The musée Guimet in Paris has a new director since 2008, Jacques Giès. In january 2009 he announced at a press conference that a contemporary programmation would take place inside the permanent collection. (It was first introduced by Serge Lemoine some years ago with specially produced artworks at the musée d’Orsay) Until the 15th November one can see the pakistanian artist Rashid Rana and until the 13th December Chen Zhen. Much of Rashid Rana works are on pixelation of photography which he declines in different cultural and art historical purposes. But it is his sculpture at the first floor which fits the best in the permanent exhibition and in the abstract impact of the stone sculptures. The concept to incorporate contemporary art works for Rashid Rana but not for Chen Zhen. Even if he is one of the most important chinese artists it is not sufficient to borrow some art works from the CNAP to make it a coherent exhibition. Only „round table“ from 1995 has find his definite space. The idea to draw the contemporary public from the three steps away Palais de Tokyo and Museum of Modern Art, to the magnificiant collection and space of the musée Guimet is efficient, but has to be improved. But by the way, you can discover prodigious little things which perhaps you’ll have to reclassify as contemporary like this part of a khadvanga.
Lili was the personality that Tim Yip invented for his holiday exhibition at the MOCA Taipeh Museum. The best thing about her is that you can read her name from ahead and from behind. Like all good stories there is more than one way to tell them, but as often recognized the narration is a problematic approach to an exhibition. In a film identification is a good way to produce and use emotions. In the museum identification bothers the spectator.
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
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 essentiallaws 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?
Since three weeks I worked with my students on exhibitionsflyers of Julian Opie, Sigmar Polke and Rothko. They had to describe prices, biographies, pictures and so on. The last day had come and we went to the Juergen Teller exhibition at the Consortium. Even if at first they were not very interested, they saw directly that the pictures had a autobiographical-context and were trashy. In front of the self-portait with a Mercedes, they said it was Juergen Teller with my car. A real hint that germanness exists mainly through german cars and expresses international dreams of utopic luxury - as the last suvivoir of the island of utopia .
