Happy anniversary!! thx all folks!

Hi you! I haven t been here for a long time... Sorry I was just changing country job and everything! Now I can continue... slowly first and then normally!

It was just to say happy birthday to this blog and special thanks to the 11500 visitors... Thanks a lot everybody and see u really soon!

;-)))))

The dictionnary Artblabla/English

In the last post, I introduced a discussion based on an article released in the Arts Newspaper, that eventually led (and currently continue to lead) to a debate about the art world, the artist, provocation, context and many other interesting issues.
I'd like to focus on a point of the debate related to the way the initial article was written in the Art Newspaper because I believe it is relevant to explore the way cultural differences affect the contemporary art world in general.

This all starts with the following comment:

I wish I could follow what the heck the writer is trying to say in this piece.

9.5.08 Jonathan San Francisco

How many of us felt the same in front of an art-related text, an introduction to a specific artist or an exhibition book/review? To be honest, if you do your first steps in the contemporary art world, it sounds like a foreign language!

To this first comment, a second writer adds:

What the writer is obscuring with his "art-speak" is that the videos featured animals being battered to death, in some cases by the artist, in the name of art. I saw the exhibit and was sickened and I've worked in hospitals all my life. What I saw when the exhibit was pulled was a demand, if you will, for ethical, humanistic and humane values rather than an "anything goes in the name of building my career." If the video had shown the torture of humans done as an art form there would have been no mistaking its brutality. I realize that most of us eat meat and that animals are usually not killed in a humane way but this exhibit wasn't about that. It was about promoting a career by using gruesome and controversial imagery.

Eventually, a third writer, visibly more concerned by what happens in the contemporary art sphere, writes:

9.5.08 Nancy San Francisco, CA

My 2¢ in response to the previous comments. Firstly, what is "art-speak"? When I hear someone use that term it always feels as though they are simply trying to dismiss the argument. This is a venue for art writing and sometimes complex and nuanced ideas require like language. Do we deride economists, carpenters or anyone that has a vernacular/vocabulary/language that we have trouble deciphering?

[...] I also wonder if Nacy's analysis that the artist is "promoting a career by using gruesome and controversial imagery" is based on an understanding of the work in context of his entire body of work/career, or simply on a knee jerk reaction and subjective view of contemporary art and artists.

9.5.08 josh Oakland

This actually makes a point here, the 'knee-jerk reference was obviously not compulsory but demonstrates a certain passion in the debate...! "This is a venue for art writing and sometimes complex and nuanced ideas require like language. Do we deride economists, carpenters or anyone that has a vernacular/vocabulary/language that we have trouble deciphering?" is a wise comment but...

If you are a regular reader of these blog lines, or if you have a foot into contemporary art world as a hobby or as professional, you've probably acknowledge all the postmodernist theoretical background and would probably agree with this third writer. However a contradiction lays just there:
On the first hand, contemporary art is over mediatised and becomes increasingly popular. If not in a art-specific media, contemporary art is often introduced to the mass culture through the celebrities who bought or sold famous artworks, big amounts of cash exchanged and sometimes glittering cocktails and parties to celebrate prizes.
On the second hand, rich of a solid theoretical background and a more and more complex history of the Art and the interactions between sub-genres; contemporary art becomes less and less accessible to the newcomer but more and more interesting in my opinion although i agree that we can find the best, the worst and too often... the worst.

This is not just about the words to describe it! This is way more than just this! I am talking about visual vocabulary, the visual semantic rules and cultural history associated; the postmodernist grammar and conjugation system, which binds the artist, artworks and viewers altogether to create meaning with a unique sense of the tenses dialectic...
Therefore, how come a newcomer who never really learned this foreign language could possibly understand such complex artworks as Jim Beam JB Turner Train from Jeff Koons? Try to explain to a newcomer that this stainless steel train, filled with Bourbon is a masterpiece and talks about class, power and the contemporary art market?

Jim Beam JB Turner Train from Jeff Koons

Culturally, I know that French and English people use to consider that visual art has to be explicit and does not have to be decoded and would bet that it is the same in a lot more countries, but people have to learn how to read an image in the same way that we learn how to read a text. As might be expected, people are more attracted by literature, more than visual art and contemporary art particularly. A RadioFrance Internet article, written by Hélène Chevallier in 2005, describes a change within museum exhibition policies to try to solve this problem with some interventions at school, dialogues with artists and accompaniment of the visitors. In the same article, the public services manager of Lyon’s Biennial Turgaut E., argue that “it is easy to consider young people as the next generation of audience and have the keys of the future of contemporary art, but that’s really important to sensitise them as young as possible. If we give them the opportunity to see more contemporary artworks, they will be not totally disoriented when they will be adults!”. The International Council of Museums, uses in Marketing the Arts, the term “edutainment”. They proposed to include guided tours and extra-mural works as an integral part of the exhibition project building.
This definitely is a first step, although I hate when interactivity becomes compulsory in a growing number of museums...
The key lays therefore in the education process... When would we see a fully recognised picture analysis as an exam for the GCSE, baccalaureate or any equivalent?

Quotation of the month - May 2008

One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar.

Oscar Wilde

The most obvious... I did not think about...

I did not think about it but, but it was so obvious!!! I' ve read an article entitled “I see a new, pervasive and global condition of fundamentalist violence directed against dissident images and thought” in the online version of the Arts Newspaper and it all became clear!! I forget to talk about it!! Ok here I go:

The article talks about an exhibition that seemed really controversial for some... Not for others...
The artist is apparently French with North African origins (it is somehow relevant, u ll see...) and the artwork is a movie made in a Mexican slaughter house... Showing animals being slaughtered and was apparently misinterpreted by a part of the audience that saw there a kind of 'Animal Snuff Movie' realised for the sake of Art. We can't really blame them, can we? I've mentioned earlier in this blog that the art world is not being tender at the moment with projects of people dying in Art galleries for the "show" (I m not discussing these artworks here... this is a whole other debate), the story of this student with her performance art piece in which she artificially inseminated herself repeatedly and then self-aborted for the sake of art, then Guillermo Habacuc Vargas who chained a dog and left it in the gallery without food for the sake of art... It is all disturbing isn't it???

This all sound really crazy to me, however I must say my opinion is a bit biased as I belong of a specific group of people recently mediatised because of its leader actions and PR operations, and girlfriends... We became notorious in the past as some of our traditions are usually perceived as foolish: eating cow tongues and snails, being really arrogant, protesting for everything and demonstrating all the time. We are known as the French people.
My opinion is biased because there are some of the things out there I take for granted (snails are really good... yes, they really are!), some I do not understand (when I say that in France, in soap advertisements, girls appear entirely naked under the shower and, I do not understand why you think this is pervert...) and some things, my people do not accept (Chinese people eat puppies and rotten duck eggs!!).
I do not say I am any better than you, I just say that I am different... I am just French! But look, I am not only French, I went to university, come from a village, a Polish family with a catholic background... and finally I am really into contemporary art things for years... It makes things easier for me to accept or understand as it is part of my culture. In fact, we all are singular individuals, who belong to groups which belong to larger groups. Therefore, when I go to see an exhibition about Chapman Brothers artworks (notorious for being particularly controversial...), I am not really shocked. Does it mean that it would be stupid of you to be shocked there?

Jake and Dinos ChapmanHell (excerpt)1999-2000 (destroyed 2004)Mixed Media

http://sponbustion.com/archives/2005/03/06/the-chapman-experience

Some ideas could be dangerous when exported in other social groups. We have recently seen conflicts exploding all around the world because of a couple of Mahomet's drawings. What kind of conclusion could emerge from this?

Coming back to our slaughter house example, it appears as I mentioned previously, that a group of people believed that the animals were killed on purpose, for the sake of the video. It led to blackmail, dangerous anonymous threats...etc. Who is responsible?
I believe that, as in every communication process, that meaning is built both by the emitter (here the curators) and the receivers (audience). Therefore, the information about the artwork was probably lacking... This is an old habit, tradition for galleries to keep a mystery around the artworks. It is part of the art culture, usually justified by the fact that every viewer must be able to enrich the artworks by building a personal relationship with the piece of art, as many different opinions as different viewers who enter in the gallery; different meanings to be shared, to generate a result that is more powerful than the simple sum of every individually built meanings!

Art exists to question what we take for granted, it somehow must shock. Can we talk about everything? I believe so, but maybe not in front of everybody... There is therefore a responsability from curators to take into account the culture in which the work of art is exhibited. This responsability lays in the dispensal of the information. The artist has the liberty of expression for him, but it is the role of the curator to dispense acurate and relevant information, in accordance with the culture of the potential audience of the exhibition. In two words: Cultural relativism.

Different communities may need different information in quantity and in nature to understand the message emitted through the artwork (Hofstede researches show that some cultures tend to use the context more than others within the communication process, for the connoisseurs ;-)).

Away from the Flock, A controversial artwork by Damien Hirst. Vegetarians protest about it, and it is vandalised with black ink while on show at the Some Went Mad, Some Ran Away exhibition, curated by Hirst, at London's Serpentine Gallery.

To conclude, I would like to say this: I know that contemporary art can appear really violent and provocative but in most of the time, it is served with an intelligent discourse. In fact, when the art is stupid and provocative, it does not go through the whole art system... So, do not be affraid to seek for information and to ask questions! This is a horrible feeling to enter in a gallery and to feel stupid because you do not understand anything (and I know what I am talking about). This is partly why this blog exists. On the other side, when you take part of an exhibition organisation... BE RESPONSIBLE AND CULTURALLY AWARE!!!

High and low society, memorials and the story of the 50 meters high horse in Kent!!!

Hello reader!

It seems that there is a big effervescence around public arts this last few days and I thought I should talk about it in this blog... I recently posted an article called 'what is a true national culture', introduced by these few lines:

The position of the critique is a central question regarding the cultural differences , whether it is a critique of the society through the work of art or a critique of the art itself, as it is influenced by social norms and rules.
Defining whether a work of art is ‘original’ or not may depend on a stereotyped definition of originality for social coherence needs, and may thus be unresponsive to the work of those who challenge the authority of that tradition and that stereotype.

For example, Graciela Trajtenberg highlights in “Modernism in Action: Comparing the relationship between the Visual Arts, Social class and Politics in Israeli Nation-building”, that the attempt of artists affiliated with the organised labor movement, to promote an art deeply embedded in the local cultural conditions (“reflecting the political aims of the Israeli settler movement” and “with a flavour of Middle-East cultural heritage”) were countered by the contemporary art world hegemonic power. When the art culture of the early 1900 was promoting the modernist’s aesthetic, Trajtenberg describes in her study how the combination of this movement issued from the main European capital cities and bourgeois patronage blocked attempts of the Israeli politically inspired art, to become a significant art trend over liberal ideals of ‘free’ art scene.

A strange notion of liberty... It does not mean that the system does not generate good artworks.

Rachel Whiterhead (see previous post here)- Memorial - JudenPlatz - Vienna

I would like to explore briefly another problem, which may lie under all this: When it comes to 'public' art.

On the one hand, there is an art world that tries to place massive art works everywhere in the UK (Shall we really complain? It s definitely a matter of point of view when it comes to pay the local taxes); on the second hand, people's desires are not necessarily fulfilled with the authorities responses... What I am just about to say may sounds like a cheap advice but I think it's worth to say it: Authorities should take account of the gap that stands between the art world culture and the people's culture!

In a previous post entitled "The contemporary art world in 2008", I introduced the potential modification of the business etiquette within the contemporary art world in 2008, due to the growing importance of the Asian markets... In parallel, for my uni final work, I introduced the hypothesis that a 'contemporary art' culture of communication may exist, largely influenced by the top end buyers who benefit from a great media coverage and therefore could be influential for minorities within the art market. A culture mainly U.S. and Europe oriented at the moment, but just about to change drastically.

Christian Boltanski

Jüdisches Museum - Berlin

To be more precise, I've demonstrated that according to the international sales figures blended with scores associated with each countries for the cultural characteristics, that the dominant western art market tends to give little chance to artists and enterprises to move among genres, but also that no importance is accorded to these new genres unless there are values of prestige associated. In other terms it does hardly give a chance to new emerging movements, especially if those movements do not emerge from the major cultural actors of the International art market.

That is for the market culture... but what about the people's culture, which probably has nothing to do with this international financial/cultural battleground? Reading this last paragraph again makes me think that the art world would not give a damn about the people anyway!

Do you take account of the people's culture when you commission an 'angel of the south' in Kent? The fourth plinth on Trafalgar square that traditionally supports contemporary artworks? Hardly... Yes in fact but it tends to be kept hush...

John Tusa for an article in Guardian Arts Blog entitled "Art in public spaces should be decided by the people" proposes a series of questions to improve the communication process between the Commissioners and the Public:

Is the work to be a sculpture or an installation? Is it for an existing community with an existing identity, or a new community whose identity can be influenced by the commission? Is it to be permanent or temporary? If temporary, what follows? Is the commission primarily a sop to a developers' conscience, a blatant attempt to gloss over a basically mediocre development? How is the community to be involved? How is the artist involved? What is the process for choosing a short list of artists for the commission - if this is the route chosen? And finally, who chooses the actual commission?

Model for a hotel - Thomas Schütte - Photo by Orange Mac

This question can become really tricky when it comes to commission a memorial artwork. Why would we commission an artwork for a memorial by the way? Probably because in some cases, words and pictures are not enough to communicate things as 'heavy' on consciousness as holocaust, wars or genocides... There I come back to the first post of this blog, last November that introduced my vision of what a great contemporary artwork is: a way to express an idea, to reach the full-range of human feelings when words or traditional media becomes powerless.

I think the 'Angel of the North' really makes it, I did realise it when we organised this trip to Newcastle for a bench of International people who desperately wanted to stop to take pictures there...
I invite you to visit the Guardian website to have a clear view on what projects are currently competing to become Ebbsfleet Landmark (Kent). Finally, my preference would definitely go to Mark Wallinger's project... (see previous post about Mark Wallinger)

Photograph: Ebbsfleet Landmark Project Ltd

Why? Although I am deeply in love with Rachel Whitehead's work I cannot avoid to dream about my daughter at the back of the car, a spark in the eye, just thinking that in a couple of miles she will see the sculpture of a giant horse!!! ;-))

Artwork of the month - May 2008 - 'Lock' by Renaud AUGUSTE-DORMEUIL

My name is Conflict, won't you take me home? You've probably heard about me in the newspapers, on tube or in the cinema but there is a great chance that you've never seen me for real... Some of you believe that I am a necessary condition for their liberty... I won't blame them! It is just that they don't know me really... I am far more dirty and naughty that what they imagine. But you do not realise it anymore.

