05/06/2012

Stedelijk Museum – The New Identity

Stedelijk Museum – The New Identity

On the 28th March the definite public opening of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam was finally announced. The grand opening is scheduled for the 23rd September 2012, and it’s to be followed by a grand retrospective exhibition of Mike Kelley’s work. 
Years of delays on the construction site raised a lot of criticism from both the press and the public, and finally at the end of last month it was possible for the curious and the art hungry people in Amsterdam to take a tour in the new building. The new museum was slightly anticipated by a new corporate identity, and already debated projects by Mevis and van Deursen.


The now almost 70-year-old museum was initiated with the direction of Willem Sandberg – an incredible graphic designer himself – in 1945, and the graphic design that followed each of the museum’s exhibitions has become almost as important as the exhibition itself. Designers allowed to place their hands on those projects weren’t that many. After Sandberg’s tyranny Wim Crouwel came along, designing the modernist ‘SM’ identity that stood proudly until 2010.

It should have been followed by Experimental Jetset’s SMCS logo, but it was actually replaced by the capital T designed by Mevis and van Deursen for Temporary Stedelijk. 
Mevis and van Deursen’s logo might seem a bit goofy at the first glance for hard-core modernist habitues. It plays with the iconic idea of the capital initials, as with the Temporary Stedelijk’s capital T, filling it with the museum’s full denomination. Hence, it becomes both an image, an icon and almost a phrase. After the initial moment of wonder you can’t but be amazed how Mevis and van Deursen manage to surprise each and every time.

Rujana Rebernjak

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04/06/2012

Warming Up For Contemporary Art Summer 2012

Warming Up For Contemporary Art Summer 2012

The exciting summer season of art opened its doors on the 2nd June, with Manifesta 9: the only traveling European biennale dedicated to contemporary art that – after Rotterdam, Luxembourg, Ljubljana, Frankfurt, Donostia-San Sebastián, Trentino-Alto Adige and the Region of Murcia – chose this year to takes place in the restored Waterschei Mine complex, located in the industry-leading city of Genk, Belgium.

Curated by the Mexican art critic, curator and historian Cuauthémoc Medina with associate curators Katerina Gregos and Dawn Ades, the concept of the 9th edition of Manifesta is based on the dialogue between art, history, geographical and social issues, focusing on the rise and the decline of industrial capitalism during the modern age. A former coal-mining site, which lies deep in the green fields, becomes the charming venue of a critical reflection that analyses and retraces the role of memory and cultural heritage in modern and post-modern societies.

Through the interpretations and critiques made by numerous past and contemporary artists around the object/metaphor ‘Coal’ – from the genius of Marcel Duchamp to Marcel Broodhaers’ ironic approach, from Bernd and Hilla Becher’s photographic testimony to the ‘energetic’ neon sculpture by Claire Fontaine and the video installation by the young Italian artist Rossella Biscotti – Manifesta 9 plumbs the depths of the modernity both by recording and transforming the outlook of social development between new and historical, local and global.

Manifesta 9, which will run until the 30th September, is just the first event on an art lover’s calendar. Our tour goes from Belgium to Germany, more precise: to Kassel, where another world’s leading art show will open next week. From the 9th June until the 16th September, it’s the turn of dOCUMENTA 13 – this year under the direction of the global citizen and art connoisseur Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev – that traditionally comes back every five years to last for exactly 100 days. The event, which usually attracts thousands of people (in 2007 visitors were 750.000) in spite of the small size and the isolated location of the host city, will present a survey of new artistic trends. Thanks to the works by more than 150 artists, and to a variety of collateral events spread around the city, dOCUMENTA affirms itself as one the hottest destinations of the international contemporary art summer.

The countdown has started even for the icing on the cake of this season: Art Basel, the kermesse where the top representatives of art and design gather together from all over the world to show off their masterpieces in Switzerland. Art Basel hosts over 300 leading galleries and more than 2500 artists – from old masters to emerging talents. It will open on the 14th June and it will run until the 17th, being a byword for art excellence accompanied, as each year, by smaller fairs (among which Volta, Liste and Scope and great shows.

