Contempoary Art

The catalogue of the 10th Kaunas Biennial covers the rich programme of contemporary art exhibitions, residencies, studies, workshops, live sound and electronic shows as well as educational events for persons of all ages and interests. The Kaunas Biennial 2015 under the title “Networked” initiates and analyses connections, encounters, confrontations and forms of [post] communication caused by art. The artistic director of the project is Virginija Vitkienė, Doctor of art criticism, while the author of the main exhibition Threads: A Fantasmagoria about Distance is curator and writer Nicolas Bourriaud.

Taking as its starting point Tate Britain’s recent John Martin retrospective, entitled John Martin: Apocalypse, this paper considers the possibility that depictions of biblical apocalyptic scenes in Martin’s paintings are actually metaphors for revolution (French and American). The first half of the paper investigates possible links between Martin’s apocalyptic imagery, British imperial ambitions and the rise of capitalism. It also considers how Martin’s plans for urban redevelopment are linked to his preoccupation with cataclysmic doom. Through iconographical readings of Martin’s paintings the paper hypothesizes that themes such as the fall of great civilizations and the wrath of god are not coincidental but concerns contemporary to Martin caused by capitalist expansion. The second part of the paper goes on to investigate the possibility that our contemporary interest in the apocalypse is in fact, just as it was in Martin’’s time, a metaphor for militant unrest, which is manifested in theory and culture because of our inability to imagine the end of capitalism – in this context the paper turns to contemporary painter Gordon Cheung to reconsider the idea, attributed to Jameson and Žižek, that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

Catalogo della mostra (Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Museo Egizio, Musei Reali Torino), Franco Cosimo Panini Editore, Modena 2018.
Schede delle opere di: Jananne Al-Ani, Moreshin Allahyari, Kader Attia, Mariana Castillo Deball, Ali Cherri, Liz Glynn, Iman Issa, Mimmo Jodice, Lamia Joreige, Mark Manders, Walid Raad, Simon Wachsmuth.

“Banerjee’s work embraces the messiness of contradictory meanings.”[1] This is an uncommonly succinct and genuinely respectful description of the artist’s work, which is dazzling, breathtaking and confounding. Reality and fantasy, history and mythology partner with each other. Her work is like a cartographic fiction, in which Banerjee schematizes and visualizes an imaginary world based on real world pliable fact. Banerjee is a rarity among artists, who can simultaneously enable and enrich meaning without being intentionally didactic or moralizing. Hers is a poetic activity that creates opportunities for viewers to awaken to alternative meanings in art.

Nel febbraio del 1966, Dick Higgins nel primo numero di Something Else Newsletter, pubblica un testo dal titolo: Intermedia. Il concetto, che Higgins aveva già utilizzato a partire dal 1962, trova in questa pubblicazione una sua prima chiara formulazione teorica. Nel giro di pochi anni il termine intermedia verrà utilizzato e rilanciato da numerosi critici e numerosi artisti. Solo per citare alcuni italiani, ricordiamo: Gillo DorKles, che l'utilizzerà nel suo "Ultime tendenze nell'arte d'oggi" (seconda edizione 1973), e Adriano Spatola, che lo impiega nel suo "Verso la Poesia Totale" (1969), saggio fondamentale per una lettura della poesia sperimentale del Novecento. In breve tempo diverrà uno dei concetti chiave per un approccio critico-storico all'arte del XX secolo, a partire dalle avanguardie storiche che Higgins stesso indicava come le "fasi iniziali" di questo movimento di rinnovamento.

Maria Thereza Alves: The Long Road to Xico / El largo camino a Xico, 1991–2015

Edited by Pedro de Llano
Texts by Maria Thereza Alves, T. J. Demos, Pedro de Llano
Published by Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, CAAC, and Sternberg Press (Sevilla/Berlin)

The Long Road to Xico, 1991–2015 is the first monograph of Brazilian artist Maria Thereza Alves, and the outcome of her solo show at the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville in 2015. It gathers more than twenty projects realized between 1991 and 2015, including rarely viewed early works that help us see her most recent production from a new perspective. This publication also collects a selection of Alves’s writings and contextualizes her work in the political and cultural debates from the 1980s, when she became an activist—in the United States and Brazil—and an early participant in discourses around “postcolonialism” and “ecology.” Together with these materials, the book contains essays by the editor, Pedro de Llano, and T. J. Demos, professor of art and visual culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and author of Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology (2016). Containing an exhibition history and bibliography with a record of Alves’s activities in art, literature, and politics since the late 1970s as well, The Long Road to Xico, 1991–2015 establishes itself as the main publication on the artist’s work to date.