There are many reasons for this, but the one obvious to me is linked to your representational systems. You have been lucky enough, not to see the warfare on your doorstep and to see, feel what it is properly like. Therefore, your idea of a war is based on what is available to you, may it be fictional or read from a journalistic point of view.

Me, Conflict, would like to introduce you to an artwork I really dislike. Its called Lock and the artist is Renaud AUGUSTE-DORMEUIL:

Lock is a term borrowed from the snipers lexical field, which means that the target is ready to be killed. Helped with a laser pointer, Renaud AUGUSTE-DORMEUIL simulates a situation where civil targets caught in the line of fire of an undefined threat in Paris streets.

I'll ask again... Won't you take me home? Instead of this simulacra of modern urban unfair warfare? You all have in mind photos of Sarajevo, victims of Snipers. Let me refresh your memory. The media used to be flooded of such pictures at that time. But this was far away, so far that people could not even point at Sarajevo on a map. And the media did not help: Who really knows what happened there? But let's just come back to our artwork... I was just saying: What I dislike about this artwork, me, Conflict, is that it helps people to think about what would happen if I had to come to your door... A simulation... As if people were attacked in your peaceful parks, streets and playgrounds. In 'lock', the threat is viewable, the tragedy is imminent; did not yet happen though, but is just about to happen. The potentiality of death is not only a newspaper thing anymore. And YOU now think about it, maybe as you could be the victim of this sniper that points his red eye on your shoulder or on your back.

Why is it different from what you see on your TV screen?

First it is fictional but wait... this one is quite subtle: No it is not real, I can assure you it's not and you probably know about it. It does not really look like a journalistic picture, does it? Usually CNN and friends show you what happens after the tragedy... and you might expect some standard gestures from the subjects or at least a diaporama before-while-after like, that shows the tragic events as in a movie. But here, nothing! You are not even sure that something will happen.

My second argument to highlight a difference between press picture archetypes and our artwork lies in the framing and compositional codes of the photos. Have now a close look on this picture below:

This is a terrific shot taken a few seconds after Benazir Bhutto assassination in Pakistan by John Moore. This picture is part of a series that won the first prize at the World Press Photography 2008. You can see it is real by the way the photo was taken... You expect such picture from a journalist, don't you? That is exactly the aesthetic that would boost the TIMES/Guardians sales, when framed on the front page. A guy praising at the sky in the middle of the carnage, smoke, calcined corpses and blood everywhere around... This Muslim really looks like Jesus Christ?! The perfect white European archetype of sacrifice and suffering... A model that applies everywhere?

From the exact same series, I find this one far more interesting... This is a bit more unexpected. It was taken while the bombs were exploding and it really gives a sense of immediacy. But that is a question of taste.Ok, one more time: My name is conflict, do you take me home? an idea of me? or am I just a far, remote, unrealistic fantasy that does not have much to do with proper truth and reality?

For allowing the viewer to question all these problematics, I say 'Lock' by Renaud AUGUSTE-DORMEUIL... Artwork of the month.

Quotation of the month - April 2008

In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Contemporary contemplation

Hello reader! Coming back to the first lines of this blog in November 2007, I made the choice of focusing on the cultural differences that may shake the contemporary art galaxy, rather than writing lines about the last exhibition I did not go to anyway. This covers the viewers, the artists, the intermediaries and all the different media that allows information transfer between them. Today’s post is going to focus on an aspect of this last particular point.
In an attempt of modernisation, to stay in touch with the general mood, the church often commissioned artists to 'communicate'. Sometimes political ideals, sometimes to say "hey!! we went through the middle age to come to meet you!"... But here, I m just being cynical. But contemporary art is more often associated with the idea of Church (the one with a big 'C' which is related to the people, the dogma…etc.) when it comes to architecture. I have seen some stunning things around there and would definitely recommend you to go to see the Liverpool modern cathedral that looks like a nuclear reactor from the outside, or Notre Dame de Ronchamps from Le Corbusier.

Liverpool cathedral - Photograph: Me!!!

What about having a contemporary art exhibition in the church? Well, it is a church not a gallery... But there is the trick: To include the work of art in the decoration features such as the windows. Chagall's windows in St Etienne cathedral in Metz are great examples that come to my mind, a bit dated though...

Chagall's window in Metz cathedral

So is there something really contemporary edgy, happening somewhere at the moment in our churches? Probably not... But look, we've seen so many weird stuffs recently in the art world. First, there is this story of this student with her performance art piece in which she artificially inseminated herself repeatedly and then self-aborted for the sake of art then Guillermo Habacuc Vargas who chained a dog and used it as “art”. He told everyone not to feed the animal which eventually died in the gallery.
Then, are the edgy things, the most simple artworks the one that belongs to a temple? I believe so... and then comes this marvellous artwork commissioned for the St Martin-in-the-Fields Church in London to Shirzeh Houshiary:

The simple idea of a monochrome stained window that mixes the symbols of the cross and the grid to make a powerful statement about the place of races and gender differences within the Church (the one with a big 'C' literally crystallized by a church feature, the one with a little 'c' this time which only describes the construction).
I think it really makes it. The Guardian goes to qualify this artwork as 'gynaecological reworking of Christian symbols'. Do you understand it better? Sure but there is no need to shock anybody by inserting the word 'gynaecological’ in a description of a stained glass in a church. But there again… it s contemporary art and it is traditionally shocking.
Last questions: Does the nationality of the artist (Iranian) adds value to the overall quality of the artwork? What if I tell you that Shirazeh Houshiary was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1994? In the author's death, Barthes criticizes the reader's tendency to consider aspects of the author’s identity—his political views, historical context, religion, ethnicity, psychology, or other biographical or personal attributes—to distill meaning from his work.
It seems a good PR operation to me that eventually leads the commissioning team to declare to the press: "The fact that we are standing now in a church, in front of a window designed by an Iranian woman artist, at the beginning of the 21st century, is truly significant". Sure it is but it seems to me that this cosmopolitan attitude towards contemporary art and especially artists becomes another fashion that will soon be outdated. Will people qualify what we should call 'cosmopolitan art' as the art of the years 2000 as 'extreme art' is now sometimes used to qualify the 90's as the last years of the age of 'controversy as a trend'? Controversy for the sake of controversy>>> cosmopolitan for the sake of postmodernism.

It makes sense, doesn't it? ;-)

Artwork of the month - April 2007 - Real or no real?

Hi Blognauts! How are you? You had enough rest? Can we come back? the bunny brought you a bag full of potential articles. I think we might explore a few ways introduced by the postmodern philosophers and plenty of surprises! Pomo philo? Isn't it a bit boring?

Well if you enjoyed the previous lines of the blog it must not be a problem!

Let's start with the artwork of the month of April that will introduce the next few posts:

Kings Cross, London 2007 by Naoki Honjo

Naoki Honjo is a popular Japanese artist that blurs the border between reality and fiction by using a technique that uses the macro photography visual codes and transposes them to large city views. As some of you may be not particularly familiar with photography techniques, I will show you an example to illustrate this. Do you remember 'crazy art nation' introduced in the post 'another brick in the wall'.

Look closer at how does the picture appear. You will see that the picture gets its maximum of sharpness on the little character that represents Mark Wallinger. The foreground and the background get blurred due to the size of the object and the distance between the scene and the camera lens.

Arts Crazy Nation

Amery Carson

The point here, is that a 'visual culture' exists. Look at the picture above. It is a flower and it is not really hard to guess... But think about it... How do you know it is a flower? There are a few clues: the colors, the water drops, the organic aspect of the subject. The depth of field is one important clue. You have seen many of this flowers close-up and the small depth of field is one of the elements you expect when we show you such pictures. It is part of your visual culture!

When Naoki Honjo shows you a picture of buildings, roads and buses; with such a small depth of field, your brain may conclude that the objects shot on the picture are incredibly small... Probably a model... But no! Not this time, this is 'real', a picture of the actual London.

We might therefore say that Naoki Honjo cheats with our system of perception.

From another angle, we could imagine that a god-like photographer took the picture, starring at us the way we would stare at an ants colony... The presence of something superior, gigantic that looks at us from above and could crush everything we take for unbreakable, with a single finger.

Furthermore, the scenes look like big toys, dolls house, lego (?!) something that questions the social movements, the way we evolve in the city, representational modes.

Saitama-Arena, Saitama, Japan, 2004 by Naoki Honjo

Containers, Tokyo, Japan 2005 by Naoki Honjo

London Buses, 2007 by Naoki Honjo

This is a crystal clear demonstration that the gaze at the artwork is biased on a quite powerful manner by the stereotype we hold about the picture features (here the point of view and the particular depth of field). What I would like to point at, is that we hold stereotypes about everything, it is simply the way the brain works! We may be largely unaware of the stereotypes we hold... The more obvious are the ethnic ones, African are like this, French like that... But Naoki Honjo brilliantly demonstrates us, using quite a poetic channel that it may not be that simple!

Would our conception of the real, be subject of such stereotypes? Is this same conception of the real, potentially biased by our perception system, would be subject of cultural differences?

I propose you to discuss this in the next posts!

Eastern holidays... lol

Ifucansayitwhypaintit, needs a break for Easter. I ll be back after an Easter break!

Do not hesitate to go back on one of the past 40 posts and comment them; most of them are not necessarily linked with actuality.

Anyway here are some eggs as requested by the tradition:

Sarah Lucas - Autoportrait with eggs

See u soon!

What is a true national culture?

The position of the critique is a central question regarding the cultural differences , whether it is a critique of the society through the work of art or a critique of the art itself, as it is influenced by social norms and rules.
Defining whether a work of art is ‘original’ or not may depend on a stereotyped definition of originality for social coherence needs, and may thus according to Harrison and Wood “be unresponsive to the work of those who challenge the authority of that tradition and that stereotype”. Because we also hold stereotypes about our own culture... We may therefore imagine that there is a bias when exploring the question of our identity... Would you really think that you can be that subjective?
For example, Graciela Trajtenberg highlights in Modernism in Action: Comparing the relationship between the Visual Arts, Social class and Politics in Israeli Nation-building, that the attempt of artists affiliated with the organised labor movement, to promote an art deeply embedded in the local cultural conditions (“reflecting the political aims of the Israeli settler movement” and “with a flavour of Middle-East cultural heritage”) were countered by the contemporary art world hegemonic power.

When the art culture of the early 1900 was promoting the modernist’s aesthetic, Trajtenberg describes in her study how the combination of this movement issued from the main European capital cities and bourgeois patronage blocked attempts of the Israeli politically inspired art, to become a significant art trend over liberal ideals of ‘free’ art scene!

Guy Ben-Ner -- From 'Self portrait as a family man'

Taking the problem on the reverse, studies also highlight the difficulties that an artist may encounter while trying to depict elements related to a ‘true national culture’.
By analysing the creation process of an artist who wishes to produce an artwork that might reflect his/her national culture, Fanon (1965) highlight that the exchange of influences between ‘dominant’ (here the US and European art world and its influence on the international art market) and the dominated cultures (second third and quarter world cultures that try to impose their own cultural views on the international art market) is too deep nowadays.
This artist would take the risk to come across the use of stereotypes within the depiction intention. In attempting to reach the basis of what might consist the ‘true’ national culture, artists deny the foreign culture and its influence, such as its contributions in terms of techniques and trends. Such work is therefore based on the assumption that constant recognisable patterns exists in what is considered as ‘true national art’. But Fanon, argues that “the forms of thought and what it feeds on, together with modern techniques of information, language and dress have dialectically reorganised the people’s intelligences".
In the artist attempt to depict what consists of the ‘true’ elements of a culture “turns paradoxically towards the past and away from actual events”. He/she, then illustrates the ‘cast-offs of thought’, a set of rules, norms and values that do not reflect the reality of the culture anymore.

The artist in this case does not depict the national culture but a set of cultural artifacts. Therefore, “what seems to characterise a people, are in fact only the inherit, already forsaken results of frequent, and not always very coherent adaptations of a much more fundamental substance which itself is constantly being renewed”.

The Viewer's position: Is your artwork 'Offering' or 'Demanding'?

Have you ever wandered if your artwork was 'offering' or 'Demanding'? No?! You should definitely!! And if you have no idea of what I am talking about, I would suggest you to read these few lines that may enrich your artistic argumentation or help you to reflect on this ... 'stuff' that stands in front of you at the next exhibition (lol)!

I am going to focus on how the ‘position of the viewer’ may influence the understanding of the artwork in two different posts. The first, here, will be a kind of introduction, will give you a key concept to understand the second one which will specifically focus on cultural differences. Have a good reading!

Considering the artwork as a channel of communication, we can distinguish two different ways in which the viewer can be addressed. Represented elements can be ‘Offering’ to the viewer or being source of a ‘demand’.

The ‘demanding’ elements tend to involve the viewer in the artwork. This involvement can be ‘demanded’ through the gaze of a figure looking directly at the viewer or by asking the viewer to be part of an experiment in which the created meaning or resultant feelings are part of the message mediated through the artwork for example.

Paul Klee - Ancient sound

The idea of interacting with the work of art is not new and has particularly be enhanced by Paul Klee in the 1920’s when using the concept of ‘space in between’ also called third space. Hannula in -Space: a merry-go-round of opportunity an article from Kiasma magazine, argues that the 3rd space is, "the space, situation and opportunity, which can open up between two persons, or, for instance, a viewer and an object. It is, most of all, a question of encounter, which possibly creates the third space. An event, which simultaneously belongs to both parties”.
Therefore the ‘encounter’ is viewed as a starting point for an act of mutual influence between the participants, an interaction that connects both parties (here the viewer and the artwork).
Hannula describes the creation of such encounter and the creation of the third space as a strictly empathic individual experience that has no rules except trying to be open to other views and to give opportunity for self-expression.
Hannula says here, that entering the third space leads to the creation of an area where “the content of concepts and statements is hotly debated. In the best case, it creates opportunities which promote something different, new and previously unidentified”.

