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.
Here you can see some of the happy few visiting the Charline von Heyl exhibition at the Consortium. Geronimo and Najade appreciated the space, imagining their new loft in the white cube. They were more fascinated by the book size work, giving also the title of the exhibition „Le jour de boire est arrivé“. Some of the paintings were for their „goût“ too expressive, or even too bloody. They really enjoyed the drawings made by many different layers used in the small sizes. As a mater of fact it is true that the palimpsest and collage principle really reinforce the book character of Charline von Heyls graphical „writing“!
It is not really usefull to write on an exhibition which has already ended. You should write a critic as a form of publicity, when everybody can visit the place where the artworks are shown. But in memory, the exhibition has his own way. It lasts a while and then is going to fade away. Memento Moronika of the Chapman brothers is over and now begins to flatten in my memory, the bronze sculptures in the first floor as the coloured paperboard dinos in the second floor. A catalogue is published at Walter König, Köln.
At the Andrea Caratsch Gallery you can see until the 28th of march the exhibition John Armleder Olivier Mosset New Paintings. As a matter of fact you could already see them from the 15th January „Olivier Mosset’s New Paintings“ in the same galery and in the same display. In between the 7th of march John Armleder had taken over all the installation as an artwork under his own name. The process makes us think of the early Mosset paintings when he appropriated himself the stripes of Buren in 1972.( See the excellent book of Catherine Perret on Oliver Mosset ) Here Armleder appropriates himself the exposition of Mosset. It is a pity that some of the splendid monochrome paintings are not well stretched on the frames and produce parasite geometric reflections.
Nam June Paik: Works from the Kunsthalle Bremen in the Sprengel Museum Hannover
10.12.08-22.02.09
Until the 22th february the Sprengel Museum shows works from the Seoul born artist Nam June Paik who died at the age of 74 in 2006. In the exhibition you can see also one of Paiks most important works his Videosynthesizer. Already in 1969 Paik tried to break up the one channel model of television to make it an interactive media. As a musican and strongly influenced by artists as Stockhausen and Cage or Mary Bauermeister wanted to give the spectator an active role in seeing.This is a model he even sticked to in later works as Real fish Live fish II made in 1982. Here interaction became a process of thinking. Unfortunatly his works misses a little bid of the atmosphere in which they where first exposed in the Fluxus mouvement and you even do not want any more to manipulate his videosynthesizer even if you where allowed to. The exposition has no catalogue and is situated in the entrance level so that you can not make the différence with the collection of the museum.
Until the 16th of march you can see in the Centre Pompidou a Ron Arad exhibition.
Normally architecture and design exhibitions are simply boring. The best way to experience architecture is inside or outside a real building. Walter Benjamin calls it a tactile experience and transposes it to other media, as film and even photography. Now way to find this kind of perception in an exhibition with models, plans and autocad simulations which are mainly used to present a project to a client. Design exhibitions are annoying because all along the visit you try to recognize your own furniture. It is like art for the poor. In the Arad exposition most of the displayed pieces are unique or limited edition and it becomes pointless to identify your own furniture. The exhibition has a really dramatic scenography which tries to animate Arads armchairs and their quite ambiguous mixture of baroque formes and high-tech materials. Most of them have a strange similarity with the chirurgical instruments in Cronenbergs film “Dead ringers”. Even worse is the fact that they want to hide this ressemblance under their aesthetical surface. If you have ever seen books on Ron Arads bookworm rack, you can feel how it is like to sit on some of his chairs, except perhaps on the Big Soft Easy.
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