http://www.caac.es/programa/alves14/frame.htm

http://www.sternberg-press.com/index.php?pageId=1749&l=en&bookId=642&sort=year

Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life Staggering between the momentary, transient and the infine, unchanging, the modern individual's sense of continuity has been repeatedly interrupted by avant-gardes, radical movements and fluctuations. Thus, we can say that today, sense of continuity has been replaced by sense of obscureness. Discovering the infinite and unchanging seems to be impossible today. The tendency towards aesthetic strategies as a conception different from ethical judgements and scientific knowledge instead of rational strategies depending on devices enables us to determine the position we will take against, near to or in the flow and change in this environment with many fragments. The artist always focused on discovering, inventing and unearthing what is new in these fluctuations and disengagements throuhout the last century. We can get the hang on the modernity emerging in today's cultural environment within the framework of Baudlaire's duality. The individual who takes part in Baudelaire's definition of artist who observes the city and translates the data he finds there is often encountered in Paul Auster's texts. Author Daniel Quinn, a character in Glass City which is the first text of Auster's New York Trilogy, is flaneur defined by Baudelaire. This concept which has come to be the subject of modernity makes this city traveller turn into a cultural analyst with the effect of Benjamin's texts. Flaneur collects the moments frozen in time flowing throught the streets of the city. This city traveller, cultural analyst " performs a botanical study on asphalt. " We can see that Benjamin deals with the flaneur concept in Baudelaire with the detective character of Poe 1. Auster, on the other hand, highlights all these relationships within the flow of the story. The flaneur-detective relationship is created between the author and the detective. " Detective is who goes through and listens to the blockade created by the objects and events while seeking the idea with which he can make them unite and infer a meaning from them. In fact the

Desde hace algunas décadas, un conjunto significativo de proyectos teatrales han puesto en escena formas de trabajo hasta no hace mucho tiempo ajenas al propio ámbito y, con ellas, figuras y formatos que se han ido instalando paulatinamente en nuestro medio. Me refiero a aquellos ciclos que, partiendo de determinada propuesta temática y/o conceptual, una metodología de trabajo y un corpus de objetos de investigación, convocan a directores, dramaturgos y actores para desarrollar sus propios recorridos y espectáculos a lo largo de un tiempo igualmente variado. Las temáticas incluyen los museos, la vida de las personas, las instalaciones artísticas, los archivos olvidados, la ciudad, los manuales de instrucciones, las poéticas teatrales del siglo XX. Se destaca particularmente el aspecto conceptual de los ciclos, generalmente articulado en torno a la reflexión e investigación sobre la propia práctica teatral, su desarrollo en el contexto de la cultura y el arte contemporáneo y su capacidad de interpelar tanto las coyunturas sociales como los legados históricos.
Son los proyectos, sus temas e hipótesis de investigación los que organizan y dan contenido a un conjunto de espectáculos u obras y les otorgan sentido de unidad. En este aspecto, cobra fuerza un perfil curatorial de características autorales que excede una concepción acotada y más tradicional de la gestión.

F. Baeza, L. Marmor y S. Vidal Mackinson (ed.), Buenos Aires, Fundación ArteBA, pp. 161-192. ISBN: 978-987-28023-7-0 [Edición bilingüe]

Tutta la poesia sperimentale del XX secolo, sia essa poesia concreta, visiva, sonora, elementare, spaziale, digitale o, per usare un termine onnicomprensivo coniato da Adriano Spatola: Totale, si presenta come un oggetto spurio, difficilmente definibile, che gioca sulla propria ambiguità proponendola come valore estetico. La commistione di più linguaggi ha creato opere indefinite, sporche, fantastiche, dei veri e propri mostri. Mostri da intendere però nell'accezione di chimere, esseri che sommano in sé le caratteristiche di più animali, che unite danno vita a qualcosa di straordinario. La chimera, secondo Esiodo, aveva testa e corpo di leone, una seconda testa di capra sul dorso e una coda di serpente. Per Omero invece: corpo di capra, testa di leone, coda di drago e sputava fuoco. Al di là delle differenti descrizioni, gli elementi centrali sono la capra: ansia di libertà, sfizio, capriccio; il leone: la forza e il coraggio; e il serpente/drago: guarigione e avvelenamento, rinnovamento. Tutti elementi che entrano a pieno titolo nella storia dello sviluppo della poesia sperimentale e che ne definiscono, in qualche misura, anche il suo essere straordinaria, cioè fuori dall'ordinario. Perché la poesia sperimentale è stata sempre libera e capricciosa, coraggiosa e potente e profondamente rinnovatrice. Ma per chimera s'intende, si sa, anche un'ipotesi assurda, un'utopia non realizzabile. Ciò spiega forse perché, ancora adesso, la poesia sperimentale sia presa in così poca considerazione, contrariamente ad altre forme di arte pluridisciplinari, nate sempre nel secondo dopo guerra, che godono, al contrario, di grande considerazione.