A view through the peephole in the door of Marcel Duchamp's Etant donné (1946-66)

Alternative ways of reflection on identity, position, environment and goals arise out of the collaboration of two parties with their own culture, language and personal history that can lead to the alteration of assumptions and prejudices and might animate to call the validity of stereotypes into question.
An example of the appearance of such ‘third space’ could be illustrated by a performance which consisted of measuring people at the entrance of the gallery, and giving them shoes with adapted heels that completed their height to exactly 200cm (If you find the name of the artist and the performance please do not hesitate to comment this post).
His idea was to let people enter in an almost empty gallery enabling them to look each other in the eyes at the same level. In this way he created a third space between the participants who themselves became a part of the artwork for a moment.

Paul Cezanne - Nature morte au crane

By contrast, ‘Offering’ elements such as still lifes which depict inanimated objects (a basket of fruits for example) are descriptive and do not ask for the viewer’s involvement.
Sacks in 'Lecture on conversation', highlights that communicative power or ‘entitlement’ issues are resulting in the everyday use of communication due to viewer’s position: “Not everyone may address the viewer directly. Some may be looked at, other may themselves be the bearers of the look”. In other words, the issue of the viewer’s positionment recalls culturally embedded eye-contact, that will be the subject of a next post.

Know that you know about offer and demand, would you have mesmerizing examples of offering or demanding artwork to share with us?

Rosemary Laing - Artwork of the Month, Feb/Mar 2008

There is a great deal about the initial assumptions we make about things that surround us. When you enter the Tate modern or Centre Pompidou you expect the highest quality of art; and although you may not know half of the artists exhibited there (Not to know about everything is rather normal and even more enjoyable...), you may presume that it is fantastic even though you do not specially like it.

To rely on the context is one of the most important characteristics of the human process of communication. Our new artwork of the month relies quite cleverly to the context both through direct (visual clues) and indirect components (artwork status, the photographic medium) and your lecture may probably be biased once again, like with every other artwork of the month I introduced in the past, because many people including me already gave their own interpretation; I do not think I am a powerful opinion leader though. The solution for you is to go on place to see this artwork for real, but that might be difficult to be honest... But let me introduce the artwork first:

What is this exactly? The actual artwork called Groundspeed (Red plazza) is 'what happened in the Australian jungle' (a very dangerous piece of jungle according to the 'enhancing' ArtReview article). I first came across the artwork while reading an article in the June 2006 edition of the ArtReview magazine in an article called "Art at the Extremes". If it is featured in anArtReview article, it might be important... The artist, Rosemary Laing chose to go in the carpet shop in Kiama (New South Wales - Australia) and to order several hundred square feet of their finest Axminster. The artist point is to reflect on how Europeans changed both physical and cultural landscape 200 years ago. She changed the wild Australia Forest into what looks like an ordinary living room here in the U.K.Therefore, what is presented to the viewer is a picture of the actual artwork, which makes it even more interesting. First because it is brought to the contemporary art world which would probably never go on place to see the artwork as it they would do with recognized accessible Land Art. But that is only to be mean that I say this. This artwork obliges you to rely on the picture you get in the Gallery.

Spiral jetty - Robert Smithson

The photographic medium is therefore relevant because it imposes a distance. The viewer becomes a powerless note keeper and has no possibility to interfere with the actual creation which may recall the feeling of what people may sense in front of the TV while watching Al Gore 'An Inconvenient Truth' or any alarmist BBC News coverage about climate change actual repercussion. I believe that this adds a terribly contemporary note to the artwork.

The artist uses cleverly both the photographic medium and the museum as the place in which the communication act is supposed to occur to create meaning. Groundspeed came to the public in 2001 and remains inspirational. Can you believe how fast time flies? This was a time, only 7 years ago, when people still did not care that much about environment and climate change. It usually takes time to change minds that deeply but in this special case communication might have helped a bit. Think about what comes to your mind when we are talking about pollution? A few pictures of the melting ice in the north pole and polar bears sinking because they find no land to stand on, films of flooded houses in the U.K. in the summer 2007. Think now about the war on terrorism? There comes to your mind the pictures of 9/11 disaster. The world always relied and will rely more and more on visual symbols.
This could be an answer to the question "What is Art for?"explored earlier in these blog lines.
It incites to action by putting into light concepts we may not be able to see anymore because we seek for social coherence; concept that are sometimes easier to occult than to have to reflect on. To quote the French producer Jean-Luc Godard : "La culture, c’est la norme, l’art c’est l’exception" (Culture is the norm, the art is the exception). This is done thanks to the clever use of a web of complex symbols, that aim to impact the viewer as deeply as possible.

They were great example of Artworks socially or politically oriented, all along art history and their influence does not need to be demonstrated anymore!

Le radeau de la méduse (The Raft of the Medusa - Géricault)

Guernica - Picasso

Another recent example of artwork that works quite well in this sense was presented in 2004 by Tony Matelli and called Fuck'd:

Doesn't it speak pretty loud? This clearly invites to reflection... A stunningly realistic chimpanzee used in a theatrical scene to discuss the impact of social forces on the individual (or human determination to injure the wild animal which looks so much like us!). A really powerful message.

Sometimes, a picture speaks louder than a billion words... But in the same time, if you can say it, why paint it?

Laughing in a foreign language

Living now in the UK for three years, coming from France, I had the opportunity to experience the famous English humour. What is it exactly about?!? To be honest I still have no idea... I had the chance to manage for one year with a group of International people, a society of 450 members coming from more than 35 different countries. We all laughed a lot altogether about many things, sometimes out of nothing. And when we did not find the words we used hands eye contact or noises. Everything is fine to pass a message when you do not find the appropriate words... Especially in a foreign language.

I remember sitting at a dinner table, about 3 years ago in the Czech countryside with a family that did not speak any of my words. The father spoke a few words in French (about 47 different words), trying vaguely to explain that he came a few times in France, visiting a friend. encouraged by these impressive communication skills, I took the map and described, repeated myself many times, reformulating, using basic words. I only found out that he did not understand how beautiful the city I came from was, when he answered "YES!" to the question "Have you ever travelled to this side of the France?"...

Despite this small communication accident, we laughed a lot and it was all based on simple gestures. I loved it!

But coming back to English humour, I really could not tell what makes it different. It is the same for Spanish, Chinese, Mexican [...] humour. It's a whole thing.

There is an exhibition, currently running in London that explores the "Laughing in a foreign language" problematic.

Clown (2005) Julian Rosefeldt. Copyright and courtesy the artist.

Laughing in a Foreign Language, from 25 January – 13 April is the first exhibition curated by The Hayward’s new international Curator, Mami Kataoka. In a time of increasing globalisation, the exhibition questions if humour can only be appreciated by people with similar cultural, political or historical backgrounds and memories, or whether it can act as a catalyst for understanding the unfamiliar. Bringing together 80 works including videos, photographs and interactive installations, many of which have not been shown in the UK before, the show investigates the whole spectrum of humour, from jokes, gags and slapstick to irony, wit and satire, as well as questioning what it means to share a sense of humour and what it is that makes an individual laugh.

Ralph Rugoff, Director of The Hayward, said;
“Laughter is universal; it is something that people in every culture can relate to. Humour however, is socially specific. This exhibition offers an alternative and fresh perspective on different cultures by bringing together artists from 22 nations around the world, including Japan, Mexico, Iran, Germany and Cameroon, and exhibiting work that asks us to explore not only the differences in culture and humour but also what unites us.”

Cindy Sherman

Laughing in a Foreign Language explores the role of laughter and humour in contemporary art through the work of 30 international artists, including Jake and Dinos Chapman (UK); Ugo Rondinone (Switzerland); Makoto Aida (Japan); Doug Fishbone (US); John Bock (Germany); David Shrigley (UK); Jun Yang (China); Julian Rosefeldt (Germany); Olaf Breuning (Switzerland); Candice Breitz (South Africa), Matthew Griffin (Australia) and Marcus Coates (UK).

I emitted a few posts ago the theory that to be successful on the market (in the large sense of the term market), an artwork needs to address the network of social relationships that composes the art world. Then, must exists a kind of "contemporary art visual language" with its codes and conventions and therefore a specific type of humour.

If you fancy contemporary art you will probably be more willing to laugh at these "jokes" presented within this exhibition (?!).

Actually if you could go there and tell me...?

Aristotle said that only humans are able to laugh. Modern science demonstrated that rats and chimpanzee can do it too...

Quotation of the month - February 2008

It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.

Charles Baudelaire (1821 - 1867)

Enter the crowded world of contemporary art

I already explored with you, issues of space and cultural differences when it comes to create or to read an artwork. There is an article in the Arts Newspaper this month that stresses the change in visitors behaviour due to a growing audience in galleries and museum...
This specific post story all started a couple of years ago, with a box in a book called "Le Marketing Sensoriel" which gives key elements to understand the "rush management" as a marketing tool (In other words, miscellaneous techniques to retain people in a crowded high street, hype shop. The box, entitled "behavioral cloaca" explains that a great number of rats were put together in a small cage for behavior observation purposes. What they've found out was that rats became hostile, gave way to cannibalism, incest and death... Then I would like you to think about the crowd in a big museum such as MOMA or TATE on a Saturday afternoon from this overcrowded point of you... OOOPS!

Joke apart, the first experiment really exists and demonstrates the influence of busy environment on living creatures behaviour. Do not tell me that you've never felt claustrophobic or agoraphobic while walking in Manchester city center on a week end. What type of impact could have the crowd on the museum visit experience? The Arts Newspaper article stresses that most of the artworks were not created to fit into galleries as they were supposed to end on a wall in the peacefull well-protected house of a rich investor... Some quite place, where you (they) can have a face to face encounter with the artwork for hours without 100 tourists taking pictures (with a powerful flash), or standing between you and the canvas. Moreover, some artworks respond to each others, are complementary. The first example that comes to my mind is the Rothko's room in Tate modern, London.

Rothko's room in Tate Modern, perfect conditions

The memory of those children running everywhere in the room, drawing, and the people standing in front of the paintings is as strong as the memory of the proper canvases. I remember grabbing a paper explaining a couple of facts about the paintings and a mother telling me I should not take it as it was something specifically designed for 'young at Tate' or something like this and that her boy wanted it back. Ok ok I give it back to you... I d be very glad if someone gave me one of this leaflets 'for dummies'! but nothing... The moral of this Rothko story is that I did not understand anything at his art by standing in this gallery because there were too many people (including me) turning around breaking the symetry and the way the light is reflected from the canvas to the viewer...

Another example, In Tate Modern again, walking on level 3 you may see a giant queue waiting to enter an open-egg-like form...

What so special about it? The object is called Ishan's light and its creator Anish Kapoor (see above). Without entering into too much details about the artist intentions here, I was curious enough to enter the 10 minutes queue to have the privilege to be face-to-face with the sculpture for about 40-50 seconds, having that feeling that the people in the queue were staring at my poor, amazed and dizzy body with a 'now it's my turn!' look. While entering into the sculpture shape, you basically loose your sense of time and space due to an optical effect created by the highly reflective dark interior surface. You need to put your hands in front of you to really understand what happens to you. You wish to stay here for hours but you know that it is already too late, you have to leave... next person, next artwork...

Martin creed's work N° 329 'half the air in a given space'-Lyon's biennial 2004

Same for Martin creed's work N° 329 'half the air in a given space' in Lyon's biennial a couple of years ago, same for many other artworks.

Edward T. Hall, a well recognized anthropologist and a big name in cultural studies introduced in the 'Hidden dimension' the concept of proxemics which in simple terms is the 'cultural' notion of space. Hall notes that different cultures maintain different standards of personal space. In Latin cultures, for instance, those relative distances are smaller, and people tend to be more comfortable standing close to each other; in Nordic cultures the opposite is true. Realizing and recognizing these cultural differences improves cross-cultural understanding, and helps eliminate discomfort people may feel if the interpersonal distance is too large ("stand-offish") or too small (intrusive). Comfortable personal distances also depend on the culture, social situation, gender, and individual preference.

Does it mean that we are not equal in crowded museum and galleries context. Some may have more difficulties to cope with busy rooms in which artists try to communicate complex contemporary messages through amazing masterpieces. We are not equal in front of the potential stress generated in these situations that would alter the quality of the communication process.

Remember these three important things:

• If a pretty latina comes to seat right next to you the German little on the bench in front of this Rothko's masterpiece; it is more likely that she wants to admire the canvas rather than getting your number.
• Galleries may not become a place for hot dates
• Do not, in any case, hold such stupid stereotypes (specially the two mentioned above).

Visitor, beginner, looking for deep accessible information

Sometimes, while going to a gallery or visiting a random web page, you come across something marvellous. As you are not a specialist and because your memory has limitation (in my case, depending on the size of the meal I just had...) you just look at the title, the name, you walk away and you forget... It' s not like I always knew I would start a blog someday, about contemporary art and cultural differences!

Here's the one I precisely talk about:

Green Tilework in Live Flesh 2000

Imagine the great difficulty to find who did that! I vaguely remembered that it was an exhibition about South American artists a while ago Tate Liverpool... That's a good start I must admit. Ok Ok looking for keywords to google now: Wall, Flesh, Blood... hummm Little squares?

After a couple of hours, I finally found it: Adriana Varejão!

Once again, I regret that there were not many information displayed next to the artwork. If it is the first time you come to a gallery and you do not know anything about these things that surround you; there will be no way for you to get the message! Where is the context here?

Brazilian 1964–Folds 2 2003oil on canvas over aluminium, mounted to wood with oil-painted polyurethane240.7 x 230.2 x 40 cm Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

Once upon a time, in 15OO to be exact, Europeans discover Brazil which will become a Portuguese colony until the 19th century. Racism, Slavery, assimilation, submission, massacres left many different scares in contemporary history and part of the contemporary Brazil economic success is due to this dark aspect of colonialism. Sugarcane massive industry was made profitable by the forced labour of African slaves.

But these are not things that people like to hear, specially if in some ways they feel directly or indirectly responsible.

