Markmaking

Art of Two Germanys

Art of Two Germanys at the L.A. County Museum.

LACMA: exhibition catalog timeline

Previews and Reviews:

Christopher Knight, Culture Monster (LAT)

Eduard Beaucamp, Art Newspaper

Hanno Rauterberg, Die Zeit

Jordan Mejias, FAZ

Jori Finkel, N.Y. Times

Kate Bowen interviews Stephanie Barron, Deutsche Welle

Kerstin Zilm, Deutschlandradio

Marlis Schaum, Deutsche Welle

Suzanne Muchnic, L.A. Times

Picasso's Harlequins in Rome

La Repubblica reviews Picasso's Harlequins in Rome: Il genio che brillò tutta una vita

A spiegare il perché è il curatore Yve-Alain Bois: "Arlecchino può essere qualsiasi cosa desideri e Picasso, che era all'apice della sua produttività e poteva adottare contemporaneamente gli stilemi del cubismo, del neoclassicismo, del surrealismo e dell'espressionismo, aveva diverse affinità con questa maschera leggendaria". [...]

Fino al 1917, che, come avvisa Bois, segna una definitiva inversione di tendenza: "Picasso smette di sostituire una data maniera con un'altra e non scarta più nulla, inventando stili nuovi senza mai eliminare quelli precedenti. Negli anni, anzi, si costruisce un incredibile arsenale di forme e approcci al quale attinge liberamente ogni volta che ne ha voglia".

Protean.

Biennale gets Swedish Approval

Eurotopics conveys Jelena Zetterström's appreciation of the present Berlin Biennale:

This time the Berlin-Biennale was neither a big thematic event nor did it have a theoretical superstructure. And it wasn't about the top 100 in contemporary art, either. The Biennale presents itself as a story with many more or less loose plots. It's about Berlin and Europe in the past and present... about personal crises, collective memories and the individual lives of artists. The exhibition stretches along Auguststrasse in what was once East Berlin. It begins at a church and ends at a cemetery. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, this street has earned itself a reputation with the city's art scene, but its symbolic value has its roots in the times before the Second World War when a large percentage of the city's Jewish population lived here.

"A German Farewell"

Jörg Lau, in Die Zeit via signandsight.com, praises the Bonn exhibition concerning the post-1945 German expulsions. It seems once again that the historical self-conception of East Germany was built on a complete falsification of history. Quelle surprise!

It also seems that the German expellees, collectively victims of a war which their side started, only to eventually lose, channeled their implacable irredentism into civil, parliamentary politics even while becoming economically productive citizens of their adoptive homeland (which, bowing to reality, welcomed them in) rather than, for instance, strapping explosives around their waists and blowing up Polish schoolbuses and discos while demanding sanction and, moreover, funding from the international community for these acts.  Quelle surprise!

Frank Nitsche at Max Hetzler

1. Artnet.com -- paintings by Frank Nitsche, 2000-2005
2. Sebastian Preuss, Berliner Zeitung 7 Dec. 2005
   
   "I translate forms," he explains, lapidarily. What he means by that develops during a studio visit. He shows a few of his albums, that he has been putting together from photo clippings for fifteen years. There one finds auto accidents, people in crisis situations, bodily abnormalities, details from science or industrial design, daily grotesqueries from  the consumer world and the Pop. From these impressions, but also from the pop-design of his giant athletic shoe collection or the absurd kitsch plastic objects that he brings back from travels, he develops wavy, crumpled, compressed, or energetically striving-against-each-other forms.
   
3. Jens Asthoff, artforum.com: "The largest is only twenty by twelve inches... compressed but no less complex."

Berlin Beauties

BERLIN BEAUTIES: DOROTHY IANNONE, EMMETT WILLIAMS, DIETER ROTH

Gagosian Gallery in Berlin is pleased to present “Berlin Beauties,” the first exhibition to illustrate the exceptional relationship between Dorothy Iannone, Dieter Roth, and Emmett Williams ...

Gagosian Gallery in Berlin? Wait a minute, somebody smells a Cattelan... Klaus Lüber in the SZ reports:  Spiegel (d), Signandsight (e).

Open Systems (Tate)

Why the c. 1970 shift from art about art, and art about art about art, to art about "reality," "the world," or "life," no matter what those terms are variously and contradictorily held to mean? I hope that the Tate exhibition will shed light. See also the symposium to showcase  up-and-coming young ideas on the topic.

Exhibition: Open Systems: Rethinking Art c. 1970 (Tate Modern, UK)

The featured artists sought to connect with the increasingly urgent political developments of the decade and make their work more responsive to the world around them. Building on the structures of Minimalism and Conceptualism, they reacted against art's traditional focus on the object by adopting experimental aesthetic 'systems...

Graduate Symposium (abbreviated list):

Luke Skrebowski: Jack Burnham
Jonathan Bass: Robert Smithson
Irene Small: Hélio Oiticica
Maja and Reuben Fowkes: Croatia
Sophie Richard: Sculpture
Seth Kim-Cohen: Open Systems
Anna Lovatt: Serial Art
Paula Feldman: the Yellow Pages
Rachel Churner: Hans Haacke
Nicholas Cullinan: Arte Povera
Gloria Hwang Sutton: VALIE EXPORT
William Kaizen: Dan Graham, Radical Software and Gregory Bateson
Kathryn Chiong: Strategic Art Systems