Fellow exhibitor

Nina Canell

Nina Canell, "Temporary Encampment (Five Blue Solids)" (Detail), 2009. Showing in "The Inner Life of Things" at Frankfurter Kunstverein, Germany

Powerful image! A suggestion of craft (the multiple plinths) and industry (the plinths look like wooden crates) with constructivist and modernist overlay in the lush abstraction and the whole thing's sort of idealistic glow.

Canell's work apparently "stems from a basic interest in the convertibility of materials and conditions". She "combines everyday items and found objects - objects shaped by everyday processes, features and nature and transformed into carriers of new information - into walk-in, spatial installations with visually, audibly and intellectually experienceable, process-oriented arrangements". (that's from "Projects in Art and Theory" space, Cologne).

Whew. Well, that may be translated from German, as she is Swedish, and based in Berlin. The installation materials are "Elektromagnetische Gerate, Gipsplatte, Plastik" .... hm. Figured it had to be some kind of magnetism keeping those balls in the air. Interesting avenue to explore!

The other work of hers that I found was less visually powerful, more minimalist conceptual. Sound works, boiling things, cement sacks and neon tubes seemingly draped over rods or branches. I kind of like the new look with the floating balls.

Here is another image from the show. Egill Saebjornsson, "Grey Still Life II", 2009.

Fascinating, but the site was only in German so couldn't really get the gist. Want to know if the diagonal is out of paint only, or if there's a board sticking out towards us. Either way - I like it. Reminds me of Dada mixed with foundation course work, but it hangs together and makes me curious.

Fabulous news photo

This is a press photo, by Ana Marin, c/o Reuters. Popped up on ArtDaily Newsletter. Shows fireworks exploding round the Burj Dubai, the world's tallest tower, at its opening ceremony.

Fabulous photo! Great to see the rich darks and the intimate feeling given by the leaves attaching us to earth, while ahead there is this astounding fuzzy, ethereal pillar - like something from an undersea plankton documentary or a fiber optic fashion show - lighting up the sky above. What a moment, the old, the natural, and the new!

I'm not entirely convinced of the value of the tower, nor care that it is the tallest. I haven't dwelled on the philosophical ramifications of the whole event - it may not be tied to positive change in any way - but as a documentation of human ingenuity and the ongoing aspirations of humankind, the photo does a pretty good job. Well, maybe the fact that we are using fireworks for show instead of destruction is a step in the right direction. What of the fact that oil has created new cities and extravagant expansion out of nothing? Commerce and material underpin the origin of all our cities so this follows the pattern of centuries. It is however interesting to see one that zooms through its evolution quite so quickly and flamboyantly.

plus ca change

Ella minutia series # 1, 2009 (ambrotype, 19 x 24 cm) Bart Dorsa

On show at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (MMoMA?) is an exhibition of some strangely beautiful photographs by Bart Dorsa called Deep Inside My Dollhouse...more interesting because they are not perfect. Dorsa uses wet plates, homemade, chancy. Funny, the early days of photography had artists being able to leave realist art behind because the camera captured it so wonderfully - with a struggle, in those days. That struggle became interesting in itself. Now we have effortless digital photography for all there has been a growing move to explore inexact or imperfect processes (old and new) of capturing images photographically - we can say mechanically - an interest of mine of course. I can think of many over the last 10 years at least - light sensitive emulsion on eggs, bricks, fabric etc. Catherine Yass, Walead Beshty, and Pinky Bass spring to mind.

Rather like the way that Chris Markham's film La Jetee (made in black and white on a shoestring) captures some exciting drama to me as an artist (in a way that the Twelve Monkeys, however interesting an extrapolation, did not), so these primitive-feeling photographs do something that large scale perfection does not.

Its not necessarily the content of many of the Deep Inside My Dollhouse images - that seems a little cliched in fact. The mysterious girl child of dark fantasy... um. But the visual presentation makes that unimportant - or part of it, or something. The story line of the Cabinet of Dr Caligari or Eraserhead isn't really the point, in a similar way. In fact they are two of the most fascinatingly boring films I have watched...closely followed by Zabriskie Point (but that was just boring, seen for the first time in the early 21st century). But they stick in my mind, they thrill me with their suggested potential, the thinking behind their artistic circumstances. Their simplicity, their home-made-ness, their willingness to play around with some imperfections and capture an idea. Pinky Bass's camera hidden in a bible at mountain ceremonies does the same thing. We see the hidden-ness, the distance.