Adriana Varejão art is made after 1970 but responds to the colonial history of Brazil. The typical ceramic mosaïcs exported to Brazil in provenance of the "old continent" (old as 'wiser'?) are a symbol of the assimilation and aculturation process.

Azulejaria 'De Tapete em Carne Viva'1999

They represent the 'viewable' surface of the Brazilian culture as if there were an official version of the history approved through a hegemonic force. Here is the vision of the colonialist power: a shiny, clean surface, that often recalls industrial aseptic tile walls, easily washable that participe to the fabric of Brazilian's society but hide an ugly truth.

Ruina de Charque - Nova Capela, 2003 Oil on wood and polyurethane

The artist may therefore propose the viewer to cut through the falsehood of history. She may also say that scares may be the only thing left if the industrial world was about to decline. I will leave that to you and encourage you to bring your personal views in a wise comment below.

Because we are not necessarily professional of contemporary art and because we do not know the artist personally in most of the cases, I suggest to all gallery owners to provide to your visitors a set of deep but accessible information! Thanks a lot...

Just a brick in the wall

For all of you who did not play with Legos when they were young or those who think that it is for kids only. There was an exhibition in Liverpool called Art Craziest Nation in january, that recreated a vision af the glamourous artworld, using the famous brick game.

Artist Mark Wallinger can be seen in the centre of the image above wearing a white shirt and black sunglasses. He is looking at Koons' Balls; in the background part of Kleins' Sponges can be seen.

Here are some examples that I chose because I had the occasion to mention these people or artworks earlier in the blog:

Featured artworks
Hirst's Shark Tank Whiteread's Room Chapmans' Dead Guys Emin's Bed Warhol's Money Klein's Sponges

Featured artists
Damien Hirst Dinos and Jake Chapman Tracey Emin Rachael Whiteread Matthew Barney Mark Wallinger
Artworld luminaries and special guests
Larry Gagosian

The group is called 'Little Artists' to explore "what it means to be an artist in the current super-branded cultural climate" in their own words. More information is still available on the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool @:

http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/walker/exhibitions/littleartists/

A role for emptiness...

Let's play a little game first! To play in optimal conditions, I would suggest to put the sound of the music player to a significant, loud level (please respect your neighbours!) One of these dots is a link to the new post. Move slowly your cursor on each of the lines until you find the links (the arrow of your cursor may become a finger). This will allow to fully appreciate the experience of the following hidden post.

Common It's not that hard. Thank you for playing!
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By the way, the whysky bottle displayed the last few days was here for the negative answer for the Bluecoat...

Pride and prejudice and stereotypes

Leaving Uni was really frustrating for me... No more lectures... I loved them! That's why sometimes I need to go back to the roots and produce an 'academic' style post. Thinking in the last post about this story about being a foreigner, reminded me that I still needed to cover the subject of Prejudice and stereotypes within the communication act, mediated through the artwork. Here are some keys that hopefully you will appreciate to learn about!

Cindy Sherman dealing with the female stereotypes, untitled, 1982, Photograph on paper, 115.0 x 76.0 cm, Tate Gallery, London

In the case of an intercultural communication act, stereotypes provide an initial prediction that we make about strangers both on cultural and sociocultural levels. Here is the 'basic'.

But people forget that every communication act is potentially multicultural; as you are a student and she is a worker, you are a male she is a female, you come from the north he comes from the south, he is your father (a parent) and you are a son (without child) and on and on.

Stereotypes are ‘a generalization about a group of people based upon their group membership. Therefore, to stereotype is to assign identical characteristics to any person in a group, regardless of the actual variation among members of that group’. For example, contemporary art is about a white square on a 2m*6m canvas as well as Mexican art is traditional are well known stereotypes...

Hewston and Brown (1986) define stereotypes as mental representations (cognitive dimension) which influence our feelings towards members of a particular group (affective dimension) which have three characteristics:

1. Groups are often classified on the basis of characteristics which are easy to identify for the viewer such as sex or ethnicity.
2. a specific set of attributes is ascribed to the whole group of people.
3. the set of attributes is ascribed to any individual member of that group, which means that individuals belonging to the stereotyped group are assumed to be similar to each other, and different from other groups.

A common stereotype which is associated with contemporary art is that it is art reserved for an elite (“Art is the noblest and the most sophisticated way to consolidate social level, power and money” (Serge V. 1990)), that it is pure provocation and finally, as it is no more attached to aesthetic or technical skills, that everybody could create it. For this reason Walker (1999:34) argues that "It appears that people got an attitude of hostility and indifference towards the contemporary art forms”.

Yves Klein.Blue Monochrome. 1961. Dry pigment in synthetic polymer medium on cotton over plywood, 195.1 x 140 cm.

The way we process information is influenced by our stereotypes, meaning that we tend to retain favorable information emitted by members of our ingroups and to defend unfavorable information from members of an outgroup (Hewston and Gilles,1986). The information process is “biased in the direction of maintaining the preexisting belief systems... These processes, then, can produce the cognitive confirmation of one’s stereotypical beliefs”(Hamilton et al., 1992). Therefore, the way we interpret incoming messages emitted by the artist through an artwork is dependant on the stereotypes we hold about contemporary art, the artist, the content of the message emitted and on every environmental factor associated with the artwork (e.g. if it is displayed here, in the Tate, it is necessarily a masterpiece)

Ian McClean (2004) highlights that stereotypes have an influence on how artworks are compared and classified. He argues, that if people lately “seemed to have noticed art conceived by non-western artists, such art is still conceived as the Art of the other rather than the same, as if only the West (or more accurately a few privileged places in the West) is a site of modernist and postmodernist” (2004:294).

Frida Kahlo. Frida and Diego Rivera. 1931.Oil on canvas. 99 x 78.7 cm. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, USA

Let me give you an example: Frida Kahlo’s or Diego Rivera’s paintings have often been and remain introduced as Mexican artists, producing Mexican art rather than being presented within the context of a specific art genre for example. In this way a stereotypical view of Frida Kahlo’s and Diego Rivera’s art is reinforced as their art is reduced to the category of “being Mexican”.

In conclusion?! Stereotypes are here and we can't avoid using them... they are shortcuts of the mind that help us not to have to consider the totality of the billion of information that our brain receives each seconds of our life. But there is something you can do about them:

To question them! They provide a good prediction of a stranger behaviour but certainly not absolute truth about individuals. Be curious! Doubt! Ask questions! After all there are no stupid questions... only stupid answers.

Want to read more?

• Hamilton, D., Sherman, S. And Ruvolo, C. (1992) Stereotypes based expectancies. In W. Gudykunst and Y. Kim (Eds.), Reading on Communicating with Strangers. New-York: Mc Graw-Hill. (Originally published in in Journal of Social Issues, 46(2), 35-60.
• Hewston,M. and Gilles, H. (1986). Stereotypes and Intergroup Communication. In
  W. Gudykunst (Ed.), Intergroup communication. London:Edward Arnold.
• McLean I., (2004). On the Edge of Change? Third Text, Volume 18, Issue 3 2004Walker, J. (1999) ART & OUTRAGE Provocation, controversy and the visual arts, Sterling: Pluto press

You won't find green grass in an art gallery, but you will be able to look into the neighbour's garden...

Is the grass always greener in your neighbour's garden? Many of you may have experienced living abroad for short or longer journey... It is always interesting to see yourself in another framework. You get used to some of the things you may find there (In my case, here in the UK, a few things come to my mind such as the tiny skirts and hum... let me think about it...) and some you will never get used to.

There is something that I still can't cope with here... I tried really hard, I promise! But I can't get over it: The open curtains.

Let me explain... For me, the concept 'home' is deeply linked with this other concept called 'privacy', or 'retreat' and I can tell you that I have great difficulties not to stop to watch what happens in these thousand houses I pass everyday when I am on the way to work.

People laying on their bed or sofa watching TV, having a can of beer, getting prepared for the party... They would be French I wouldn't care. But they are not and I want to know everything about them in the 2 1/2 seconds allowed by the social communitarian rules that would lead the police to my house for 'weird act of voyeurism' if I'd be watching for too long. So instead of leading a digital SLR raid at night to frame these people, I prefer going into an art gallery!

Sometimes Preston homes ring a Richard Billingham's bell in my mind... Do you know him? He was shortlisted for the Turner prize in 2001 but shined among the YBA's (Young British Artists is a group promoted by Saatchi that appeared on the contemporary art scene in a really famous exhibition called 'sensation' that promoted new stars such as Hirst, Sarah Lucas, Tracey Emin, The Chapman Brothers and many others...).

When discovered, Richard Billingham was seen as a poor child of the Midlands who came over a dramatic familial mediocrity through the use of a camera. His mother, Liz, tattooed and obese; his father, Ray, alcoholic and his brother, Jason who is a drug addict... The pictures are usually untitled and are talking about the artist roots; a family album and certainly not related to any political critique or anything like that.

I mentioned it earlier in this blog but I think that, no matter the subject you cover through your artwork, it has to address the network of social relationship that compose the contemporary art world. In this particular case I think Billingham allow gallerists, curators, critics [...] visitors to access to a world that they would not see otherwise. In the particular setting of the gallery, it is highly recommended to stay in front of these 'windows' opened by Richard's camera... highly fashionable indeed. No worries, the police this time won't come to knock on your door; this is institutionally authorized voyeurism!

Who cares about these middle class people? I mean the ones who got a job, one or two kids and a mortgage? I just imagine in 2o years time when the economical, social and cultural centre of gravity will definitely be set between China and India... Would Chinese artists come to the old Europe to take pictures of the last middle class families as we do now with the first middle class Chinese families?

So... from our perspective, Billingham's pictures are fantastic...right? But when it came to produce a second serie of photographs, the artist who was obviously the centre of the press and critics attention, failed to hit his target a second time... He chose to picture the city area he came from. Pretty pictures that did not work...

The art world has a thousand of similar tales to tell. Looking at one of the last issues of PHOTO magazine, I was amazed by a serie of pictures taken by jessica Dimmock. Taken on the apartment at 4 W. 22nd St, NYC. Drug addiction, violence, love, sex, friendship, poverty...

Jessica Dimmock - the ninth floor

"The images that garnered Dimmock her F Award, as well as and Inge Morath Prize and PDN's Marty Forscher Fellowship Fund, are compassionate yet disturbing portraits of lives stifled and consumed by addiction" says the other blog... As a European, 25 man potentially middle class, passionated with photography and visual arts in general... with no drugs addiction nor major problems in life... I agree.

Why I was not there? Any suggestion?

Hello blognaute! I haven't seen you for a long time now... I kept myself busy for preparing an interview that took place in Liverpool last Tuesday... Do you remember? The Bluecoat, the present I asked for Christmas!? Well... usually it's no news good news, but this time... I was so stressed that I think I did not do that well... I needed time to go back on these blog lines... I ll give you the answer as soon as I got it... Positive or negative...
That's it for the 'social' aspect of this warm hearted blog! Yes I eat drink and breathe contemporary art, but this blog is for you as much as for me. Without you it wouldn't exist anymore! So once again and I will never say it enough: Thank you!

I know that some of you read it quite regularly. Please feel free to write a comment on this specific post if you have any interesting suggestions to improve the quality of this blog.

Hope you won't be too shy for this!

Artwork of the month Jan 2007 - Raw version Paul Mc Carthy

It's time for a new artwork of the month.

Usually there is one artwork I fall in love with, every month, but this time I really, reeeaalllyyy wanted to speak about something from Paul Mc Carthy. Probably because I did not know much about him when I started this post and because his name regularly comes back everywhere in contemporary art blogs journals; as a major influencial figure. He is recognised as an inspiration for many artists such as Mike Kelley, Cindy Sherman, the Chapman brothers and many many others. Almost a myth. But what to choose? This is really hard... In Mc Carthy's work everything seems connected... If I take one among the huge amount of artworks it may be out of context, maybe inappropriate. This is something that really makes sense as a whole thing. Not that one artwork separated from the others is meaningless but once you explored the richness of the connections between the numerous sculptures, videos, performances, paintings...

McCarthy is a storm... Try to read exhibition reviews, critics are unanymous "it takes to the guts". Since the 60's he carefully attempted to soil Hollywood and Disneyland madness "as a type of prison "that you are seduced into visiting" to highlight modern social movements. It seems a bit complicated... I'll slow down.

Blockhead in front of Tate modern

There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad. Salvador Dali (1904 - 1989). This statement perfectly applies to Paul Mc Carthy, but at the end what does make him "not mad" and internationally recognised? I think it is the coherence of his work. Certainly too 'well-orchestrated' over this very long carreer of sculpting, painting, video producing, doing performances to be a simple attempt of a disturbed man to come to terms with his own personal problems.

To quote Magnus af Petersens in his excellent essay 'Paul Mc Carthy - 40 years of work - an attempt of a summary':
Paul McCarthy’s works incorporate a sharp social critique, which focuses on social and cultural traumas rather than on private issues. This is the dark side of the American Dream, of the consumer society we all live in, even in Sweden and the rest of Western Europe. He also touches on a variety of existential issues. But he can also be exceedingly comical, although the laughter often sticks in your throat. He is a clown, a buffoon in the Rabelaisian sense.

40 years of work... Paul Mc Carthy has a long and quite prolific career that really starts (at least for the artworld) in the 60's. Back in the context, in the U.S., the legacy of Jackson Pollock, the 'action painting' abstract expressionism just reached its climax point (The emphasis is put on the action of painting rather than the result on the canvas), artists are more and more interested in 'speech act' or "a statement that is not solely descriptive but also constitutes some form of action". His works present also numerous minimalist references:

Ketchup Sandwich

Corporal fluids metaphorically represented by Ketchup, chocolate, vaseline become recurrent themes both in symbolically complex performances and in minimalist artworks to which he does numerous references (for example a cube filled with ketchup represents a crane or a big letter 'H' that lays on the ground symbolises the minimalist form of a dead body).

Everything quickly becomes inter related; moreover, by reproducing the same artistic acts over the years changing the medium, Mc Carthy questions the relation between these representational modes. For instance The 'Ketchup cube' concept used in 'Ketchup Sandwich' also appears clearly in 'Blockhead' a giant inflatable Pinocchio shown above. Once you've acknowledge the existence of the first one, it becomes really hard to conceive this Giant puppet's head not filled with slimy, greasy, red fluid... The concept recall is really powerful!

