03/04/2013

Taking Hip Hop Back to the Streets

Taking Hip Hop Back to the Streets

Hip hop has always been site-specific, but Jay Shells is taking things a step further. The New York-based artist is hitting the streets, taking famous rap lyrics and screwing them on street posts at specific locations all over New York City. “Alot of rappers call out their block,” Shells said in the promotional video below. “When you’re on a corner that’s called out in a song, I think it’s cool to know that.”


The ongoing project, “Rap Quotes”, consists of homemade but very official-looking bright red street signs. For example, you can find Busta Rhymes’ line “Yes, yes y’all, you know we talkin’ it all, see how we bringin the street corner to Carnegie Hall” outside the entrance to — you guessed it — Carnegie Hall. Mos Def’s boast that he’s “Blacker than midnight at Broadway and Myrtle” can now be found at that exact spot under the JMZ line in Brooklyn. Outside the Marcy Houses, a Jay Z lyric reads, “Cough up a lung where I’m from, Marcy son, ain’t nothin’ nice.”

Shell’s big red street signs sport lyrics from New York legends Nas, Mos Def, Big Daddy Kane, Jim Jones, Big Noyd, Kanye, Kool G Rap, Capital Steez, KRS One, GZA, Redman, Guru, Capital Steez, and many others. You can follow Rap Quotes’s progress on Twitter. “It became sort of a scavenger hunt,” Shells said, before adding, “I think people will steal these. Within a week, they’ll be gone.”

Lane Koivu

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01/04/2013

4 Questions To – Sebastiano Mauri

4 Questions To – Sebastiano Mauri

We met Sebastiano Mauri, the Italo-Argentinian versatile and charismatic visual artist, graduated in cinema, who faced less than 1 year ago the literature world issuing his first brilliant and acclaimed book “Goditi il problema” (Enjoy the problem), Rizzoli, 2012. Sebastiano opened the door of his eclectic house to the photographer Paul Barbera‘s photo-documentary project “Where They Create”, telling us about his personal and unique life.


You are a visual artist, but also a writer, and you worked in cinema too, how do you manage all these different roles together?
It depends. Sometimes I dive into a specific project and there’s no room for anything else, it’ll all have to wait. Other times, probably far from any deadline, I manage to work, let’s say, on my screenplay for a couple of hours, structuring, jolting down dialogues, then I might dive into one of my altars, and get lost in painfully slow processes such as composing mosaics or creating flower arrangements made of hundreds of tiny roses, and finally write a few pages of my new novel.

As much as I can, I try not to loose touch with any of these activities, so that I keep alert that part of the brain and/or body. But then reality kicks in, and this productive sounding, eclectic schedule is swept away by being unable to stop applying tiny lilacs to Ganesh’s temple, walking the dog who’d do anything not to return home, or answering emails about matters you thought resolved a year ago. Basically you end managing it day by day, the best you can, hoping nobody will realize you don’t have a master plan.


I’ve noticed that most of your previous interviews dealt with the countries you are more attached to and your multicultural education, along with your interest in spirituality. Is your creativity related to any special places? What’s the role of religion in your works and in contemporary cultures?

I have lived extensively between New York, Milan and Buenos Aires, different languages, very different realities, very far geographically. I wouldn’t say that my creativity relates more to one place than the other, I’d rather think that it is stimulated by the juxtaposition of differences. Change per se is a great tool to put things into perspective, reconsider your habits and even beliefs. Movement, doubt and fluidity have become the greatest influence on my work.

In the past four or so years, religion has been the main subject of my research. I look for similarities between the different credos, a common space where we’re all welcome, and that does not invite judgement, conflict or exclusion. Still today, religion can offer a great deal of comfort in the form of psychological support, social interaction with like-minded people, stress releasing mantra practices, recurring rituals that break our habits, making us concentrate for a moment on something that isn’t our daily schedule, something that might be greater than us. The goal is, like with everything else, to take what is good, positive, life enriching of this experience, and leave out all that separates us, that makes us feel different from one another, that brings judgement and cultural isolation. My (good) God against your (bad) God, the Geroge W. Bush view of the world. Religion can be the opium of the people, but it can also be a caress, a held hand, a shoulder to cry onto, an ear to talk to. Not something to look down onto.


