Use value

Interesting interview here with Charles Esche, regarding the function and role of museums and the value and uses of art in present day society. He has been recently announced as curator of the 2014 Sao Paulo Biennale. Here's an excerpt that I found interesting:

Domeniek Ruyters: Why this title: The Uses of Art? It suggests that art has another dimension than some of us, used to a more autonomous interpretation of art, might think it has.

Charles Esche: Well, you know Domeniek, that we have been working on this word at VAM for quite a while. To cut a very long story short, I could say that the role of autonomy in modern art is not its role in contemporary practice. Rather than freedom of expression, it is more related to the economy of attention and how ideas gain purchase in a competitive environment. So autonomy remains a crucial concept but instead we talk about use in order to get at autonomy from another angle and, of course, we realise that some people within the world of art find that difficult.

There is also one danger of misinterpretation that people overlook the plural of uses. We are not advocating that art has only one use, but want to address its potential utility within our current ‘overcoded’ conditions (to use Brian Holmes vocabulary). We suggest that the main issue today is not the form of art as such, but much more how we engage with it, how we debate it, how it inspires us to think creatively about where we are and where we could go. Those who at the moment fetishize autonomy as something that needs to be protected make an important mistake, because they cling on to a past value without engaging it with the present tense. Often when having discussions with people who champion autonomy at the end we find that we both value exactly the same things in art, its openness, its possibility to think differently and present things we’ve never seen before. Where we part company is that we believe we should find ways to allow this openness to have agency in the present, when it can constructively manifest itself in the lives of people.

Italia

Don't know how it's taken me this long but I've only recently discovered the work of Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri. This month's Art Forum has an amazing portfolio of images (the last two images are snaps from these) and an essay that is well worth a read if you would like to know more.

Deptford

REEL - UNREEL

Francis Alÿs - REEL - UNREEL
Kabul, Afghanistan 2011
In collaboration with Julien Devaux and Ajmal Maiwandi
20:00 min.

Watch here

Division of labour

“… in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, to fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.” Karl Marx, The German Ideology (1845)

Quoted by Anton Vidokle in Art without Market, Art without Education: Political Economy of Art, e-Flux Journal Issue 43

Tiqqun

The 'locational turn'

"dOCUMENTA (13) takes a spatial or, rather, "locational" turn, highlighting the significance of a physical place, but at the same time aiming for dislocation and for the creation of different and partial perspectives — an exploration of micro-histories on varying scales that link the local history and reality of a place with the world, and the worldly."

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Curator documenta (13)
(My Photograph)

Public Sculpture in King's Lynn

Public sculpture on the Green Quay, King's Lynn, paying homage to the town's history as a major Hanseatic port town with links to Bergen, Norway and other Hanseatic towns across Northern Europe.

Ranciere on the aesthetic revolution

J.R.: What is the kernel of the aesthetic revolution? First of all, negatively, it means the ruin of any art defined as a set of systematisable practices with clear rules. It means the ruin of any art where art’s dignity is defined by the dignity of its subjects – in the end, the ruin of the whole hierarchical conception of art which places tragedy above comedy and history painting above genre painting, etc. To begin with, then, the aesthetic revolution is the idea that everything is material for art, so that art is no longer governed by its subject, by what it speaks of: art can show and speak of everything in the same manner. In this sense, the aesthetic revolution is an extension to infinity of the realm of language, of poetry.

It is the affirmation that poems are every- where, that paintings are everywhere. So, it is also the development of a whole series of forms of perception which allow us to see the beautiful everywhere. This implies a great anonymisation of the beautiful (Mallarmé’s “ordinary” splendour). I think this is the real kernel: the idea of equality and anonymity. At this point, the ideal of art becomes the conjunction of artistic will and the beauty or poeticity that is in some sense immanent in everything, or that can be uncovered everywhere.

That is what you find all through the fiction of the nineteenth century, but it’s at work in the poetry too. For example, it’s what Benjamin isolated in Baudelaire, but it’s something much broader than that too. It implies a sort of exploding of genre and, in particular, that great mixing of literature and painting which dominates both literature and painting in the nineteenth century. It is this blending of literature and painting, pure and applied art, art for art’s sake and art within life, which will later be opposed by the whole modernist doxa that asserts the growing autonomy of the various arts.

My Favourite Photograph

Wolfgang Tillmans - Young Man, Jeddah, a, 2012

Tomorrow I will be talking about this image at The Photographers' Gallery as part of their series of My Favourite Photograph Talks. The talk will begin in the gallery cafe at 1pm.

Dream house

Residencia Tomie Ohtake / Ruy Ohtake from here.

Amsterdam

WB

The nature of this sadness stands out more clearly if one asks with whom the adherents of historicism actually empathize. The answer is inevitable: with the victor. And all the rulers are the heirs of those who conquered before them. Hence, empathy with the victor invariably benefits the rulers. Historical materialists know what that means. Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession. They are called cultural treasures, and a historical materialist views them with cautious detachment. For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another.A historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from it as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain.

Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History

South American Modernism

"In the city’s San Francisco Valley, these slums, where nearly half of Caraqueños live, dramatically run up against a series of gargantuan buildings with punchy red, yellow, blue, and white facades cut out from the hillside—superbloques. Each of these housing projects is forty meters tall and over eighty meters long. Nearly swallowed by ranchos, they are vestiges of modernist urbanism long since colonized by the realities of twentieth-century Caracas."