2012 holds the turn of Jeff Koons at Fondation Bayeler, Gerrit Rietveld at Vitra Design Museum, Tatlin at Tinguely and the artist nominated for Turner prize 2011 Hilary Lloyd at Kunstmuseum (just to mention a few).

Enjoy the art season!

Monica Lombardi

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31/05/2012

Charles and Ray Eames – The Films

Charles and Ray Eames – The Films

The legacy of Charles and Ray Eames is still one of the most relevant cultural heritages we have carried out from the sixties. The famous couple, known respectively as the architect and the artist, started their long work-life relationship back in the college years. 
Hundreds of successful projects that have crowned their collaboration, originated from a studio in Los Angeles that has grown up to be America’s most creative site during the Mad Men years. 
Charles and Ray’s career has recently been poured into a documentary. The film was appropriately titled “Eames: the Architect and the Painter”.

The film in itself, apparently a feature created for mass audiences, doesn’t reveal much to a design geek. Historically speaking though, it gives an insight into their studio and working method, narrated through a series of anecdotes told by their young collaborators. The movie actually reveals quite vividly the complex visual world the creative couple has brought to life during their career. 
One of the most interesting projects Charles and Ray worked on, surprisingly as it may sound, is not their appraised furniture.

The actual treasure revealed by the documentary is the way they made their short films. Guided by Ray’s sensitivity that transformed everything in paintings, the filmography produced by the Eames’ studio had the exact same goal of every other project: to communicate ideas. The extensive list of films is conserved today by “Eames Office”, an association dedicated to communicating, preserving and extending the legacy and work of Charles and Ray. Comprising more than 100 films made between 1950 and 1982, it showcases videos like Powers of Ten, Tops, House, supreme examples of their wit and curiosity towards the world.

Rujana Rebernjak

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25/05/2012

Mind the Map

Mind the Map

Everybody knows Harry Beck’s map of the London Underground system: brightly coloured lines running only at right and acute angles, connected by circles and notated neatly in the signature Johnston typeface. It is arguably the most beautiful, influential and important piece of information design ever. Its magic lies in its ability to render an incredibly complex system eminently comprehensible through abstraction and good design: while it is geographically inaccurate, you simply can’t lose yourself in it. For decades, cities the world over have tried to ape its intuitive simplicity and iconic handsomeness to no avail.

In the spirit of Beck’s design, the London Transport Museum this week launched Mind The Map, an exhibition of iconic and newly commissioned artworks inspired by the map itself. Included in the exhibition are abstractions, deconstructions and reconstructions, including David Booth’s legendary paint tube map for Tate Britain and Tim Fishlock’s “A-Z” alphabet made from the hidden letterforms to be found in the map’s many sinewy intricacies.The exhibition’s ethos is “the maps in this exhibition are more about journeys than geography,” and nowhere was this more clear than in Jeremy Wood ethereal “My Ghost” maps, in which the artist used GPS to track himself around London to reveal his phantom presence around the city.

Catch Mind The Map tucked in behind the museum’s usual interactive collection of TFL history – 19th century train cars you can sit inside, classic Routemaster buses you can climb aboard and life-size models of 19th century subterranean tunnelling – running through October 28th at London Transport Museum’s space in Covent Garden.

Tag Christof

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24/05/2012

Walking in the woods and unleashing ones thoughts

Walking in the woods and unleashing ones thoughts

Il faut cultiver notre Jardin
Voltaire

“We must cultivate our garden” concluded Candide – the character of Candide: or, The Optimism, one of the well known novel by Voltaire – condensing the idea of life of the French writer, historian and philosopher who rejects Leibniz’ mantra “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds” in a very direct and sarcastic way. According to it, all human beings can do is to try to let their world become as good as possible and fulfilling it with their own experiences and values, independently from external influences.


