Ian Bunn | Political & Popular Culture Arts

Daniel Campbell Blight the British writer and curator with a specific interest in the history and theory of photography, and cultural media studies, has published an article in the Guardian titled ‘Writing an artist statement? First ask yourself these four questions’. Blight states “…You can find preposterously complex, jargon-laden artist statements on the websites of galleries and pop-up project spaces all over the English-speaking world. If you don’t believe me, join the e-flux mailing list. I regularly visit such exhibition spaces in London and beyond, and read – with total, dulling indifference – the often pompous ramblings of what Alix Rule and David Levine call International Art English. This is a dialect of the privileged; the elite university educated. If you can’t write it effectively, you’re not part of the art world. If you’re already inside but don’t understand it, you’re not allowed to admit it, or ask for further explanation. This kind of rhetoric relies on everyone participating without question. To speak up would mean dissolving the space between inside and outside: quite literally, the growing boundary between the art world and the rest of society. …The funny thing is, the chat you actually hear at a gallery opening rarely uses this language. …The vocabulary of artspeak is not without meaning, but it has a specific place. Academia is only one part of the art world. My dislike is not for the language of artspeak, more the effect it has on the art industry in its ability to engage with a wider audience. Not to mention what such language does to the reputation of writing in the arts, as well as the wider practice of writing itself. Writing about your work should be an open and compelling activity, not a labyrinthine chore.”

Inspired by Daniel Blight, The Guardian ow.ly/kuGnt Image source Twitter ow.ly/kuFEd

Jason Lazarus the 37 year old American artist, curator, writer, and Assistant Adjunct Professor has been interviewed by Julia Halperin for Blouin Artinfo in an article titled ‘26 Questions for Semiotically Inclined Photo and OWS Sign Artist’. In the article Lazarus states “The documentation of OWS created more questions than answers — the disparate messages on protest signs resisted clear, linear, or congealing narratives that traditional media rely on to produce content. Re-creating the signs, collaboratively, with the public, allowed a way to not only produce those messages documented widely across time and space en masse, but the process of creating them literally slowed down readings of the phenomenon, producing an experience of heightened awareness of the productive (unresolved) questions that linger in OWS’s wake as well as to the economy of protest (materials, aesthetics, scale, textual play/innuendo/multiple layers of meaning). The project is a kind of reverse-photography, imaging 3D sculptures from flattened images demands a careful, multiple-layered, and active reading. …The project … frames a collective process of becoming where our strain of late capitalism is openly and visibly questioned and criticized as incompatible with our current iteration of democracy. Meanwhile, the capital in the system, like water, continues to fill in the gaps with unending resilience and infinite flexibility. … it’s important to me that the project started as re-created signs that actually occupied public space as part of Occupy USF Tampa, and they have since traveled to alternative exhibition spaces on their way to a museum. They will make their way back to alternative venues and street as well. Political art is optimal when it’s most liquid, able to travel through contexts and paradigms. I’m interested in how this project will change as its referents become distant with time.”

Inspired by Julia Halperin, Blouin Artinfo ow.ly/jAq2p Image source Twitter ow.ly/jAq0S

Kate Ruggeri the 24 year old American artist, curator, and DJ has been nominated by Blouin Artinfo as an emerging artist in an article titled ‘Painter-Sculptor Kate Ruggeri Finds Heroism in Humble Materials’ by Allison Meier. Meier states “Following a fire that wrecked her studio, Chicago-based artist Kate Ruggeri is persevering by creating work that evokes hope and heroes through the unlikely materials of old clothes, buckets of house paint, and twine. …she’s been experimenting with merging her interests in painting and sculpture into dimensional forms swathed with reclaimed fabric and discarded materials, and coated with thick layers of paint. The results have a scrappy, tactile quality, but also a quiet gravity. … “Joseph Campbell’s monomyth was my main inspiration, since I was little I’ve been interested in myths, adventure stories, and biographies. I don’t think it’s very difficult to identify with a hero at moments in your own life.” …One of Ruggeri’s sculptures, appropriately called “Hero,” strides like a DIY Giacometti, a paint-stained backpack on its shoulders and a walking stick pointing forward. “In the past few months, I have seen great heroics in my friends and community,” she explained. “My roommate had been mugged and shot walking home, and survived. There were a number of tragic deaths in the Chicago community. My studio building had burned down and I had lost all of my work.” … A painter at heart, she started using sculptural constructions as canvases because she was exhausted with looking at blank, flat surfaces. After building a wooden armature, she wraps it with window screens, fabric, found materials, and personal possessions. …“In my work, I try to create homages to human experience,” she said. “I see the viewer on their own journeys, having their own lives, their own struggles, triumphs. It’s a way to be self-reflective.”