- Joshua Bauchner, The City That Built Itself

In the kitchen

When I'm not out at college in the studio one of my favourite places to spend time is in the kitchen of our house in Ealing. Over the summer we managed to grow a little of our own produce despite being away much of it, the cabbages in particular were delicious fried in olive oil and garlic. I've also been able to try my hand at pasta thanks to Dulcie buying me my own Imperia Pasta Maker for my birthday back in September, using Tipo 00 flour from the amazing Lina Stores on Brewer Street in Soho. Of course, Fred the cat is never far away, demanding his dinner or more often a little attention!

The Poetics of a Palm Tree

I've long admired the work of Yto Barrada, so was pleased to hear that she is part of the new group show at Tate Modern's Level 2 Gallery, I Decided Not to Save The World. In an approach perhaps similar to that of Francis Alys, the artists in the show look at such topics as cultural identity, territory and globalisation by way of what could be considered gestures, small interventions that have larger implications. For me Barrada's work was the best contribution here, with a body of work that focuses on the palm tree as a symbol for modernisation in her native Tangier, its usage by thegovernment as a symbol to attract tourism. Barrada produced a fanzine that was first distributed at the Third Marrakech Biennial and here displayed in its entirety in poster form. Her film Beau Geste shows workers attempting to save the life of a palm tree on a vacant plot of the land that has been sabotaged in order that it might fall down - it is illegal to cut down a palm tree, and so in order to stop the owner of the land developing on it Barrada explains how these people have set about to save the tree and thus disrupt his plans. A simple gesture it may be, Barrada highlights the resistance that can occur in the face of a modernising and globalising economy.

Images from here.

An image of modernity

Today I visited the ICA for the latest in their series of culture now talks, with this instalment being delivered by Hal Foster. His newly published book looks at ways in which contemporary art and architecture have informed each other, something he terms the art-architecture complex, and the implications of this. In his talk he discussed various threads of the book in relation to specific examples of architecture, from architects such as Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano who he described as being exponents of a 'global style' of design, to Zaha Hadid and Herzog and de Meuron, whose stylistic influences drawn from such historical artistic avant-gardes as Russian constructivism he was particularly sceptical of. He noted how these buildings are essentially images first and foremost - glittering beacons of modernity that have no grounding in site or locality (think the ostentatiousness of the Shard).

There was also a trajectory in his line of thought from the minimalism he has discussed at length before in his career and the spatial concerns of contemporary architecture today. Interesting was his disdain for how the buildings discussed aspired to create a sense of 'lightness of being', and how these buildings were aspiring to a sense of modernist 'transparency' - making the materials of the building visible - but in fact were creating an air of mystification and illusion. Rather than an experience being activated by the subject and their relation to the space - as with minimalism - the space itself creates the experience, and this is a negative, Foster posed.

Since it began to rise above its surroundings on the south bank of the Thames I've found the Shard incredibly disconcerting. As Hal Foster noted in his talk, it really does have no connection or awareness of its immediate surroundings in London Bridge and its sheer height really does make it difficult to come to terms with. I've always found its juxtaposition with the brutalist, modernist tower it sits next to a poignant happenstance - as Andrew Marr pointed out in his recent television series on megacities, here is London's glittering beacon of modernity, casting a shadow over the eyesore that once heralded another moment of modernity but that now is a drab, grey, monstrous lump of concrete. And yet it was this concrete and the aforementioned transparency of materials that formed the core of the modernist project, analogous to them with a transparency in all aspects of democratic life. What is so democratic about the Shard, rising high above all around it?

"We need to make a building that doesn't shut people out, one that responds to local as well as city-wide needs. A building of this scale, this ambition, cannot be just for private gain: it becomes a public project privately financed." - Renzo Piano on The Shard

Midcentury Days

Polypropylene Chair

Royal Festival Hall Lounge Chair

Calyx print

Yesterday Dulcie and I visited the Robin and Lucienne Day exhibition at PM Gallery in Ealing. The Days, a husband and wife duo, could be regarded as the British Eames, with their furniture and fabric designs propelling Britain towards modernity in the 1950s and 60s. The exhibition displayed some truly exquisite design work, featuring famous example of Robin Day's chairs designed for the Royal Festival Hall and a vast range of fabric designs by Lucienne Day, including the famous Calyx print commissioned for the Festival of Britain in 1951 (pictured above). The whole midcentury modern thing is having a bit of a revival currently and with the recent recreation of the Festival of Britain on the Southbank, yet it was nice to see this understated exhibition focusing purely on the merits of the design, highlighting that, whilst it may be a nostalgic trend for some, this was not simply about riding the wave of popularity but showcasing timeless, quality design.

Ideational Arts

If you have time please check out Ideational Arts, a new platform for discussion of visual art and culture. It has been set up by a course mate of mine and I am one of the contributors, and have just posted an article today. We hope to encourage dialogue and debate whilst discussing issues that relate to our own practice an other wider cultural concerns we may have.

Details from Butterworth Station, Penang

Butterworth Station is in the north of Peninsular Malaysia and is situated next to the ferry terminal which provides access to Pilau Penang. We arrived here after an ovenight train from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur and a subsequent six hour train journey up the mainland, taking in much of rural Malaysia along the way.