Exactly this sentence seems to frame the sense of Gerda Steiner (b. 1967) and Jörg Lenzlinger’s (b. 1967) art. Tangles of seeds, stems, branches along with animal bones, artificial plants, toys and unusual objects are picked up from different environments where the Swiss artist couple has lived. The objects inhabit their unique, imaginary and epistemological cosmos. With any apparent connection you find kitsch and worthless things: a toy robot, pieces of Chinese fountains, old stuffed animals or small plastic spiders. They coexist with biological and personal elements in a harmonic and poetic way.

The old bag of Jörg’s mother, hung on the ceiling in the middle of the library, contains a climbing plant which tends to the overhead lighting (Handtasche). A suspended twisted installation made of spawns, branches, plastic flowers and a pink teddy bear (Luftfisch) welcomes the visitors at the entrance of Buchmann Galerie in Lugano, Switzerland.

The whole venue is dipped in a flourishing garden full of artworks – Tony Cragg’s sculptures, works by Lawrence Carrol, Giuseppe Pentone, Felice Varini and Lawrence Weiner just to mention a few.

This amazing gallery building, a block of cement and glass, hosts also a collection of Steiner and Lenzlinger’s visionary walking sticks, a bizarre Chinese cave and a huge web, which embraces a room with its loaded tentacles. The artists, with their naïve and genuine allure, embody a sort of aesthetic of frugality full of content and able to intrigue viewers. It’s hard not to admire the brightly coloured organism (photo below) treated with a synthetically produced fertiliser that’s generally used in the agricultural industry, that grows fast as if it has been fed with the cakes of Alice in Wonderland (Isabel Friedli, Cultural Goods, text in the catalogue of the show).

The exhibition entitled Im Wald spazieren gehen und die Gedanken von der Leine lassen (“To go for a walk in the woods and unleash ones thoughts”) is a perfect merger of experimentation and research of an original language hovered between science and imagination both joyful and unsettling.

The solo show by Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger will run until July 2012, open by appointment.

Monica Lombardi – Images courtesy Buchmann Galerie 

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22/05/2012

Solution Series

Solution Series

Even though graphic designers are keen on thinking that their profession makes a difference and that it’s politically, ethically and culturally relevant in our society, it’s a rather uncommon phenomena seeing this idealistic approach actually at work. Especially when it comes to Italy, graphic design is still considered an ‘artistic’ outtake on the artifacts we encounter on a daily basis. On the other hand, designers themselves generally profess a more politically active attitude but aren’t capable of actually putting it into practice.

There are, however, a few practitioners that try to take the matter in their own hands. One of the projects that was born from this kind of approach is Solution Series – a series of books published by Sternberg Press and curated by Ingo Niermann with the precious contribution by Zak Kyes (a graphic designer we have already praised in one of our articles).

The Solution Series has quite a definite – and also a bit pretentious – ring to it. What it does is developing highly critical cultural proposals in a tumultuous era of geopolitical instability that should function as stimulus for rethinking some of the urgent problems present in the area the single book refers to. Some of the titles in the series are “Finland: The Welfare Game” by Martti Kalliala with Jenna Sutela and Tuomas Toivonen, “The Book of Japans” by musical artist and writer Momus, “United States of Palestine-Israel” by Joshua Simon, “America” by Tirdad Zolghadr and “The Great Pyramid” edited by Ingo Niermann and Jens Thiel.

Ironically by using the word ‘solutions’ the editor mocks the well-established critical discourse by ‘inviting the authors to develop an abundance of compact and original ideas for countries and regions contradicting the widely held assumption that after the end of socialism human advancement is only possible technologicaly’.

The latest outtake related to the project is “Solution Greece?”, an exhibition of the work developed by Kyes for the Solution Series. Hosted by Ommu, a bookshop and project space situated in Athens, the exhibition tries to demonstrate the power of cultural production and the kind of solution it might offer in a country that is coping with a difficult political and economic crisis. Finally a socially and politically relevant, even though slightly utopian, approach of contemporary graphic design practice towards the problems of our society.