Do you think that human beings still need amulets or icons to believe, or do faith and firm belief stand alone?
In the age of digital reproduction of images and globalized production of goods, amulets and icons are seen, distributed and sold now more than ever. Faith and firm belief need help from the marketing department like anything else.

Do you think that sexuality can still offer original food for thought and research?
Anything that has to do with our daily lives is always going to be original and nurturing food for thought. Our lives are engaged in a daily duel between habit and innovation: our reading of them is forced to constantly adapt. It will never arrive a final word on human nature.

I’d say that the telling of hidden details, as far as I am concerned, has to do with the attempt to share thoughts and facts that one is naturally (and unhealthily I might add) drawn to keep to oneself. I have found that if you dare open up to others, most probably that’s exactly what they will do with you. A liberating act.

Monica Lombardi – Images Paul Barbera

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29/03/2013

Ruby Anemic: “Please take care of me” at Galerie LackeFarben

Ruby Anemic: “Please take care of me”

The born and bred Berliner artist Ruby Anemic just opened his long awaited solo exhibition entitled “Please take care of me” at Galerie LackeFarben in Berlin. New works of neon, concrete, video, canvas and mixed media are spread across the four small storeys of the untraditional gallery space, which used to serve as a paint shop back in the 1930’s. Since closing his Pool Gallery in Berlin-Mitte, Ruby Anemic has been focusing solely on his artistic practice, and is finally ready to show his interdisciplinary work, all with an ironic and humorous yet critical view on contemporary culture.


Several of the artworks have been made using fire as a tool – leaving burn marks instead of paint or ink. In Burn for a Smile, a smiley grins at the viewers from a large canvas, burnt holes into the texture as a re-think of Lucio Fontana’s carved canvases. Other works, such as I am a Dreamer consist of Ozzy Osbourne song lyrics burnt onto leather pieces, still smelling of fire and skin.

Downstairs, a large silver curtain (Untitled) is moving back and forth; a kinetic art piece driven by tiny, hidden motors, creating an illusion of flowing water or a mirror in a fun house. A large part of the works are entitled Objects on Paper, consisting of mostly fashion magazines where a small toy car or a book has been placed covering the face of the model. These works are all about composition, the beauty and humour of everyday life and objects, something that Ruby Anemic, the champion of pop cultural references, always does incredibly well.


In the dark basement, one single video work, a looped video clip of Brad Pitt (Reiteraction) pretty much summarizes the appreciated show. It is witty, tongue-in-cheek and slightly sarcastic, firmly rooted in pop culture and at the same time just not giving a damn.

“Please take care of me” by Ruby Anemic is on view at Galerie LackeFarben until April 27th 2013.

Helena Nilsson Strängberg

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25/03/2013

Jeff Wall, Actuality

Jeff Wall, Actuality

Finally, after numerous exhibitions in the most important museums of the world, PAC – Contemporary Art Pavilion in Milan hosts the first Italian solo show by the Canadian photographer and artist Jeff Wall (Vancouver, 1946). 
Actuality is the title chosen for the exhibition by its curator Francesco Bonami. The title reflects the artist’s will to set up each of his selected 42 works – among new and already displayed ones – in a conceptual way; in a tangible horizon, contingent to the reality and to the daily experience. 
Yet, everyone overlooks Wall’s art for the first time can have the double feeling to be in front of images without time; visions, which float vaguely in a recent past (thanks to the photographic medium), and a moment that is about to happen.


