergrowth. It was utterly disorientating. McQueen has never said what he was filming. As with Queen and Country, he makes us do the work, provokes us into deciding where we stand. It is a complicated business.
But it remains difficult to fit Queen and Country into the larger context of McQueen's art. "Maybe it doesn't fit. But I have never wanted anyone tripping over my tail. If people anticipate my next move, thinking I'll turn right, I'll go left. I have never been interested in an easy narrative. I don't want to make things easy, either for the audience, or for myself"
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
Olaf Holzapfel
A n a n t J o s h i
N A V E L
One and the Many
By
A n a n t J o s h i
Preview : Tuesday 13 March 2007 6:30 - 8:30pm
Exhibition will continue until 4 April 2007 11:00am � 7:30 pm (Sunday closed)
Chemould Prescott Road
CONTEMPERORY ART GALLERY
Queens Mansion, 3rd floor
G.Talwatkar Marg (Above Yantra)
Fort, Mumbai - 400 001
Ph: 2200 0211/12
www.gallerychemould.com
gallerychemould@gmail.com
Atelier als Supermedium # 14
------------------------------------------
Atelier als Supermedium # 14 samengesteld door gerlach en koop
donderdag 15 maart 2007 vanaf 20.00 uur
Keiko Sato
Daniel Eatock
Jeroen Jongeleen
Michel François
Johannes Schwartz
Ian Kiaer
Lara Almarcegui
Ryan Gander
gerlach en koop
Atelier als Supermedium, Artists Space for Contemporary Art
Sammersweg 2, 2285 SB Den Haag, Rijswijk (eindpunt tram 16 richting Moerwijk)
Ton Schuttelaar, Machiel van Soest
Atelier als Supermedium # 14 samengesteld door gerlach en koop
donderdag 15 maart 2007 vanaf 20.00 uur
Keiko Sato
Daniel Eatock
Jeroen Jongeleen
Michel François
Johannes Schwartz
Ian Kiaer
Lara Almarcegui
Ryan Gander
gerlach en koop
Atelier als Supermedium, Artists Space for Contemporary Art
Sammersweg 2, 2285 SB Den Haag, Rijswijk (eindpunt tram 16 richting Moerwijk)
Ton Schuttelaar, Machiel van Soest
Saturday, March 03, 2007
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)