The asian atmosphere in Ridley Scott’s movie Bladerunner isn’t something you will find in Philip K. Dick’s Book “Do andoids dream of electric sheeps”. It is a pure invention to place the set there and it expresses better then any other movie of the eighties the american fear of Asia. (Scott’s picture “Black rain” produced at the end of the decade in 1989 prouves the same preoccupations). It is always raining and you see a huge number of umbrellas in the picture. In the National Art Center building in Tokyo l’architecte Kisho Kurokawa replied in 2003 to Scott’s Bladerunner. Kurokawa issued of the metabolism movement of the 60‘s, build outside the wave front of his museum, a little building were spectators can secure their umbrellas, amongst others also Bladerunner umbrellas. Inside, the onlooker can choose between, postimpressionist paintings from the Musée d’Orsay, and a Man ray exhibition, both announced in english or an exhibition on calligraphy only presented in Japanese. The fact that there was no free press entrance made me focus on the umbrellas.
Japan gives the impression that everything is regulated by visual signs, beginning with the subway waiting lane marks to the plastic food in restaurants. It is true that not understanding and reading a language leads to a special kind of visual concentration because the eye is searching to guide you. However the omnipresence of visual signs in Japan depends also on the writing system the kanji imported from China which presents a word or a concept by an image. (This is also the reason why Japanese have a better memory, one character represents a word so that they can memorize longer sequences of sense.) It is not astonishing that all kind of signs have a real graphical impact with their great elegance and simplicity. Perhaps this explains even the graphical outline of japanese contemporay art. In the newly built Midtown complex the Japan Graphic Designers Association Inc. (JAGDA) held an exhibition on graphic design with examples of their yearbook 2010 which was, and that is rare in Japan, free of admission. Unfortunatly the graphic design exposed was in fact quite academic.
In english the title of the new Art-installation in the Junot suburban is even more teasing: the wave -the kiss and the star! On this picture Ida Tursic & Wilfried Mille, Loïc Raguénès and Cécile Bart all look happy. Their feet and the feet of François Rebsamen and of all the politics cover the only mistake in this installation - the heavy looking zinc supports of the star behind them. One thing is for sure - here many adolescent skaters will change their first kiss in the sunshine
The hardend liquids here are aluminium, bronze or polyurethane foam. Foam goes form! But not really- everytime does the chemical material stays in a organical state as if it had its own behaviour which should be accepted. Corners of the room are not filles with fat but with something that looks like the last product of an digestion process of a colored winding worm. The wax paintings of Lynda Benglis have also an organic aspect but the most shiny piece of the exhibition is the last artwork made of urethane with orange pigment and only weakend by an neoclassical romantic and eclecticism arrangement of some columns and blue velvet
Take a look
At this picture you can see the painter Atsing with the art critic Alain Coulange, lurking at his paintings as only art critics do. Under the title “In the city”, the exhibition shows four works out of a larger series. First exposed at the archeologic museum in Dijon you can visit them now till the 15th of may at Jean Brollys Vitrine space - 16 rue Montmorency. Always representing a couple of people, everything seems strange in these paintings which are showing people between a freezing and a moving state, in their everyday life. Expressions and colors are reduced to their minimum in order to have maximum impact. It looks as if you where applying to a figurative painting the essential laws of abstract art, to create an essential figurativ art .“ 1. No texture - 2. no brushwork or callygraphy 3. no sketching or drawing, 4. no forms 5. no design 6. no colors 7. no light…“
El Greco. Coming from Greece to Venice to end in Spain, that’s a real european biography. But to be rediscovered by german scholars and to inspire the german expressionism is even more exiting. El Grecos paintings are showing a special perspective on faces from down under - he treats the clothes in an abstract way, neglecting the details in order to work out the impression as a whole. Only using primary colors and green in large perpendicular fields of drapery, abstract painting is not far away. Another sign of modernity is his atelier making cover versions of his paintings to sell them around the world, changing the perception of reality.
This was my third visite of the Juergen Teller show at the Consortium in Dijon with some of the EMA ART SCHOOL students in Chalon-sur-Saône. Do they have another look on the exhibition after a week of hard work in the workshop on german photography? Who knows?
Slidesss is an exhibition at the Lieu Commun in Toulouse. A slide is everything that is gliding as a result it can’t be very precise at the end of it’s trajectory. You have slide guitars, and of the best slide guitar players is the great Elmore James, you have skateboardslides and now you have slidesss in Art. Jean-Marie Blanchet and Sébastien Vonier show us their slides on the second floor of the old shirt factory. To say it in one word the essence of the exhibition is its laziness! A sort of cool efficiency which doesn’t want to be more than what it is. So the space is ruled by the padpictures of Jean-Marie Blanchet, his similis and the steelgrids and concrete-surfaces which are lying, Caspar David Friedrich like, in the middle of the room. This room had been waiting for centuries to give birth to this exhibition!
Does this picture exposed in China already mean a critic of a political system?
Does this kind of picture – a slide in a woodenbox – reveal a reality or is it just a picture ? We see a persons symbolised by puppets being wrapped, tortured perhaps killed.
Is it only in China that such things happen? As a matter of fact in America everythings changes now, Guantanamo will be dismantled. No more mock– executions as torture and soon no more “state of exception” as Giorigo Agamben called it, in reference to the definition of power of Carl Schmitt. This picture by the young photographer Huang Shiyun (born in 1982) was exposed in the Photo Award 2009 of the Three Shadow Gallery. It is called „private room“ and it is part of an exhibition of young Chinese photographers at the Three Shadows Gallery in the Caochangdi district. Pictures of Ri Yue showing poor workers wrapped in a Chinese flag could be read either as a criticism of the Chinese policy or as a marketing mean. It is for sure that some young Chinese artists discovering photography for themselves, are willing to use the medium as a way of reflecting reality and perhaps not only to make money.
The new space of the Alexander Ochs Gallery is in the Caochangdi district not far from the 798 area were the first place of Alexander Ochs was located. The opening show of the gallery presents the Domus-collection. Mainly paintings are exposed in the enormous space. It is the over dimensioned woodcut of Fang Lijun made in 1999 which is the most impressive perhaps because of the parellels with German expressionism. But the western eye of the camera captured Anish Kapoors mirroirs, reflecting one of Damien Hirst butterfly paintings.