Dead H - Paul Mc Carthy

After settling down in los Angeles, Mc Carthy works on numerous performances and includes progressively cameras, first to film the performance but progressively as a part of it, as a parody of the Hollywood (a close neighbour) codes of production and shows everything that this industry of 'dream' holds back. The artist attacks many myths, from the perfect family in a performance with Mike Kelley called Family Tyranny in 1987, to the acts of painting and cooking in Bossy Burger (1991) see picture on the left. In this performance, Mc Carthy attempts to reveal the world's cruelty by underlining the bloody aspect of the cooking act, to discuss anything from entropy to social oppression or waste culture. In WGG Test, depicting a sailing party gone wrong, McCarthy questions the effects that violence and mutilation, both real and simulated, have on the viewer in contemporary culture (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4C3yjIet2Ig Please be aware that these videos may hurt sensibilities). It bleeds, it is frenetic, the screams are unbearable, but it is clear and shown that this is all fake (presence of cameramen, displaying of the "trick" in some short sequences showing the real leg of the 'amputed' captain hidden under the stage...).
Again, like the corporal fluids, Mc Carthy throws out in the spectator's face what he/she does not want to see, because it is a part of history or intimity that everyone wants to forget! But WHY WHY WHY????!!!!! And if you run out of a Paul Mc Carthy exhibition, screaming this single 3 letters word... Then it is a total success. Why do we want to forget all these concepts? We do want to forget, now it's a fact and by being confronted face-to-face with Paul Mc Carthy abominations confirms that statement. One step further, he tends to use actual cinematographic settings used in famous mainstream hollywood productions, movies or series.

The Painter- Paul Mc Carthy

To the question: "Do you find it strange that people have such strong reactions to fecal matter, blood and mucus? The slightest thing that pops out of us is a total horror. Aren't these standard human materials? Why the shock of what's inside us?"
Mc Carthy answers: "Maybe it is a conditioned response: we're taught to be disgusted by our fluids. Maybe it's related to a fear of death. Body fluids are base material. Disneyland is so clean; hygiene is the religion of fascism".

And that is exactly what Mc Carthy's art is about!! It stands to question the formative power of social and political society. You really thought that pirates were sexy and totally disapeared? If Hollywood or Disneyland does show us a glamour image of the pirates, Mc Carthy recreates the attraction "Pirates of the Carribeans" and replaces Johnny Depp by thirty actors, wearing oversize carnival heads, simulating the invasion of a village, violence, mutilation, rape and the public sale of the village women. Probably far more realistic than the Hollywood version. One step further, beyond the farce, the masks and the grotesque spoof horror movie scenes, McCarthy's Pirate work makes also some references to the US invasion of Iraq, some scenes have been said to allude clearly to Abu Ghraib and the abuse of prisoners. Once again Mc Carthy demonstrates that we invent this new pirates dream, to hold back a certain reality of a 'human' violence (opposed to imaginary).

Mc Carthy however, offers you, the visitor, a precious gift: the ability of questioning yourself and all these mental barriers and taboos... It is a "wether you like it or not , this is there, in you, do not forget it!"

So here is my artwork of the month:

The exhibition Shop head/head shop Works 1966-2006

The foreword for the catalogue “Paul McCarthy: Head Shop/Shop Head” starts with eleven questions: The physical formalism of minimalism, or the exuberant materialism of pop art? Comic performance or existential actionism? More or less? In jest or in dead earnest? Criticism or acceptance? Sadism or love? Drawing? Sculpture? Film? Photography? Performance? Paul McCarthy himself says “You may understand my actions as vented culture. You may understand my action as vented fear.”The retrospective exhibition “Head Shop/Shop Head“ (curated by Magnus af Petersens), which is being held in association with Moderna Museet in Stockholm and ARoS in Aarhus, shows for the first time a representative selection of his work in Europe, produced from 1966 to 2006. McCarthy also made a series of new works especially for S.M.A.K. Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst. The exhibition of 40 years of McCarthy’s work will be held until 17 February 2008. By vtv correspondent Thom de Bock. PS: See the video about the exhibition at Galerie Hauser & Wirth in June 2007 which presented a series of photo portfolios related to the large-scale projects Paul and Damon McCarthy produced in recent years.

Here is the trailer of the exhibition: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXuFW4vm3EM&NR=1

On this next link you will find an excellent interview of the artist and several pictures of an exhibition that took place in Kopenhagen, which featured many of the artworks currently exhibited in Ghent (Belgium). http://www.kopenhagen.dk/interviews/interviews/interview_paul_mccarthy/

The voting process starts tomorrow... Ready???

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Can you hear this noise? you may not be on the same wavelenght... Turn this buton now? Hmm... It seems to me that the conditions are now far better to read this new post. These machines are convenient, aren't they? If you hear a noise, you turn the button and hop! It works! It would be to easy if humans could 'work' the same way.

This post is about the noise that alters the communication between the artist and the viewer... through the artwork. But let's read a bit of theoretical work first:

Cy Twombly, Untitled, 1970. Oil, house paint and crayon on canvas, 11' 4" x 13' 3" (345.5 x 404.3 cm).Menil Collection, Houston.

Contemporary art carries a message emitted by a source (the encoder/artist), encoded through the artwork (code), and received by the viewer (decoder) who decodes the message. Such model also entails a source of ‘interferences’ which is a deterioration of the message within the emision/reception process due to the condition in which the communication act occurs.

Number 1 Jackson Pollock 1948

Such ‘interferences’ or 'noise', lead to the appearance of differences between the meaning interpreted by the viewer in presence of the signifier (the artwork) and the meaning intended by the artist. “If the communication process succeeds, the medium prompts a meaningful closure (a message) in the mind of the receiver that is in accord with the intended meaning (the message) of the sender. Hence, the receiver’s perception of meaning is required to complete the process”.

As seen previously, on a radio reception, if there are too much ‘interferences’, the listener cannot hear his programme because the quality of reception is too bad. In the same way, the comunication process through the artwork channel can fail due to bad communication conditions.

From the emitting side we can first highlight that most, if not all artists intend to convey a specific message by their artworks. Oftentimes the producer’s/artists intention does not match with the viewer’s interpretation of the message emitted by an artwork.

To quote Sturken, M. & Cartwright, L. who worked on the Visual communication: “Finding out a producer’s intention often does not tell us much about the image, since intention may not match up with what viewers actually take away from an image or text. People often see an image differently from how is it intended to be seen, either because they bring experience and association to a particular image that were not anticipated by their producer, or because the meanings they derive are informed by the context (or setting in which an artwork is seen)” .

Therefore, an artist might not be in full control of the meanings that are deducted from his/her produced picture or text. Francis Bacon’s famous “distorted figures” for example has been described as a depiction of the horror of war in the context of the late 1940’s for a long time whereas the intended meaning of his painting was to depict the inner pain inherent to human conditions.

Three studies for a crucifixion - Francis Bacon

In a next post I planned to show you a couple of artworks from Paul McCarthy who masters the use of noise as an integrated part of his artworks, performances and sometimes the whole exhibition. The noise as a medium. It definitely seems that everything can be a medium. It s a shame tha everybody cannot be a genius!

;-)

We are the crowd... We are the medium

Whether you are christian or not, I guess you all had a taste of the December traditional Christmas shopping crowd, which is on every end of year tables. Although the guy on the TV told me today that this 2007 season was not that great, I am sure we all had one or two crowds on the menu... How is it to feel like a fish? Exciting for some, suffocating for others, beautiful for a few.

We have seen in previous posts that contemporary artists use a wide range of media to communicate; from a simple canvas to marble; even the art market itself with Hirst, Koons or more recently Murakami (our first artwork of the month)... There is one that is not that new but tends to come back in front of the stage on a regular basis: The crowd.

Remember...

In 1938, Orson Welles broadcasts the novel War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells from the Mercury Theater. Instead of reading the original version, Welles adapts it to the contemporary context and presents it as if it was real. Newsflashes, interrupting a routine radio program...

The result? A huge panic! People packing and leaving massively the cities, numerous phone calls to the police from scared people reporting martian attacks, explosions... A great experimentation indeed!

Another different example, a contemporary example, an aesthetic example: Andreas Gursky

Andreas Gursky, Chicago Board of Trade II

Gursky's world of the 1990s is big, high-tech, fast-paced, expensive, and global. Within it, the anonymous individual is but one among many. Gursky's work draws a picture of our multicultural society from a specific angle, stressing the geometric beauty of the social interactions, of the world we shape. A cult of the anonymous. Another artist whose approach is similar in the sense that he points at the role of the individual among the mass, Spencer Tunick takes photos since 1992 of a mass he controls. By photographing a hundred or more of naked bodies in public spaces, he challenges and questions social, political and justice conventions (he is regularly arrested for photographing his naked models in public spaces). the result is a delicious aesthetic provocation in a strange, unusual manner in my opinion.

Chile 1 - Spencer Tunick 2002

Melbourne 2 - Spencer Tunick 2001

More recently, Antony Gormley proposed an interesting project (in the sense of using the crowd as a medium) for Trafalgar square in London. There, is an free place for you, artist, to expose your artwork (after a small contest between shortlisted contemporary artists) which already introduced Wallinger's Ecce Homo for example... Gormley proposed to allow people to be the artwork, one by one, for one complete hour, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week...

Easy to imagine the crowd of 'artwork wannabes' but also the virtual crowd that will be made of people in the growing pool of participants. Also a crowd of anonymous, but who will probably be the centre of the attention of a thousand tourists and their cameras, camera-phones... etc... An anonymous glory. Good luck Mr. Gormley!

A last example is the appearance of the Chapman brothers on a reality show here in Britain. To quote the Guardian who covered the subject: "It's frightening to think what Jake and Dinos might do to the housemates. Tie them up and watch them have sex with blow-up dolls? Make them act out some nihilistic performance involving Hitler, Ronald McDonald and nursery-rhyme characters? Force them to make toy panoramas of war, cannibalism and the apocalypse? The art world waits with baited breath". Let see what they planned for the TV crowd, it's currently on air.

I guess they may be inspired by the Czech arts collective Ztohoven, who hacked a cam used for the weather forecast in a TV news program. They inserted this apocalyptic image of an atomic explosion, which resulted to a Welles-like nightmare (Station phone calls, Heart attacks...) with the artists facing the possibility of three years in jail.

Click on the following link to see the video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzaN2x8qXcM

In Conclusion, there is no excuse in the contemporary context of the art, for you not to be an artwork! But remember that you, and only you are the crowd!

Quotation of the month - January 2008

Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.
Arthur Schopenhauer

A beauty... Theo Jansen - When the art escapes from the artist - My present for 2008

Happy new year everybody! I would like to start the year 2008 with a deeply optimistic post, a present for you.

What is a blog? It could be a lot of things in fact... From entertaining a network of friends to sharing your last Fish Sauerkraut recipe. I would love to think that mine is a way to help you to stay in touch with contemporary art 'actuality' revisited from the specific angle of the cultural differences... I read blogs, websites, magazines, books, watch TV programs all night long... come out with something I found interesting that I would like to share... And if you like it, you come back on my blog. As simple as this!

So let's start with something really catchy: Theo Jansen and the Beach animals!

Theo Jansen is an artist and sculptor, living and working in the Netherland. "Since 1990 he has been working on a new creation: skeletons made of electric-conduits which walk on windpower. These animals have evolved into several generations over the last twelve years. Eventually he wants to put the anima Is out in herds on the beaches, where they live their own lives".

Here are a few pictures of these animals:

"Ok fair enough... Plastic tubes on the beach... Looks like Blackpool!" I hear you say...

Then you shall watch this, and consider it as my present for the new year:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7Ny5BYc-Fs

You want to know how these thing works? (They walk, are mechanically able to recognize water, storms and to react... to survive... Breathtaking!):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b694exl_oZo

Here is a link to the official website:

http://www.strandbeest.com/

I sincerelly hope that you will like it as much as I do. See you soon! I am going for Scotland and Lake district for a week... Want to join me? :-)

The contemporary art world in 2008

What should I write between Xmas and the new year? No contemporary art news to comment?

One of the blog's reader just asked me to write "a vision" of what will be 2008 for the contemporary art world... It would be a bit pretentious... You would not hate me for that, would you?

Having a look on the last 'ARTPrice' report, I recently did some figures work in order to get a view on what is the contemporary art world 'culture' within the framework of a MA in intercultural Business Communication.

Easy to determine who rules the art world isn't it? It is precisely a matter of rules and power, isn't it? Like the U.S., if you are responsible of 45.9% of the 'market share' for the contemporary artworks on the secondary market (auction houses), you get a better position to set "the way to do it". I believe figures from the secondary market are still relevant to analyse the art world but not for long: Biennials and fairs pop-up everywhere and get more and more power on the market and change the deal radically... This is now almost taken for granted.

ArtPrice Report 2006

Back to our market figures, we can stress that numerous writers have analysed how the contemporary art world evolved in concordance with the culture of the members of the social relationship network within which contemporary art is produced, viewed and criticised; stressing the existence of an hegemonic power of western culture.

Analysing the market shares by countries from a cultural studies angle, we can see that the International contemporary art market is dominated by highly individualistic countries.

The dominant western art market also appears highly hierarchic and tends to give little chance to artists and enterprises to move among genres (but also that no importance is accorded to these new genres unless there are values of prestige associated). In other terms it does hardly give a chance to new emerging movements, especially if those movements do not emerge from the major cultural actors of the International art market.

Sorry for the headache...

So, the hard world is dominant, gives no chance to other actors... It does not explain why the media keeps on talking about India and China... Look at the press, it's crazy!!! Money is the explanation, ...but I certainly do not mean that Chinese or Indian artists have no talent!!! I won't go too much into details as I recently wrote a post about it in this blog (How to learn to be an art financial trader while taking the plane...). To make it simple, an artwork is unique and so, a good store of value. Therefore, the boom in the market comes from the need to store the excess of capital generated by the global prosperous companies. In the contemporary economic climate, Art is a good investment... At least until a better financial opportunity arise.