This is mostly related to the fact that his works are made through the use of see-through cibachrome, later assambled and exhibited with a light box. That confers to each work a status that goes beyond the steadiness of the shot to look more like a movie still frame. It’s not by chance that Jeff Wall has many times declared that he looks at his pictures as “cinematography”. They are images, supported by big size format, which aim at becoming out-and-out beaming screens where the artist, as an experimental videographer, suspends a symbolic and incisive frame of a full length movie we’ll never see. A simple still-life, which is not so “simple”, seems to suggest the artist. It contains – in its structure and in its definition as an artistic form and visual system – the history and tradition, which convey from century to century the shared idea about how to look at and depict things.

In his production, Wall seems to be interested in post French revolution art and in those masters who redefined visual art in a crucial moment of human history: between the rise of the new social order and the modern and contemporary costume, but above all, that unique moment that gave birth to photography. Delacroix, Courbet, Manet, Renoir, Degas and also the big masters of Ukiyo-e are not used as specious visual references, but as formal structures to confront with. Each single work is a small cosmos into which you can get lost, where the space is analyzed in-depth with a philosophical approach that assimilates Wall to the artists of the Renaissance, sometimes with a slightly hermetic attitude.


We can feel the awkwardness of the man lying on the kitchen table of Insomnia (1994), but this feeling is not instilled only through the performing skills of the leading actor, it is the geometric break of the composition that underlined his uneasiness. The fundamental work Citizen (1996) tells us about issues such as freedom, democracy and civilization. 
In a time when the domination of the images – the “iconosphere” described by McLuhan – debase the value of each visual signs, the accurate work by Jeff Wall is a referent artistic and philosophical point to investigate the artistic, social and politic role of our view: we, powerless spectators looking at the pictures of Abu Ghraib‘s tortures, could learn a lot from Jeff Wall’s Dead Troops Talk (1992). The enormous picture which seems to live midway of a photo reportage from the frontline and an episode of The Walking Dead, was analyzed by Susan Sontag who reports at the end of her essay Regarding the Pain of Others: “The figures in Wall’s visionary photo-work are “realistic” but, of course, the image is not. Dead soldiers don’t talk. Here they do.”


The exhibition will run until June 9.

Riccardo Conti, Editor’s thanks for translation to Monica Lombardi – Images courtesy of Jeff Wall

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18/03/2013

Giuseppe Gabellone at GAMeC

Giuseppe Gabellone at GAMeC

Giuseppe Gabellone (b. Brindisi, Italy 1973, works and lives in Paris) is probably one of the most celebrated member of the Italian scene of artists and friends known as Il gruppo di Via Fiuggi (the group of the Fiuggi street); young authors from the late 90’s, who actively work for the re-definition of contemporary art in Italy, giving new meaning and developments to the hard heritage left by the Arte Povera and conceptual art. 
The absolutely independent artistic research carried on by Giuseppe Gabellone first focused on the crossing of sculpture and photography. With a particular analytic and incisive approach in regard to the media, he initially created visual enigmas made of sculptures, which couldn’t survive without the distance achieved only through the photographic reproduction.


Strange shapes that seem to refer to recognisable and functional objects and places, were actually reproductions of shapes, which alluded to the reality, but deprived of their physical status and natural contest, photographed and then destroyed to add further obstacles to their uderstanding. Among them: a cactus made of wet clay pent-up in a garage; curvilinear streets of down tree that never leads to any places; flowers and plants scaled down and apparently out of order, plus objects set into heavy armored structures. 
From this first approach suspended between sculpture and photography, Gabellone moved to a new series of works where matter is represented through the form of bas-relief. Characterized by the use of unusual materials, which contrasts with the tradition of their shapes, these sculptures create ambiguity whilst surprising the viewers by referring to exotic imaginaries.




For the exhibition, expressly thought for GAMeC space, and after a long absence from the Italian artistic scene, once again, Gabellone created original works that analysed the sculpture as main media, but this time focusing on high relief. To do this, the artist put themes like color, surface, and contrast between vast and master to the centre of his research, producing intense chromatic juxtapositions, which remind drawings made by children with crayons. 
This strange promenade made of stuffed fabric guides the path throughout giant components that remind the “movable type”, hypothetical letters that seem to compose only meaningless words, which don’t allude to anything specific, but maintain their conceptual potential, both striking and puzzling the viewers.