Rujana Rebernjak – Images courtesy of Sternberg Press

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21/05/2012

Bauhaus: Art as Life

Bauhaus: Art as Life

Hearing there’s a new exhibition about the notorious German school opening its doors might provoke dubious and not at all enthusiastic feelings. We all think we’ve already heard almost everything there is to know about Bauhaus, seen or read massive coffee table books depicting it, we know how its glorious masters look like and maybe even possess some of its heritage.
 When Barbican Art Gallery – in itself a massive brutalist post-war patrimony – announced the first major Bauhaus’ retrospective in Britain after forty years, the zest outside the narrow experts’ circle could have been quite mild.


The history of the revolutionary school, traced from it’s founding in Dessau in 1919 by Walter Gropious until the forced closure in 1933 has already been told from many points of view. 
Nevertheless, “Art as Life” exhibition takes a new insight on the school’s artistic production and the undercurrent legacy. While Bauhaus was duelling between classical take applied arts and its new industrial counterpart, what emerged was a collaborative spirit between (almost) all teachers and students.


“Art as Life” brings to our attention the playful and yet undiscovered side of the progressive modernist school – the famous Bauhaus parties, the commonly unknown photos of fashionable students, the unseen work where professors’ mastery gets mixed with the young students’ idealism and naivety. Unveiling the diversity of Bauhaus’ production, the works displayed are as disparate as Nivea adds, table lamps and ceramic pots, school party invitations, coffee machines, chess sets and spinning tops designed by characters like Johannes Itten, Josef and Anni Albers, Walter Gropious, Hannes Meyer, Paul Klee, Laslo Moholy-Nagy, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and August Schlemmer alongside with their students.

Running until the 12th of August, “Art as Life” opens quite a straightforward look on Bauhaus that makes us understand Modernism was much more than plain rigor.

Rujana Rebernjak – Images courtesy of Bauhaus-Archiv Museum

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18/05/2012

A Plus A – Centro Espositivo Sloveno

A Plus A – Centro Espositivo Sloveno

Venice is the world known city of art and culture, where not only you can visit historical sites like Gallerie dell’Accademia or Scuola Grande di San Rocco tracing the history of fine arts, but where every year worldwide visitors rush to see La Biennale di Venezia. Since the buzz around Biennale usually fades out after the opening, the city quickly returns to its natural slow pace. Fortunately enough, the old beauty has still some eager enterpreneurs that try keeping the city alive all year long.


One of those, if not the only truly worth mentioning, is A Plus A, Centro Espositivo Sloveno. The gallery, situated in one of the most beautiful campos in Venice – Campo Santo Stefano – has quite a full schedule all year long. Besides hosting the Slovenian pavilion during the Biennale, following all of their events you might leave you with a full agenda. Dubious as you may be wondering whether quality shouldn’t be confused with quality, A Plus A can guarantee for both.

Not only it organizes successful exhibitions, the space is also committed to promoting culture in all of its faces, thus hosting concerts, 24-hour performances, talks and a course for curators named Corso in Pratiche Curatorial e Arti Contemporanee.

We have had the occasion to visit the gallery last week during the opening of “Robotica” exhibition involving the exploration of robots as holders of innovation and cultural content. The upcoming events, on the other hand, include “No Title Gallery” collective exhibition and a book presentation. The latter one is the product of Ignacio Uriarte‘s collaboration with Automatic Books, a young but productive independent publishing house based in Venice. The book is named Three Hundred Sixty and will be presented during a brief talk with the author next thursday.

If you find yourself in Venice any time of the year and the marble and pietra d’istria aren’t the only things you’re in search for, pop by at A Plus A for a nice chat with its director Aurora Fonda while taking a peak at their first quality projects.