Inspired by Allison Meier, Blouin Artinfo ow.ly/gSY54 Image source lawnlike ow.ly/gSY33

Lucy Lippard the 75 year old American internationally known writer, art critic, activist and curator among the first writers to recognize the “dematerialization” at work in conceptual art and was an early champion of feminist art has been featured by Chloe Wyma in an article for Blouin Artinfo titled ‘Four Decades After Lucy Lippard’s “Six Years,” Is Conceptual Art Still Relevant? Wyma states “If you want to understand the stakes of the “dematerialization of the art object,” look no further than the late British artist John Latham’s “Art and Culture,” the entrance piece at “Materializing Six Years: Lucy Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art” at the Brooklyn Museum. The piece mockingly takes its title from mid-century formalist art critic Clement Greenberg’s influential text: An open briefcase reveals a copy of Greenberg’s book, an overdue notice from the library, and vials containing the masticated pulp of its pages. The byproduct of a party where Latham invited guests to chew the pages of Greenberg’s book, the work takes the radical propositions of dematerialization quite literally, turning the bible of formalist art criticism into formless cud. Casting off the cloth of the detached, Greenbergian art critic, Lucy Lippard played a crucial role, not only as a writer, but as curator and collaborator within the diverse artistic activity that’s now catalogued under the rubric of Conceptual Art. As she writes in the forward to the exhibition, Lippard and her circle “invented ways for art to act as an invisible frame for seeing and thinking rather than as an object of delectation or connoisseurship.” In their critique of the art object, they sought to remake the art world as a network of ideas to be shared, rather than a marketplace of objects to be bought and sold.”

Inspired by Chloe Wyma, Blouin Artinfo ow.ly/gGWLj Image source Fluxusa ow.ly/gGWJS

Udo Kittelmann the 54 year old German curator and museum director has been announced as the first non-Russian commissioner to curate the Russian pavilion for the 2013 Venice Biennale. Stella Kesaeva the Commissioner of the Russian Pavilion announced the appointment stating “It was decided in April 2012 that the artist Vadim Zakharov would represent Russia at the Venice Biennale in 2013. The idea of inviting Udo Kittelmann as curator followed from the choice of the artist. As a result, the Russian Pavilion will be curated by a citizen of another country for the first time in its history. Udo Kittelmann is one of the most renowned curators in the art world and his appointment is an important and conscious step, reflecting our principal objective, which is to bring Russian art out of isolation and secure for it the attention that it deserves at the highest international level.” Kittelmann responded with “I am greatly honoured that Vadim Zakharov proposed me as candidate for the curatorship and that the commissioner, Stella Kesaeva, supported the idea, enabling the continuation of my long cooperation with Vadim, which dates from the 1990s. I greatly admire the contribution, which Vadim Zakharov has made to contemporary art. His work has a continuity of development and is marked by a unique outlook and independence of artistic thought. His constant role as thinker and protagonist of the Moscow Conceptualist movement from the end of the 1970s remains a hallmark of his work right up to the present. As a curator, it gives me joy to be able to present this outstanding artist to a broad public. It would be hard to find a better place for an international exhibition of Vadim’s work than the Russian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.”

Inspired by e-flux ow.ly/fRYB3 image source Olaf Kosinsky ow.ly/fRYoe

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev the 54 year old American Art historian and curator has been listed by ArtReview as the number one world ‘mover and shaker’ in its Power 100 list, the first time the position has been occupied by a female. Christov-Bakargiev was the Artistic Director of the current year’s dOCUTMENTA 13 exhibition in Kassel, regarded generally as an outstanding exhibition with record setting attendances. Coline Milliard for an Blouin Artinfo article states “globe-trotting curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev is the most powerful figure in the art world, according to ArtReview’s Power 100 list. In this much-awaited Who’s Who — published yearly by the veteran art magazine for more than ten years…  That it has taken over a decade for ArtReview’s Power 100 to have a female number one might well be indicative of a lingering gender inequality in the visual arts. And to get there, Christov-Barkargiev has had to pull out the big guns. Her critically acclaimed dOCUMENTA(13) … was the most popular dOCUMENTA ever. 860,000 people saw her show in Kassel, and an extra 27,000 visited the Kabul outpost (in total almost twice as much as the number of visitors at the last Venice Biennale). …The Power 100 jury is undisclosed but it is said to be composed of twenty members from different parts of the world, including staff from ArtReview’s editorial team. Shortlisted high-flyers were considered for their activity between September 2011 and September 2012. The criteria – “local and international influence” and “impact” — are almost as nebulous as the concept of power they are supposed to pinpoint. Yet few art professionals would deny that ArtReview’s 2012 Power 100 feels like a credible snapshot of the art world in the last twelve months.”