Big Family, Lithograph, Edition of 199, 200370cm x 82.6cm

The growth in Asian countries changes the global deal, but Chinese investors buy contemporary artworks in China, Indians in India, U.S. buy in the U.S. (also mainly due to Dollar depreciation that makes artworks 'unaffordable') and France anywhere else but in France.

I believe that this is only the first step of this 'new deal'. These changes will not only affect the content of the market, but will also change its culture: India and China will probably introduce their set of values to the contemporary art world business etiquette...

Any prediction? Yes...

• Less differenciation (in other words we may see a low segmentation of the genres e.g. ‘expressionism’, segmented in institutionalised sub-genres such as ‘figurative expressionism’, ‘abstract expressionism’...etc);
• less hierarchisation (this means that genres won't be organised according to the value of prestige associated).
• More universalism in the art classification systems (which will also largely be enhanced by the maturity of the information transference technologies);
• finally, we may see a growing facility for artists and enterprises to move between ritualised genres.

It looks all fine to me... We may see more artists from what we used to call 'products of colonisation' affirming cultural identities without too much difficulties as the pressure resulting of not being part of what we used to call "the hegemonic western art world" may decrease.
This set of potential changes within the contemporary art world culture may therefore sign the end of the modernism... Postmodernism is only a baby... Let's hope it is a genius!

Detail from The Silk Route by Subodh Gupta ("The Damien Hirst of Dehli"-The Guardian- ArtReview). Photograph: Colin Davison

Good ole artistic trends debates may probably disappear in such conditions! No more: "My 'Nouveau Réalisme' is an answer to your 'painting and sculpture hegemony'..." or "I developed my idea of 'cubism' in reaction to your Blablablah..." Such a shame...

All these personal predictions concern the art world in market terms... What about the artists and the artworks?

Have you recently visited the Saatchi website? It now looks like a MySpace for the artists... I read in your mind that this must concern a minority as Facebook and MySpace themselves are too big to allow any serious competition... Well you may be wrong then: I read "HITS IN THE LAST 24 HOURS: 60,914,153!!!! RANK TODAY IN THE WORLD'S TOP 50.000 SITES: 227(Source: Awstats, Alexa)". It is an example among many other relevant examples. As a result of the resulting competition among artists, I see an increase of the artwork technical and aesthetic quality, already initiated by artists like Lisa Yuskavage or John Currin mentioned in the 'artwork of the month' for December in this same blog.

Jeff Koons - Model for a project... Work in progress

You can already see that artworks are more and more expensive to produce... Is it a consequence of these changes? If realized, the 161 foot tall hanging train would be located at the entrance of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and would become a perfect illustration of the contemporary affordability to be a 'good artist' (see model above). I must admit that I am joking a bit... Koons can do it? Ok why not! It does not mean to me that someone from the other corner of the world may not impress the whole art world with a pencil, a A4 piece of paper and a great idea...

In conclusion, to YOU, the black middle class, bisexual lady from Kenya with your pencil and your A4 piece of paper... I wish you the best for 2008 and will probably see you soon in a famous contemporary art museum in China!

Happy new year everybody!

Arty Christmas Everybody!!!!

Merry christmas to everybody!! I hope you'will get the canvas, brushes... performances and exhibitions that you asked to Santa. Personnaly i asked for a job at the Blue Coat gallery in Liverpool... Who knows?! lol

Paul McCarthy Santa Claus, Tokyo, Japan, 1996

Merry Merry Merry Merry Merry Christmas!!!

Bearlin - Mark Wallinger, bears, war protest and a pince of Turner prize

Berlin, 5th of December 2006 Zoologischer Garten, calls attention to world media. Knut is born. Rejected by his mother at birth, this baby polar bear was the first polar bear cub to survive past infancy at the Berlin Zoo in over thirty years. Raised by zoo keepers, he became a major "touristic attraction".

Because Berlin loves Bears... You can find thousands of them, both in very official places and in some of the oddest corners of the city. Among many of them, reappropriated by artists, advertisers and therefore tourists, the black bear on Berlin's flag is the one that conclusively binds the animal with it's cultural identity.

Walk along Unter den Linden and try to define a taxonomy of the many "by-products" which shows the bear in countless funny situations... Mugs, T-shirts, pens, postcards... Bring something from Berlin? Bring a bear! So, what would be the ultimate tourist experience if not getting transformed into a bear?

And here comes the winner of the Turner Prize which, each year, awards a contemporary artist living or working in the U.K.:

In the framework of his performance called 'Sleeper' (double agent in the cold-war espionage context), Mark Wallinger dressed as a bear, walked on the huge ground floor space of the Neue National gallery for ten consecutive nights.

As written in the exhibition catalogue "The work develops the artist's interest in the idea of transmutation by exploring the mechanics that underpin Berlin's civic symbolism."

I think that Knut (who sleeps in a cage 15 minutes by walk away from the gallery), would tell you a lot about what it is to be a stranger adorning the local cultural attributes if he could talk.

The title also gives clue to the viewer to understand the artwork. Although divided for many years, the city is currently building an identity based upon both east and west cultures. Berlin shows to millions of tourists, its scars as a solid proof of it's notorious history (fragments of wall, differences in the architecture style of buildings on both sides...), but do not exhibits what is left to the city's consciousness as those things do not record on photographic film. I believe that the artwork comes here more than with everything else as a channel of communication, an interface that makes all this reflection... recordable.

The 'sleepers' were double agents forced to adopt plausible disguises, to adopt foreign customs in order to gain locals' trust.

I guess that this artwork will have a specific impact on those who lived and/or worked in a foreign country... Imagine what happened in people's mind when the wall felt down from this perspective; when you become a stranger in your own home... But people from Berlin would tell you this sad tale better than me.

In fact, and although sleeper's footage is currently exhibited at Tate Liverpool, this is not this artwork that the Turner Prize jury awarded. The winner project is called State Britain and recreates the peace campaigner Brian Haw's anti-war protest in Parliament Square. You probably saw it if you visited London and therefore Big-Ben, two steps away from Brian Haw's camp. Precise in every details, from the tea-making area to the numerous banners, flags, photographs and posters, Wallinger apparently hired 14 people for six months to source the materials and carefully weather and age them to a state of complete authenticity.

But at the end,... what makes all this so special? Look at the picture of the artwork below:

Can you see the black tape line drawn on the Tate gallery's floor, behind the artist? It appears that this line defines exactly the actual zone of exclusion drawn in May 23 2006 following the passing by parliament of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act that forbade unauthorised demonstrations within a kilometre of Parliament Square!

The artwork stands exactly on this line... How clever... Therefore, it becomes 'outlaw' but culturally approved by the government and therefore untouchable, which brings back to life the Brian Haw tools for protestation. Moreover, it attracts the attention of the media and demonstrates how art and language can be powerful!

Deliciously provoking! Please give an award to this guy!

Who does what? A short reflection on the role of the actors of the contemporary art market

The contemporary art market gives key roles to intermediaries such as opinion leaders, promoters, but also distributors. These are the ones who belong to the network of social relationships within which art is produced and its use determined. Such people are critics, consultants, art collectors, auction house experts, sales persons, journalists, museum professionals, art teachers and professors:

Right at the heart of the art market are the buyers of artworks. Completing the offer and intermediaries in the market scheme, they finally decide on the success of a trend or an artist. The English reference magazine ART REVIEW draws a map depicting the geographical distribution of power within the contemporary art world every year. The French Collector François Pinault was classified being the first most influential art player in the world in 2006 by the above mentioned magazine (in the Power 100 Issue) whereas the first artists appearing in the ranking are Bruce Nauman and Jeff Koons occupying only the 9th and 10th position.
Consultants enable actors in the art world, gallerists in particular, to gain access to information concerning the market. They also are the ones who may give access to the “grey” market where artworks are sold privately by one collector to another without passing through a dealer or an auction house.

In his book "Collecting contemporary", Adam Lindermann argues that museum staffs facilitate the emergence of an artist’s reputation and the evolution of trends: “There is no doubt that the Paul McCarthy (one of the 24 artists represented in the ArtReview classification mentioned above) retrospective organised by Lisa Phillips and Dan Cameron (belonging to the museum staff) a few years ago at the New Museum of contemporary art in new-York confirms that this seminal but long under appreciated artist was going to develop a real commercial market”.

Art critics no longer have the power to make or break the reputation of an artist. As an example, the exhibitions of Damien Hirst or Jeff Koons had bad reviews in the Art press but were still sold out. Nevertheless art critics continue to have a significance on the art world as they give information on hypes and trends.

By classifying, promoting and explaining art to novices or simply by their choice to display one artist rather than another these intermediaries maintain this social network alive and powerful.
In this context, Carole Duncan in Aesthetic of Power highlights that an artwork would only be recognised as ‘high art’ on the international scene if one of its network members treats it as art. Therefore, “In order to become visible in this world, an artist must make work that in some way addresses the highest community or some segment of it”. In other words, the message and its form have to match the expectancies of the intermediaries in terms of communication.

Moreover, Carole Duncan, argue that “The modern world of high art is an international art market centered in NY city and emanating out to rival centers in Paris, London, Milan, Tokyo and the other great centers of capitalism. Like any market, it is organised around the production and the use of commodities, in this case luxury objects produced by small manufacturers”. Underlining this, figures on the art market show that this market is dominated by players from Europe, Hong-Kong and the US being western in its cultural orientation and business practice. This hegemony of western culture in the art market might form an obstacle for members of other cultures to act on the market.

Also, it may be difficult for an artist to escape the hegemonic power that western culture has on the whole art world.

Now that you know your people, there is no reason for your masterpieces, to stay hided forever in the little wood house at the back of the garden !!! ;-))

Artwork of the month: Lisa yuskavage

What to find in the "Artwork of the month" section? Something that I like... old or new... Well known or not... Something that I want to share... And this month, I would like to share with you my interest in Lisa Yuskavage paintings and an artwork in particular:

With True Blonde Draped (1999) she depicts a poignant portrait of a blond hair girl who seems crushed by something not directly painted on the canvas... But Lisa Yuskavage gives us clues about her situation:

Let’s first have a look on the background. The saturated red color, fills heavily every inches of the frame with sexual connotations.

Her ruffled hair and her naked body under the bedding indicates that the scene takes probably place after the sexual act. She significantly protects her crotch with both clasped hands. Beautiful, ...she is, she is an exact compromise between sexual icon (blond hair, pulpy with a huge breast) and ordinary (shadows on her face, blunt nose, unsteady breast). She is the victim of a voyeurism act that YOU, the viewer, perpetrate. Prisoner of the canvas, of the tainted surrounding air and prisoner of her own attributes... Her beauty is her burden, heavily symbolised by her breast. She is trapped!

This stereotype that shapes the cage of our True Drapped Blonde is central in Yuskavage paintings and I invite you to have a look on the flickr diaporama available on the right column of this blog to discover more of her amazing artworks.

Technically, Lisa's work is recognized as particularly impressive among connoisseurs: She apparently uses models to study lights and shadows; photos to frame the paintings, her work is so impressive technically (paint strokes, mastering of light effects...etc.) that specialised art press often compare her to Renaissance masters (No joking).

To replace her work in a more general art world background, she is often associated with artists such as John Currin (Google his name on Google image or click there to go on the BBC website or slate.com, you ll see the similarities by yourself), Luc Tuymans and Elizabeth Peyton in the 1990's, reaching superstar status after reinserting figuration in the art world.

Lisa Yuskavage is currently represented by David Zwirner, New York and greengrassi, London.

Call it kitsch, call it soft-porn, call it gorgeous, sexy, weird or embarrassing, appealing or repulsive, Lisa yuskavage paintings shake the art world... but what about you?

So...? Do you like it? Do not forget to vote on the right hand side column of this blog!!!!

;-)

happy first anniversary...

Hello reader!!

Today was the last day to vote for the artwork of the month and you were 15 to vote... Not that bad if you consider that in one month of existence, this blog attracted 163 Visitors (48 unique visitors from 12 different countries) for a rate of 5.26 Visits / Day!

I believe it is a success! Thanks to all of you who gave me the motivation after this month-test to continue this way! I am open to any suggestion to make it better, so do not hesitate to leave your comments!

As I said, I will start now to advertise it and to use the classical blog-marketing techniques to share this blog with more visitors. I wish to hit the 1000 visitors by the 12nd August!
But now, let's talk a bit about the artwork of the month... The results for the Murakami's 'Hommage to Francis Bacon' were:

• 50% Funky Soul Baby
• 42% Groovy for sure
• 7% Not the type of artwork I d hang on my living room wall
• 0% Rather listening to Enya

I am glad you like it!!! Something tells me that we will have to come back to Murakami quite regularly regarding to his actuality!!!

Thanks again for all!

Is art cool?!?

December, end of the year, time for assessments. Everybody in the art world seems to agree that Doris Salcedo's crack in the Tate gallery and Damien Hirst's diamond skull are the artworks of the year.

I say fair enough... Did you see this crack? Did you see this skull? amazing aren't they?!!

The first is a work commissioned by the Tate gallery and is only viewable in Tate modern because it's part of it. This 548ft crack called Shibboleth is here to show how the foundations of the contemporary art world are fragile. Cracking the ground floor of the HUGE turbine hall of the Tate modern was particularly clever in this sense: Tate modern is one of the biggest touristic attractions in London, one of the coolest brand (15th on the coolbrands classification... Do not believe me? Check yourself: http://www.superbrands.uk.com/pdfs/CB%20-%20Press%20Release%20-%20Announcement%20-%20Final.pdf) and a centre of gravity for the contemporary art. Cracking its foundation suggests that the contemporary art culture was built upon colonialist values and cultural imposition. "Shibboleth asks questions about the interaction of sculpture and space, about architecture and the values it enshrines, and about the shaky ideological foundations on which Western notions of modernity are built" in Salcedo's own words.

Although the media criticize on the one hand that visitors keep on asking to the staff "how did the artist do that?!" and keep on falling in the crack... (A dozen of accidents reported!); on the other hand, to quote Jonathan Jones from the Guardian Art blog "it is a fissure that doesn't really threaten anything or anyone".

Moreover, he says "Modern art has now become the universal culture of Britain's middle class, of all ages. Yet when a really provocative and powerful contemporary work appears - I'm talking about Damien Hirst's diamond skull - the middle class runs for cover, disturbed by the impossibility of reducing this disturbing object to a liberal platitude".