Giuseppe Gabellone’s show will run until 5th May 2013.

Riccardo Conti – Editor’s thanks to Monica Lombardi – Photos by Roberto Marossi, Courtesy greengrassi, London e ZERO…, Milano, Courtesy GAMeC – Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo

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14/03/2013

Martin Kippenberger: sehr gut | very good at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin

Martin Kippenberger: Sehr Gut | Very Good

On February 25th this year, the iconic artist Martin Kippenberger would have turned 60 years old. That said, if the multi-talented enfant terrible of German art wouldn’t have died way too early at the age of 44, following a life of too much too fast. For the first time in Berlin, the National Gallery in Hamburger Bahnhof, the German mothership of contemporary art, is now honoring Kippenberger with a large retrospective. 300 of his works – paintings, drawings, sculptures, posters, books, music and photographs – are on view in Martin Kippenberger: sehr gut | very good, arranged as an approach to Kippenberger as a person and artist rather than a chronological retrospective.


Kippenberger was a painter, actor, writer, musician, drinker, dancer, traveller, charmer – an ‘exhibitionist’ in his own words, and his life cannot be separated from his work. During the few years he spent in West Berlin, from 1978 until 1981, he set up Kippenberger’s Office together with Gisela Capitain, where he exhibited his own or his friends’ works and offered a whole range of other art-related services. Later he became the business director of the punk, new wave and visual art venue SO36 in Kreuzberg, and even started his own punk band. In the legendary Paris Bar in Charlottenburg, where the German and international crème de la crème of artists, actors, musicians and other heavyweights were hanging out back then (and to some extent still do), Kippenberger traded his paintings for a life long provision of food and drinks.


Martin Kippenberger: sehr gut | very good at Hamburger Bahnhof is an ambitious attempt to show every side of this multi-faceted artist, as well as his private and public person. In one of the side rooms, the seldom exhibited so called “white pictures” are on view; fusing irony, concept and avant-garde rhetoric into transparent, glossy writing similar to school reports stating “sehr gut/very good”. Refusing to adapt to one single style, Kippenberger’s enormous variety of artistic output still feels rebellious, but sometimes also slightly confusing. The widespread exhibition takes a while to get through, but is worth every turn. Be prepared to get surprised: there is a very small chance that you will be able predict what will be on view in the next room.


Martin Kippenberger: sehr gut | very good is on view at Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – from February 23rd through August 18th 2013.

Helena Nilsson Strängberg

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04/03/2013

Wandering in Silvia Bächli’s Ephemeral Worlds

Wandering in Silvia Bächli’s Ephemeral Worlds

Raffaella Cortese seldom, if ever misses a shot. After reviewing the women’s diverse expressions of mourning proposed by Kiki Smith last October, once again we return to the Milanese gallery to discover the first solo show by Silvia Bächli (b. 1956, Baden, Switzerland), another esteemed exponent of Ms. Cortese’s selected and intimist female art universe.


The Swiss artist, living and working between Paris and Basel, displays a bunch of her distinctive works created through the use of basic forms and materials: ink, gouache, charcoal, painting on white paper, characterised by a clean, delicate mark, tending to essential shapes with a light chromatism. Though reminding the abstraction of the minimalist American/Canadian artist Agnes Martin (1912-2004), Bächli’s approach is able to mix non-figurative and real elements strictly connected to the nature.

In her works flower stems turn into parallel lines, rectangles build vanishing forms and pale childlike female figures, apparently immersed in empty atmospheres, report an accurate, meditative construction of “unknown worlds where to wander, creating a space and exploring it, by acting with and against the paper edges.” 
In complete contrast to the present “spectacularization” of art, replacing the more and more flashy, shouted communication, the artist – who represented Switzerland at the 53rd Biennale of Venice – developed a low soft-spoken language made of slight, evocative and intimate words.