Inspired by Coline Milliard ow.ly/eU7PC image source Facebook ow.ly/eU7NN

Juliana Engberg the Australian curator and artistic Director of ACCA (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art) has been appointed as the Artistic Director of the 19th Biennale of Sydney (2014). Chairman Luca Belgiorno-Nettis, in a statement states ‘The Biennale of Sydney has a proud history of attracting and working with independent Artistic Directors of international standing. Juliana is one of Australia’s most accomplished curators and the Biennale is very pleased to be able to work with her.’ Engberg stated in response “The Biennale of Sydney, as one of the most established and certainly one of the largest of the world’s biennales, provides an exciting and challenging opportunity for curatorial development. There is a great artistic history to reflect and build upon, and take forward. My curatorial quest is to further invigorate the Biennale with works that excite the imagination of the audience and answer their desire to discover new artists, different ideas and emotionally charged and intellectually stimulating art. I hope to provide memorable encounters that linger in the minds of the audience. I am for the celebration of artistic imagination. I believe works that encourage exuberance, joy, exalted states and transcendence are valuable to the human psyche. And I am for the power of artistic observation. Art that elevates the commonplace by bestowing upon it extraordinary concentration, that helps us see our world as remarkable, essential and fragile. I am for art that probes certainties, whether they be historical or contemporary. I’m looking forward to creating a Biennale that provides opportunities for artists and audience in a mutual quest of discovery and participation.”

Inspired by Biennale of Sydney ow.ly/cQHR7 image source Vimeo ow.ly/cQHLR

Art war to prevent destruction of culture (May 2nd 2012)

Antonio Manfredi an Italian artist, curator and director of a Naples museum, the Casoria Contemporary Art Museum has set fire to a painting valued at €10,000 to protest the under-funding of arts in Italy. Before cameras, he set fire to a painting by French artist Séverine Bourguignon watching the spectacle via Skype. In an interview with John Hooper of the Guardian, Manfredi stated “There’s no money for upkeep. We were flooded recently. And there are tons of garbage mounting up outside. …This is a war. This is a revolution, an art war to prevent the destruction of culture, and in a revolution, there are winners and losers. …There are about 1,000 works, so this could go on for years, I tell you, it’s not nice setting light to works of art. It’s terrible. Each one has its own story. …You can’t …ask for money from companies in the area that are in the grip of the Camorra, some pay [the mobsters] protection money. Others are actually controlled by them. … in this area, if you don’t have backing from the authorities, you’re in serious danger. My fear is that they’ll let me go ahead and burn the lot.”

Inspired by John Hooper http://ow.ly/awOgA image source http://ow.ly/awOz3

People are really voicing their own sovereignty (December 25th)

Carson Chan the 31 year old architecture writer and curator has been featured by Alexander Forbes in an interview for Artinfo Berlin about the fallout from the Arab Spring protests on the Moroccan ‘Marrakech Biennale’, which had been “forced into a state of adaptation, rolling with the ever-changing context of the region … [Challenging and reassessing] post-colonialism, and why it’s important to break the rules.” In the interview Chan states, “The context of North Africa right now is that it’s a tumultuous area of the world. The people there are really voicing their own sovereignty, their own ambitions, and it’s really exciting to be there… More importantly, I think, is how a post-colonial identity has affected people in Morocco. It was a French protectorate from 1912 to 1956, so French as a language was installed, certain codes of how to operate, what to show, what culture is being expressed was dictated by the French for a long time.”

Inspired by Alexander Forbes http://ow.ly/82McW image source artiffexbalear http://ow.ly/82Mks

Edwin Parker “Cy” Twombly the recently deceased 83 year old US artist renowned for his paintings that blurred the line between drawing and painting, is the subject of a major exhibition to celebrate the Bicentenary of the Dulwich Gallery. The show explores the parallels between his work and that of the Renaissance painter Nicolas Poussin, both of whom took up residence in Rome for the greater part of the careers. Although their works are quite disparate in style, curator Dr. Nicholas Cullinan of the International Modern Art at Tate Modern explores the overlapping subjects shared by both through the juxtaposition of their related interests in antiquity and classical mythology. Prior to his death, Twombly closely collaborated with Cullinan on the development of the exhibition which includes works not previously exhibited.

Inspired by Randy Kennedy http://ow.ly/5Df8p image source Painting Zombies http://ow.ly/5DfjS