Photograph: Getty

And here comes our second Artwork: Damien Hirst's Diamond Skull. For me there is nothing controversial about it. I can imagine that it may shake the common mood but honestly, having a look back in the 90's on Tracey Emin's bed, it may suffer the comparison. Remember, she brought her own bed covered of alcohol, germs and traces of her sexual activity... In Saatchi's gallery. Ok! Ok! Nothing to do with the skull, but that rocked! didn't it?

My Bed by Tracey Emin, 1998. Photograph: courtesy Jay Jopling/White Cube.

Here lies the problem. Contemporary art became popular, fashionable, cool (look at this whole blog: I do not think I m the first writing a blog about contemporary art, believing that my view got the spark that will lead me to a Worldwide Web rapid success!) And my generation acknowledged the existence of contemporary art with artists like Emin, Chapman brothers and a pope crushed by a rock came from space. In fact my first memorable artwork was the empty room presented for the Turner Prize by Martin Creed (Work No. 227: The lights going on and off 2000 (installation at Tate Britain)5 seconds on/5 seconds off, Edition 2/electrical time). In fact I found it controversial enough to bring it on the top of my hobby list... Can you imagine now why a skull and diamonds are not controversial to me? Is it controversial to you?

Courtesy Cabinet, London © GBE (Modern) New York Photo: Tate Photography

-John! come here! Take a picture of us in front of this... hmm... Nazi's cross model representing hell, crafted by the Chapman brothers!!!

Yep! Chapman's are cool too nowadays!

ART should be challenging and provocative... But please do not provoke us for free... We are bored anyway, it's all done! ;-))

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/art/2007/12/hirst.html
http://blogs.independent.co.uk/independent/2007/10/salcedos-crack-.html
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/dorissalcedo/default.shtm

Quotation of the month - December 2007

The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.
Marcel Duchamp

Tony Stamolis Vs. Terry Richardson

Hello reader! Look what I found on the Internet today: A press-release from the website of the Guy Hepner gallery... A good occasion to compare those two influential photographers. Unfortunately it is a bit late (till 31/11... and a bit far away as well...). One raised on the east coast, the other in California, but so many similarities...

Terry Richardson- iconic, established, extrovert. Exuberant and erotic at the same time, he has carved a niche as the heavyweight champion of off the wall, spur of the moment, raw talent photography of the past 10 years. His "snapshot aesthetic" is unmistakable, often shot with nothing more than a mundane compact camera. Richardson is an icon, his photos every bit as much. Tony Stamolis- Tony Stamolis's new portfolio is the work of a classic cad: raw and sexy, with a winking sense of humor. The Brooklyn photographer shoots friends, lovers and ad-hoc still lives with a prankster's eye. Never happier than when provoking the masses and challenging the generally accepted, his signature look is captivating, as funny as it is sexy, all the while remaining what it should be: great photography
Work is available from $2500, for all inquiries please email info@guyhepner.com

Do you think they are typical products of the U.S. culture? Have a look at the following text: It comes from a study of Hofstede, well-known in the world of cultural studies who is famous for his work on cultural dimensions and available on his excellent website: http://www.geert-hofstede.com/hofstede_united_states.shtml.

"The high Individualism (IDV) ranking for the United States indicates a society with a more individualistic attitude and relatively loose bonds with others. The populace is more self-reliant and looks out for themselves and their close family members.

The next highest Hofstede Dimension is Masculinity (MAS) with a ranking of 62, compared with a world average of 50. This indicates the country experiences a higher degree of gender differentiation of roles. The male dominates a significant portion of the society and power structure. This situation generates a female population that becomes more assertive and competitive, with women shifting toward the male role model and away from their female role.

World averages shown above are: 55 - 43 - 50 - 64 - 45

The next lowest ranking Dimension for the United States is Power Distance (PDI) at 40, compared to the world Average of 55. This is indicative of a greater equality between societal levels, including government, organizations, and even within families. This orientation reinforces a cooperative interaction across power levels and creates a more stable cultural environment.

The last Geert Hofstede Dimension for the US is Uncertainty Avoidance (UAI), with a ranking of 46, compared to the world average of 64. A low ranking in the Uncertainty Avoidance Dimension is indicative of a society that has fewer rules and does not attempt to control all outcomes and results. It also has a greater level of tolerance for a variety of ideas, thoughts, and beliefs".

Now have a look on their portfolio displayed on the following websites and keep what you just read in mind:

http://www.terryrichardson.com/

http://www.tonystamolis.com/portfolio/01.html

Got it? ;-)

http://www.guyhepner.com/content/content.php?id=753

How to learn to be an art financial trader while taking the plane...

While reading the VLM Airlines on-board magazine on my trip back to France the other day, I came across the word 'Behemoth'. Not the kind of word you see everyday! Especially when it comes to give a pretty name to the contemporary art market. If you read ArtView regularly and especially this month, you will see that this term Behemoth is also used in the same way. Whatever, the important is to see the growing interest in Art as a financial investment. The word Behemoth and his recurrence in the Art press, signs the consensus in the contemporary art view."If you're new to the scene, procure an art adviser.

"Know your market; scour the art press, the galleries and the fairs; but most importantly, appreciate the work before making a transaction".Wooow What an advice!!!

Artnews argue that a huge change appeared in the 'art as a financial investment' landscape in the 80's ignited by the Young British Artists group(YBA), promoted by Mr. Saatchi...

I do not know if you are familiar with economy concepts. For this reason I will try to explain briefly and as clearly as possible what led investors to turn their wallets in the direction of Jeff Koons, Pollock et al.

Let’s start with a bit of history: After the war, the developed world had been investing in industry for '30 glorious years'. In fact so glorious that these industries were generating surpluses and were so enormous that further it became hard to see how further investments could improve earnings. The solution was rather in the need of downsizing. The investors then turned their attention to the Russia, Asia, Dot.com companies, but the money was made on the sale and resale of shares rather than from any notional future income these companies might earn. Then it was the house market helped by restrictions on Land use and the limitation for constructions in Britain... So why Art? ArtView says that an artwork is unique and so, a good store of value. Although internal movements pushed new generations of artists in front of the stage, sharing the big chair with old masters, the boom in the market came from the need to store the excess of capital generated by the same prosperous companies mentioned before.
What can lead the financial artworld to collapse? Art prices could rise so high that people would not be confident anymore in buying artworks, perceiving a too big difference between intrinsic value (linked with the quality of the artworks) and financial value (The price we are willing to pay to get a artwork). But another investment opportunity offering better appreciation could also arise.
In both scenario, prices would obviously fall... This is why having a regular look on the top end of the market is important. I planned to keep you in touch anyway!

Photos:

Andy warhol at the Hamburger Bahnhoff in Berlin.

Jake and Dino Chapman at the Frieze art fair. London.

Do you see what I see?!? (Cultural differences in the artwork's perception)

Here is what you can find on the website mighty optical illusion, under the post: A "Psychological" Optical Illusion

"The influence of culture and environment can have an effect on our visual perception - believe it or not. This theory was first explored by Robert Laws, a Scottish missionary working in Africa during the late 1800's. Take a look at the picture below - what you see will largely depend on where you live in the world. After that you have examined the picture, scroll below for a more detailed explanation.

So What Did You See - What is above the woman's head? When scientists showed a similar sketch to people from East Africa, nearly all the participants in the experiment said she was balancing a box or metal can on her head. In a culture containing few angular visual cues, the family is seen sitting under a tree. Westerners, on the other hand, are accustomed to the corners and boxlike shapes of architecture. They are more likely to place the family indoors and to interpret the rectangle above the woman's head as a window through which shrubbery can be seen". (http://www.moillusions.com/2007/11/psychological-optical-illusion.html)

Do you still believe that your artwork is so powerful that you will soon be internationally famous?!? The conclusion is that the key does not lay in the visual clues... explanation:

Rules of visual grammar, from which differences of interpretation according to an individual’s experience may arise, are the process of analysing the elements of a picture.

Kress And Van Leeuwen T. argue that analytical processes involve two kinds of participants: One carrier (the whole: e.g. a landscape) and any number of possessive attributes (the parts: trees, sea, hills...)”. In the case of abstract art the carrier, the possessive attributes or both are not labelled and let the viewer decide on what the labels are and then leaves him/her to interpret the work of art. The meaning of the basic geometrical shapes are motivated by the properties of the shapes, or rather, from the values given to these properties in specific social and cultural contexts. This means that the interpretation of geometrical shapes can vary across a culture but also within cultures.

Colours can also have an effect on the perception of the viewer. These effects concern partially unconscious treatments, but also cognitive or symbolic associations. Colours can modify people’s perceptions on various levels being visual, auditive, tactile, kinesthesia, gustative, somesthesia. For example, the estimation of height and weight (e.g. most of washing machines are painted in white partly because it makes them appear lighter and recalls notions of ‘clean’ or ‘pure’). Colours are culturally and symbolically associated with concepts, sensations and environmental elements and have on influence on our emotions such as excitation, anxiety, affective values and preferences.
Contrary to the opinion that colours are only a matter of taste and therefore their perception depends on individuals, researches demonstrated the existence of a collective consciousness within large groups of individuals which show stable consumer preferences. Regarding the tribalisation phenomenon, colours can have new connotations:

Each ‘youth clan’ has its own trends and color codes with a famous example being the two main gangs of Los Angeles which chose colours as distinctive signs of affiliation (CRIPS in blue and BLOOD in red). Another example is given by the Indian culture, with the word “VANA” which means “caste” but also “colours”.

Shapes and colours are displayed in a given space within the physical limit of the artwork. The elements relate to each other and are presented in a way that a relationship is created between them, while their position conveys cultural specific information and values. Remember that you start a Japanese book from the end!

Look as well on advertisements in your London edition of glamour how ‘fantasy' elements (such as the woman lying on a cloud) are usually displayed on the top half, while 'realistic' elements are on the bottom half (Such as the extra light fresh yoghurt that will make you feel like the woman on the rainbow...or perhaps not).

The way to display elements in the limited space to comunicate is highly culturally linked!

Many thanks to Mareike for ALL... ALL... and to Mag to illustrate so perfectly the doubt that someone can feel when it comes to understanding abstract paintings lol (and for her to introduce me to Pollock ;-))

Pope Art

Here is a part of an article found in the "ART NEWSPAPER", written by Anna Somers Cocks 8.11.07 Issue 185 [Full article available on : http://www.theartnewspaper.com/article.asp?id=6432]

Pope suggests Church should have closer relationship with contemporary art

The Vatican's first contemporary art commission under Benedict XVI goes to Claudio Parmiggiani

The telephone rings: "The Vatican City speaking," says the voice. "Boring joke," thinks Claudio Parmiggiani and puts down the receiver. The telephone has to ring another couple of times before he is persuaded that it really is the Vatican. Then he remembers a local priest who, some months previously, had asked in a general sort of way whether he would be prepared to make a work of art for the Church. [...]No subject is specified, but to Parmiggiani's surprise he sees a book on the table, Sculture d'Ombra, about his works made with smoke. "This is the kind of thing we hope you will create," they say. [...]

Afterwards the pope said to Parmiggiani, ‘I’m very happy to see this work; the Church has always had a close relationship with modern, but not contemporary art.’ He continued: ‘You must tell me one day how you paint with smoke,’ but Parmiggiani just smiled. That is a secret he keeps even from the pope. The retrospective of Claudio Parmiggiani, ‘Apocalypsis cum Figuris’, is at the Palazzo Fabroni, Pistoia, until 23 March 2008

It seems that the Vatican finally swallowed the pills sent by the contemporary art world... See these two artworks by Sarah Lucas (Up) and Maurizzio Cattelan (Down).

Now the question is why?... Does the brand new pope wants to give a lifting to the Vatican galleries, or is it a PR strategy? Sorry I hardly believe that the pope is interested the least in contemporary art... but the PR option does not sound bad.

Example: A brand new study shows that cookies are bad for health. 3 options:

1. Continue to produce them! Although sick, people will still continue to buy them anyway (bad and not really fashionable in the communication sphere). It means here that the Vatican would stay on its position, denying the contemporary art world critique which would probably get worst and worst. When you talk to someone and that this person does not answer you tend to talk louder and louder, don't you?
   
2. Continue to produce these cookies, but print warning on each packets about high fat... (bad but fashionable in a way...). For the artworld it almost means censorship! Not a good solution indeed as it would advertise the position of the provocateur. The Church would also appear old-fashion, facing 'Left field' edgy art... The Vatican does not need this, do they?
   
3. Get rid of this recipe and develop a brand new one that will bring happiness in "your" body through the use of Omega B27 revolutionary 0% fat oil created in your own laboratory(Really hype and really good)... Hmmm, very trendy!!!!!

Although none of them are proactive strategies, these all give an answer to your customers. In the case of the Christian industry, it seems a bit late to be proactive as you saw previously. But who will shoot someone that commission Claudio Parmiggiani to produce its artworks? The Vatican chose the 3rd of our 3 options!

What a powerful message... How cool the Vatican is! But remember:

Matthew 5:39
39But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.

Pictures:

First artwork by Sarah Lucas: Made entirely from Marlboro Light cigarettes and is titled "Christ You Know It Ain't Easy".

Second one, Maurizio Cattelan "La Nona Ora", sculpture of the pope John Paul II, crushed by a meteorite...

The story of Koons and the incredible market

Did you read the contemporary art news recently? Ever heard about Jeff Koons? Well Jeff Koons is responsible of the production of the most expensive piece by a living artist ever auctioned. How much? $23.6 million... A sculpture of a stainless steel heart hanging from a golden bow. The previous record for a living artist was Damien Hirst's "Lullaby Spring," which sold for $19.5 million last June at Sotheby's in London . Hirst's piece was a stainless steel cabinet containing 6,136 handcrafted and painted pills.

The Koons work was bought by the Gagosian Gallery, "Hanging Heart," nearly 9 feet tall and weighing more than 3,500 pounds, is from Koons' "Celebration" series, inspired by celebratory milestones such as birthdays and anniversaries.