Exploiting the double exhibition space of the gallery, Bächli presents here, along with the series of drawings and paintings on paper of different sizes and techniques, a maybe less known, but still highly representative work. The photo installation entitled Hafnargata conceived with her husband, the Swiss artist Eric Hattan, and previously exhibited at the Kunsthalle Nürnberg in 2011, is the result of an explorative journey made by the couple in the barren landscapes of Iceland, a white primitive panorama, which perfectly reflects the essence of the artist’s poetic: “drawing means leaving things out.”


Monica Lombardi – Courtesy the artist and Raffaella Cortese Gallery, Milano © Lorenzo Palmieri

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20/02/2013

Kenneth Anger’s ICONS at Sprüth Magers Berlin

Kenneth Anger’s ICONS at Sprüth Magers Berlin

On a particularly cold winter night in Berlin a few weeks ago, Sprüth Magers opened the doors to their latest show – the American experimental film maker and artist Kenneth Anger‘s ICONS – and the gallery was quickly filled up with heavy winter coats and frosty cheeks. Kenneth Anger himself was seen wandering around together with a young assistant, bringing an extra dash of old school movie glamour to the evening. This is the last week to experience ICONS, which is based on an archive of film, photographs, scrapbooks, letters and memorabilia from Anger’s personal collection, and that previously was exhibited at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2011-2012).


Kenneth Anger was introduced to film at an early age by his grandmother, and has been making his own films since 1937. In 1947 when the dreamy Fireworks was released, Anger got arrested for obscenity charges. Today he is considered one of the original filmmakers of American cinema and a countercultural icon. His films often merge surrealism with homoeroticism and the occult, and have made a big impact on mainstream film directors, post war popular culture in general (anything from queer iconography to MTV) and the aesthetic of music videos.

The two exhibition rooms have been painted midnight blue and crimson red to replicate the way the collection was hung in the artists’ own Los Angeles home. Entering feels slightly like stepping into a treasury, where original footage, tabloids and magazines from the early Hollywood years cover the walls, revealing Anger’s fascination with the film industry and the Golden Age of Hollywood. Centered around figures like Greta Garbo and Rudolph Valentino, ICONS airs a fascination with the mystique of classic stars, which also inspired Anger’s infamous celebrity gossip book Hollywood Babylon, published in 1975 and 1984.


In addition to the precious archive, the recent work Airship (2010-2012) is being shown, consisting of three short films based on newsreel footage of airships hovering in the sky. It’s a typical Anger fusion of occult magic, symbolism and mystery, with an almost supernatural quality to it. Stepping out of the exhibition into the very real, freezing cold winter night afterwards, feels like travelling hundred miles away from the glamorous, vintage and sometimes surreal universe that Kenneth Anger created. You better catch a glimpse of it while you can.



ICONS by Kenneth Anger is on view at Sprüth Magers Berlin until February 23rd.

Helena Nilsson Strängberg – Photos courtesy of Kennet Anger and Sprüth Magers Gallery

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19/02/2013

Supermarket 2013

Supermarket 2013

While speaking of art and its commercialization has become all the way a tautology, the Stockholm Fair “Supermarket 2013” proposed a new take on the argument. Hosted at the Kulturhuset from the 15th to the 17th of February 2013, this art fair represented the last step in the investigation of the different roles that artists may assume in the art world. Defined by Howard Becker as a complex system of production, commission, preservation, promotion, criticism, and the sale of art, the concept of the “art world” was at the centre of this event, as the artists did not simply present their works but were their active promoters. Not only as creators, curators or producers, but as gallerists.


As the artist and product manager of “Supermarket 2013” Pontus Raud explained, artists took their independence back, retaking the control of art and its system, which has up until now put them on the side. Started under the name of “Minimarket” in 2006, this art fair has gained attention, becoming the most important Swedish art fair and, consequentially, changing its name into “Supermarket”. The mission of this project was to let artists meet each other, present themselves to the market and have discussions together. Despite the enormous amount of art works, the attention here wasn’t supposed to be limited to unique creations but to the whole gallery, which became the very focus on the event.