Julia Marionette # 3, 2009, (ferrotype, 19 x 24 cm) Bart Dorsa

The Minutia series on the other hand (top image) has no cliche in sight. It seems to have the most impact with its small image of a woman against a large black background. The image becomes archetypal, like an Indian temple sculpture, an Aztec drawing, a company logo...without surroundings to identify the era, the naked woman could be from any time in history. The black flattens. The fingerprints round the edges add to the idea of the image being seen, handled, an object of some intensity and accessibility. Interesting little gems.

Art and change

This is one of a series of photographs taken by Sue Johnson in the township of Khayelitsha, outside Cape Town in South Africa. I met Sue as she was teaching at a recent Creative Capital Professional Development Program Workshop.

Following on from her work in Cape Town between 2004 -06, sales of Sue's photographs went on to fund a small not-for-profit photography group of township residents called Iliso Labantu, which means the eye of the people. Please do visit this site and see the work of people living on the edge, "marginalized by apartheid and its legacy of poverty and unemployment" (Sue Johnson) as they photograph their world. It is a wonderful site!

What it actually means is that within the townships it is now possible in some small way to achieve individual empowerment, and a valuing/sharing of self and culture that is very new. The photographic exhibitions that are put on act as a catalyst for this, and a mixing of the so far fairly separate ethnic/economic populations in South Africa.

Over 10 years ago I visited cousins living in Cape Town, who saw the townships as dangerous slums from their viewpoint behind all the"Armed Response" notices on the walls. So it feels like something pretty special to start changing that situation.

chronicling change

Wilhelm Sasnal
Krakow, 2007
oil on canvas
40 x 40 cm

at the K21 Kunstammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf, Germany


Here's a guy I'd noticed recently for his style of painting elsewhere. Thought this image was Luc Tuymans at first - the casual insipidness - but see that it makes sense as Sasnal. I love it, and it comes as no surprise that, according to the press release...

He "conceives of the painted image as reflecting themes and aspects of the present moment...... he rebelled against Krakow's academic tradition... his artistic activities are conditioned by an awareness that by virtue of the retarding effects of the Communist period in his country, he himself is a witness to a still unconcluded postwar era..."

Interesting for him to be aware of this - "a consciousness that forms the subtle substrate of many images"

His paintings are mostly based on photographs, and the "presentation is configured freely around the classical themes of portrait, landscape, still life, genre, and history painting, thereby exploring the larger historical context of the art of Wilhelm Sasnal".

History in the making. History acute enough and different enough to be noticed maybe? Luckily, Sasnal's is an academic debate, a contemplative reflection on dark days of strife.

What of the same considerations in America? I'm not feeling so positive after seeing the disinformation and hate, the polarization of opinions and the lack of openness stirred up by the current health reform debate. (Debate!?? Debate involves sensible discussion, not calling everyone jerks!) We thought the election was hard won! My instinct is to go for the positive... but based on the opinions put forward in this last year I wonder, could the largest, richest country in the world have an even bleaker, more backward and more malnourished culture than we can currently comprehend?

Rejuvenation

Baltic Center for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK

Concrete evidence of valuing the debate of contemporary art enough to fund it and nurture it ... seen here in the Baltic Center, a converted flour mill near Newcastle, England. Similar to the rejuvenation of areas of London and the Battersea Power Station that became the New Tate in London, Baltic is notable in that it is NOT in the capital. Newcastle/Gateshead was not too long ago considered to be a culturally barren area sinking deeper into the post industrial era without much hope. What has been done here - funded and encouraged by the city and government - is inspiring.

This next picture shows an exhibition at BALTIC of a collaboration between Slovenian born and New York based artist Thomas Putrih and American architect and design company MOS.

This installation shows styrofoam blocks and temporary materials such as cardboard, stacked to produce light weight structures that appear to be "on the verge of collapse".

"Putrih's work exists between science, sculpture and architecture, his projects informed by improviation and often collaboration with others. [...] Embedded in his work are ideas that undermine and question the fixity of things we know."

"This exhibition is presented at a time when a well-known modernist edifice in the center of Gateshead is in the process of being dismantled, piece by piece."