Yes Koons rules... But why? "This is just ridiculous" I hear from my left... "I do not care from the right"... Fair enough, I will give a small explanation anyway:

Koons belongs to a generation of artists that (we thought...) knew their pick of popularity in the 80's. Such as Hirst mentioned above or Maurizio Cattelan he offered to the world a new medium of art: After the Canvas, the Sculpture, the performance the ready-made, the Installation... they used the Market!!!

The Challenge was, once this new medium discovered was to manipulate it and to exercise its full possibilities. Jeff Koons technique is based on highlighting 'banalities' (a name of one of his best series): Hoover enlightened by neon, giant balloon-dog or kitsch porcelain sculptures of Michael Jackson; Koons wants to understand why and how products of mass consumption are glorified.

To simplify it places him between Marcel Duchamp (the ready-made influence: well-known for the masterpiece fountain... an urinal which tells so much about the art market) and Andy Warhol (the pop culture and critique of the mass consumption); but Koons artworks are not ellitists and he would like to talk about things that everybody can recognise easily.

He was a pioneer and still is... was really controversial by being the first artist cultivating his image by employing image consultants... This guy married the ultra-kitsch porn star Ilona Staller!!!!

In conclusion hanging heart costs $23.6 million and this price is part of what the artwork meaning if you still follow. Got it? It talks about the ridiculous price that people can spend in 'banalities' and it speaks pretty loud don't you think so?

http://www.jeffkoons.com/index_flash.html

Reflection on... What is art for?

Answering the question "What is art for?" is not easy... Here is an answer that you may find interesting. I find it quite complete and simple in the same time (which is not easy regarding to the huge amount of head twisting articles wrote on the subject...).

Art is the best tool we have when it comes to shattering our environments into an infinite number of imaginary tales, forms and space-times. For example, each human societies draft its own masterscript: Most of the time, we blindly play out its scenarios, which proscribe our behaviour, define our work and play and define our institutions and imaginary models: nine-to-five jobs, marriage, mortgage, retirement. The way art acts on these scenarios, or scraps of code, is to reorganise them, by treating them as if they were not givens; art is an alternative editing board, the post-production of the huge film we call "reality".

But before acting in this way, it is necessary to learn how to look and read between the lines; as such, art is also a reading aid. It provides the instruments and optical equipment that allow us to interpret the world. To take a simple example, it could be said that our relationship with reality is that like of a Cabbalist, trying to decipher sacred texts by inventing multiple meanings. I shall not list all of the art functions here; suffice it to say that an artist seems to me to be more useful socially than a financial trader. But what does seem clear is that art occupies a specific position in the city, and that this position is thus political. It incites its subjects to become active; to refuse the passive position the world of entertainment try to foist on them. Entertainment places us in front of images to be looked at; while social formatting provides us with frameworks in which we must live.
If artistic activities consists of putting these instruments and products back into play, then the observer's task is, as in tennis, to knock the ball back into the other court. Nicolas Bourriaud

Translation from the French by Ian Monk
ArtNews Power 100 Issue 16 / November 2007

Kanye west and Murakami...

I forget to mention something interesting... Do you know Kanye West? Probably yes...
Did you buy his last album?

Then you may probably know about it:

Yes Ma'am this is another Murakami painting!!! Undoubtly successful!!! ;-)))

Reflection on... the postmodernism

For the first "Reflection on...", I would like to have a look on postmodernism and some of its contradictions... It is a tough subject but it is essential to understand the notion of postmodernism if you want to enter in a leading art gallery as a semi-conoisseur :-)) All those strange art pieces that seem to come directly from our toys box and that now costs $1000 when presented by Koons or Kelley!

I'll come back very very soon on those two artists in a next post to give you a clearer view on the main actors of the postmodernist scene. It will be more clear then! But first, a brief explanation of modernism:

The modernism...

Reviewing the advances of modern art history for example, it is easy to dress a parallel between the evolution of art and societal phenomena: The progress of science was accompanied by the development of electronic or multimedia art, bioart and optart.

The theorical concepts used by the major artists of the twentieth century can be found “in Marxist intellectual tradition, in Freudian Psychoanalysis, and in various forms of transaction between the two”. Therefore, marxism theorisation has been developed to analyse colonialism processes; Freudian advances in psychoanalysis have been reappropriated by feminists artists.

Finally, those two new trends have been put together in analysis of hegemony mechanisms.
Regarding the variety of societal influences and the speed of social changes influencing the art world, artists were seeking for a new definition of contemporary art that incorporated the diversity of new media, the progress in sciences and technologies. An intention of progression, experimentation... That is modernism!

This cultural orientation, shaped the modernist trend, that remained the major influence on the contemporary ‘high-art’ production issued from the hegemonic western world until the 1980’s. Harrison and Wood argue that the process of idea evolution in these days was based on typical western concerns such as the myth of originality or the fundamental oppositions that are nature/culture, male/female, capitalism/communism.
On the basis of such theorical background, the culture from which the artworld emerged and the process of idea developement is defined as typical “Western in its orientation, capitalist in its determining economic tendency, bourgeois in its class-character, white in its racial complexion, and masculine in its dominant gender” (Harrison and Wood 1992:1015).
The next step for the art world was to criticise this hegemonic power of western culture in the modernist art world and to introduce the post-modernist concepts.

The contemporary art world shaped by post-modernist ideologies:

Harrison and Wood (1992) recognise that post-modernism has been introduced by three major theorists: Daniel Bell (1978) as a first author argues that the hope of modernism “lays in a return to consensus based on the shared need for moral and economic order”. Following this definition, Post-modernism would then come as a disruptive approach to modernism.
Habermas’ (1984) as the second major postmodernism theorists is reported to argue (Harrison and Wood, 1992) that “a strong ressource of aesthetic resistance remains necessary as a counter to the increasing power and autonomy of economic and administrative systems”, and therefore explains that the power to resist hegemony on the artworld lays in the hands of those who produce the artworks.
Finally, Harrison and Wood, report Lyotard’s (1984) view on postmodernism as an opposition to Bell’s view in which he “equates the postmodern, with a continuing scepticism regarding a possible consensus [...] with a form of nostalgia for the experience of an unattainable wholeness of presence” (1992:1016). In his view, postmodernism should therefore “wage a war on totality”(1992:1016).

Each of these three views remain influencial in the ‘high art’ sphere and the debate on post-modernism becomes deeper and more subtle. Due to the limitations imposed by the focus of this blog, I will not explore the post-modernism discourse in depth. However, what might be interesting at this point would be to note that each of these authors present a different view on postmodernism, which might have its origin in the three different origins of the writers (U.S.A. for Bell and respectively France and Germany for Lyotard and Habermas). Their views have been shaped by a set of specific social, historical and political conditions associated with each of these three different countries. Although they are different, they remain ‘western views’ and this fact has to be taken into account when debating on the evolution of art history.

The post-modernist critique on art history that claims for the originality of an idea, must therefore also analyse in which position the critique has been written.

Pictures:

Mike Kelley - Craft Morphology Flow Chart

Jeff Koons- Balloon Dog

Read more...

• Bell, D., ‘Modernism and Capitalism’, in Bell, 1978
• Habermas, J (1984) The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity
• Harrison C. And Wood P. (1992) Art in Theory 1900-1990. Oxford
• Lyotard, J-F (1984) The Postmodern Condition, Manchester: Manchester University Press

Artwork of the month 11/2007

Hello everybody!

I would like to dedicate the first "artwork of the month" to my most post-modernist friend that I did not see for a long time... It s a shame isn't it? Katia, I'd like to introduce you to Takeshi Murakami...Have a look:

Why artwork of the month? First because I know most of the potential first readers of this modest blog... and I know that a lot of them may like it as well. This artwork may ring a bell to a full generation of people born in the 80's, grew up showered by the animes, in fact the next generation of contemporary art collectors. Do you want to be part of it?...

Second argument the name of the artwork: Francis Bacon Study of Isabel Rawsthorne If you become a regular reader of this blog, you will soon see that I am a fan of Francis Bacon work... For memory, here is the original "Study of Isabel Rawsthorne" painted in 1966:

Takeshi Murakami, the artist, is born in 1962 in Tokyo (Japan) and is the head of an artistic tendency called "superflat" led with Hideaki Anno, Satoshi Kon. Murakami defines “Superflat” in broad terms, so the subject matter is very diverse. Often the works take a critical look at the consumerism and sexual fetishism that is prevalent in post-war Japanese culture. Murakami's work is POP, as it recalls clearly other artworks produced by Roy Lichtenstein or Andy Warhol a couple of decades ago. It is clearly a re-appropriation of the global culture idols such as Mickey Mouse who is suggested through a lot of his artworks for example (see Tantan Bo below). It is also surrealist... Look closer at this other artwork:

For anybody familiar with Yves Tanguy artworks, it may ring a bell... unspecified entities whose height cannot really be evaluated, the parallel with Yves Tanguy landscapes is easy to do...

Yves Tanguy - Indefinite Divisibility 1942

The artwork of the month reaches potentially a wide audience, recycling elements of the art and the "global contemporary culture" to reintroduce them from another angle... It points at social patterns culturally taken for granted and re-introduce them, allowing the questionment of a social environment in which the 1980's generation grew-up. And it seems to work: Murakami was ranked the 98th most powerful personality of the ArtReview 2006 Power 100, but climbed to the 89th position this year; probably due to his partnership for the design of the last Louis Vuitton collection or for the success of his "superflat" artists who all had solo exhibitions this year in France!

Tantan BO 2001

It addresses our generation (The future collectors...), the art world (post-modern concerns and homage to great artists...), it has every ingredients to make it a great success! And it already is!!!

Murakami: Already a hit... A future legend...

Why the Centre Pompidou is setting up in Metz?

Growing gossip in Metz Metropolis, some of the city inhabitants witnessed Parisian tourists taking pictures of the protestant temple... Did this time-space compressor called TGV brought tourists from the French capital with him? Most of us thought the TGV was only selling tickets from Metz to Paris! Well it may be official now: Metz is in the center of the European Union.
It Might have been a hell gate for all of those who had to enter in the army (Do you remember that it was compulsory?), Metz is now a multi-awarded city of flowers, of history and now it is getting in trouble with contemporary art.

© CA2M / Shigeru Ban Architects Europe & Jean de Gastines / Artefactory

"The Centre Pompidou-Metz will present the collection of the Musée national d’art moderne, Europe’s largest, to new audiences and offer an original programme of exhibitions. It will increase the power of attraction of a region located at the crossroads of major North-South and East-West routes, leading in particular to Germany and Eastern Europe". (Press release: http://www.centrepompidou-metz.fr/upload/file/ext_pdf_file_en_29_CPM%20FC%20CP%20ENG%2016jan07.pdf)

© CA2M / Shigeru Ban Architects Europe & Jean de Gastines / Artefactory

Historically/Architecturally designed as a fortress, Metz is getting experience in developing massive military infrastructures of all kind and this last one is loaded by the Centre Beaubourg (Paris) war machine itself. But let's have a look onto the technical features:

• The Magazine: A virtual capacity of 58,000 artworks that compose the biggest European contemporary art collection (Just for you to remember that France still get the first place on the podium concerning worldwide transactions weighted by countries with an astonishing 18,8% of the volume for the year 2006!!! (source artprice report http://img1.artprice.com/pdf/trends2006.pdf))
  
• A Barrel made of cultural decentralisation initiated in 1997 by Jean-Jacques Aillagon who wanted to fight cultural prejudices or something like that...
  
• Hammer: Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres head from the ministry of culture. Hmmm... Is this whole project only a strategy to knock over the dinosaur Jean-Marie Rausch at the head of the city since 1971!!!
• The design: Shigeru Ban... The best is simply to have a look on the result... A world class architect! "profiled by Time Magazine in their projection of 21st century innovators in the field of architecture and design".
  

The Target? You... Paris, the French reputation for cultural matters (which is rather bad especially since François Pinault the most influential figure of the contemporary art world, abandoned in Paris a full bag of amazing projects for purchasing the Palazzo Grassi on the Grand Canal in Venice... Ok fair enough...) This is not Tate Modern, nor beaubourg but it does not have any pretension... I believe this Chinese hat will have a lot to say to the people of Metz. Let's hope that the audience will be responsive! Good Luck!

OPENING IN 2009

The bullets? well let' s dream:

Francis Bacon, Three Figures in a Room, 1964, oil on canvas, 198 x 441 cm, Georges Pompidou Center, Paris.

Dream on.............

Quotation of the month - November 2007

"L'art c'est ce qui rends la vie plus interessante que l'art"(Art is what makes life more interesting than art)Robert Filiou, (1926-1987)

If you can say it... Why paint it?

On the 5th August 1962, the star Marilyn Monroe is found dead in her bungalow in Hollywood. The day after, the face of the actress appears on millions of newspapers distributed all over the world, presenting the news as an international tragedy. At the same time in New York, another star, Andy Warhol gains fame in the international art world by using the artistic silk-screen technique to produce series of portraits, or impressions of newspaper cover pages on canvas.
Within the same year, Andy Warhol is going to ‘paint’ a Marilyn Diptych, presenting on each panel of a grid 25 impressions of one of the most famous pictures of Marilyn Monroe, taken from an advertisement for the movie ‘Niagara’.

With the repetition of the 50 pictures, each of them altered singularly by the process of silk-screen printing, the artist suggests the viewer the power of the mass media. The canvas depicts a society which faces the rise of advertisement and mass consumption so efficiently that the world will give it an iconic status. However, Warhol does not only comment on the stars iconic status as a glamour figure, but also on “the role of the star as a mass media commodity, as a product of the entertainment industry that could be indefinitely reproduced for mass consumption” (Schroeder 2005). Andy Warhol’s ‘Marilyn’still stands out from the crowd and remains one of the greatest criticisms of the 1960’s society. It entered popular culture better than any other texts produced at this time probably due to his intelligent choice of the communication channel used to transmit his message: a work of art.Similarly, Francis Bacon has been reported to justify why he used paintings rather than other communication channels to express his ideas on human condition by the following statement: “If you can say it, why paint it?”

Interested??? You will be glad to know that this amazing Marilyn Monroe Diptych painted in 1962 is currently hanged on TATE Liverpool walls, part of an amazing collection of contemporary artworks (Go to see Cindy Sherman or Sarah Lucas for me please...)http://www.tate.org.uk/liverpool/exhibitions/the-twentieth-century/figuration.shtm