Rujana Rebernjak

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15/05/2012

Fotografia Europea 2012

Fotografia Europea 2012

The opening weekend of Fotografia Europea 2012 just closed down. As every year the big festival, thanks to its full program of exhibitions, conferences, talks, workshops and performances, turns Reggio Emilia in a centre for professionals and photography lovers worldwide. The core theme of this 7th edition entitled Vita comune: immagini per la cittadinanza (Common life, images for the community of citizens) tackles the issue of living together, wondering which is the meaning of being a citizen in an era when the boundaries of nations are more and more blurred.


With the photography as common language and fill rouge of all the events scattered around the city, Fotografia Europea 2012 tells stories through the analysis of four different perspectives. Four paths summed up in four key topics: “Change”, “Common places”, “Participation” and “Differences”, which aim at charting the idea of new communities, encompassing a new sense of belonging, born from the encounter of natives and migrants who share and generate a certain culture.

At Chiostri di San Pietro, Igor Mukhin (b. Moscow, 1961) in his show La mia Mosca depicts the Russian youth during the historic turning-point of their country through the use of B/W images; while in the same location, Federico Patellani (“E’ nata la Repubblica”) and Massimo Vitali (“All together”) with different approaches show places where usually people join each other – the schools after the Second World War of the former and the crowded beaches of the latter are examples of cohabitation.


Concerning the concept of participation we cannot avoid naming the exhibition Un’idea e un progetto. Luigi Ghirri e l’attività curatoriale, which retraces the curatorial activity of Luigi Ghirri, displayed in Reggio Emilia also at the show A Luigi e Paola Ghirri. Fin dove può arrivare l’infinito?, where visitors can admire the last – and plenty of poetry – shot by the great Italian master.

To underline the importance of defying convention and celebrating the differences, the festival presents a group exhibition, which conveys works by van der Elsken, Strömholm, Carmi and Petersen and relates to a famous song by Lou Reed entitled Take a walk on the wild side.
In occasion of Fotografia Europea, foundations, museums, public and private collections (as the renowned Collezione Maramotti) open their doors to collateral events and shows which will run until the end of June, while concerts and video projections enlivened the three days of inauguration of one of the most enjoyable festival, that is worthwhile living whole hog.

See you there next year!


From the Bureau

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07/05/2012

Fischli & Weiss – the book-works

Fischli & Weiss – the book-works

Speaking from a strictly designer point of view, contemporary art can be quite intimidating. Having a background in applied arts, thus strictly related to objects of daily use, confront with the fine art world can make you feel quite unprepared or inferior. With some contemporary artists though, the perspective changes radically. This is the case with the work done by Swiss duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss.


The two artist have dedicated their career to developing projects that relate to the everyday, simple things and happenings, putting them in an artistic context, making it less intimidating. 
During their thirty year long career, which started with a casual encounter in the famous Kontiki Bar in Zurich, the duo has worked with a many different media such as photography, film, sculptures, media installations and art books. 
Starting with the reproduction of their first work named Wurstserie, a series of photos depicting daily situations made with ham, salami and pickles, printed as a HOW TO magazine, the duo has continued working with print media producing some of the most beautiful artists’ books ever.


For example the book “Airports” published with Edition Patrick Frey, depicts an extensive number of airports thus confronting us with the emptiness of travelling, “when foreign places remain a mere promise, and wanderlust turns to indifference as distance’s reality is just a flashy exotic name, just another destination.” Also published with Edition Patrick Frey are the books “Bilder, Ansichten” exploring conventionally beautiful places and “Photographs”, a concise overview of their photographic work. 
These three books are exceptionally beautiful not only for the grandeur of their content but also for the masterly executed printing, thus making them real treasures. As it would be unfair not to name the other books produced by the prolific couple, here are a few others: Gärten published in 1998, Sichtbare Welt published by Walter König in 2000 and Findet Mich das Glück also published by Walter König in 2003. 
Hopefully these wonderful books will be loved and preserved in the future, as their author David Weiss passed away on the 27th of April 2012. He will be missed.

Rujana Rebernjak – Images courtesy of Edition Patrick Frey

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