Here, the discourse of art moved from the object to the practice of the gallery, like in the case of The M{}esum. “There are many museums in the world but only one muesum”. Hypothetically based in Jonasstrasse 57 Berlin, The M{}esum is presented as the world’s greatest museum of lost human history and culture, collecting, conserving and exhibiting n∅bjects from the ancient times to today. In The M{}esum, you will (or won’t) find all the lost objects of the world.

Indeed, “Supermarket 2013” always tries to bring it all back home. Even when there is nothing to bring back.

Marco Pecorari

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18/02/2013

Don’t Mind The Gap

Don’t Mind The Gap

Do you know what a ‘aedo’ is? In the ancient Greek, it was a professional singer, a bard, considered as a prophet who, thanks to his blindness, was able to sharpen his attention and sensibility, without getting sidetracked by anything and anyone around. And “a contemporary aedo, interested in history, with force spells”, is the self-definition of our unusual guest: a little storyteller and mythology lover – so short that he needs to be carried to get closer to the artworks –, thrilled about the idea of visiting and freely reviewing an art show for us, unconsciously turning himself into its added value. We are at Massimo De Carlo gallery in Milan and Rodrigo B. (b. Milan, 2008) tells us something fresh and original about The Bronze Age, an exhibition that, at first glance, didn’t seem to have so much to say.


The gap between the size of the works and the child’s height influences his first impressions, but the point of view is undoubtedly fun, imaginative and genuine. The Ghost of Human Kindness by Huma Bhabha reminds Rodrigo of a bogeyman “the monster’s body is made of white stones, while one of his foot is of wood. He has a scary face, and the stones have pockets where he can hide arms. He is a giant, or maybe it’s me, I’m too little. Do you think he’s a friend of Gulliver’s? (…) I think the monster is a ghost, he is white as usually ghosts are”.

The sculptures seem to come alive, and from the “stubborn head” exhibited by George Condo we move to Steven Claydon’s A Corrupted Alloy: “This man is looking at me. He is made of silver and has a long beard. It is a blurred sculpture. Yes, I’m pretty sure he is Ulysses. I can recognise him from his beard, which grew while travelling ten years to go back home. He has a bulky head, enlarged to host the memories of all the events he lived. If you look at him from behind, you see two colours, dark yellow and black. It seems that his hair moves. Then, I cannot see it, but behind the sculpture there is a bone, I’m wondering why, maybe it is a magic arm that Ulysses will use when in need. You know, he is so smart”.


The Ibo created by the ironic, conceptual/pop French artist Bertrand Lavier attracts Rodrigo’s attention “he looks like a baby, a silver, super smooth baby with a belly full of ice cream. He is a baby coming from a tribe, here’s why he is undressed; he doesn’t need clothes where he lives. Isn’t he afraid of living among such strange sculptures?”

“Look, what a beautiful sculpture – Untitled, 2008 by Thomas Houseago. It has only an eye; the other one is closed. Astute face. It’s all black and it makes me feel the need to bite it like a piece of chocolate. I would ask Santa Claus to bring it to me, is it for sale? Where could I buy it?”
Time goes by so fast, and in a flash the visit comes to its end, we make the point of the situation: “This exhibition is for brave guys like me. It is a show for men, or for women, who are not afraid. I like the sculptures, and also the wood on the corner (Ed. Note, Bartolini Massimo, Deposito 2013); is it a sculpture too, right? This gallery doesn’t have the flooring. The works of art displayed are not so much; I think that’s good because you don’t get tired. Maybe we need some music and pillows to sit down comfortable while chatting about our impressions. The works are set too high for children like me. I’d like to touch the sculptures, why isn’t it possible? I’ll be careful; I won’t break them, I promise!”
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Rodrigo B. & Monica Lombardi, special thanks to Emanuela Torri at Doremilab

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