Published September 1, 2006 by aanews
f you think electro-punk is dead, you don’t know Hermann Schwartz, the guitar player in the French group Métal Urbain. Hermann’s guitar playing and his punk politics have made him a legend in his own time. Schwartz outclasses them all, and here he ups the ante even more by sampling the great thinkers of history and putting them in their rightful places. Check out those groovy dropcaps he designed! And contribute now to the Hermann Schwartz canonization fund: buy this book.
RD
roximity aside, it’s hard to resist comparing the New Age window dressing of the Christo’s Central Park ‘Gates’ to Daniel Buren’s spectacular “The Eye of the Storm’ installation currently at the Guggenheim Museum. One has sold tons of catalogues, posters, and t-shirts, and one has not. One would have been (possibly) admired by Robert Smithson, and the other (probably) not, etc. Buren in his ‘welcome back’ return to the “Gugg’ (pronounced ‘goog’) messes with it in a way it’s never been messed with before. For me, the art exhibited in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Emerald City never really mattered; it was the building that was the star. And whether you plod your way up the ramp, or scoot your way down, the vast, spiraling rotunda would seize your attention (and heighten your anxieties) with its Hitchcockian perspectives and groin high balconies. This would always win out over the art, andcheat the museumgoer out of any experience beyond a thrilling stroll interrupted by the occasional presence of puzzling objects. Knowing this, it ishere that Buren exercises a form of revenge on this institution. Deservedly revered in Europe, Buren is re- membered in the US as the ‘Stripe Guy’,a conceptual artist who makes pictures ofpaintings (pre-printed linen stripes) that function both as a logo/brand and as a fram-ing device within the art contexts that choseto host them. I have always admired Buren’s “stick-to-your-guns” practice (ahem) and thebleak gaiety of the stripes themselves. In recent years, Buren, like many of his gen-eration (LeWitt, Graham, and to some de- gree Weiner) has moved into the lucrative sphere of commissioned public and private art. Apart from a gala opening attended by‘all of Paris’ that included a quaint, photo- genic performance; the only stripes aroundwere in the recreation of a 1966 painting installation. What really matters is the massive, two-sided, mirrored wedge that extends from the ground floor (thus shrinking it) to the dome, disrupting the Gugg’s sacred vortex of sightlines. 
adim Fishkin’s upcoming accomplishments include “A SPEEDY DAY 2” for the Slovakian pavillion at the Venice Biennial and a book with onestarpress. His web site has this description of his installation “A SPEEDY DAY: The light in the room is changing according to the “fast clock”. On its electronic display time is running in its own “fast rhythm”. “Daylight” and “nightlight” follow one another to the rhythm of the “electronic clock”. For example, 24 hours are “passing” in 12 minutes. If we were on a hypothetical rocket moving away from the Earth at a speed of 299,782 km/sec (which is only 10 m/sec slower than the speed of light), these 12 minutes would become the “day” of the “earth clock”. Several different options could be calculated based on several different “speeds”. The speed of the “clock” is calculated with the formula: t = t0/(1 - v2/c2)1/2.”
ans Schabus is from Vienna, as everyone knows since he took over the Austrian pavillion at the Venice Biennial 2005. The city he lives in has morphed in recent history from a sleek European backwater to a western frontier town as Eastern European borders opened. Stodgy old Vienna is getting some of it’s mojo back, and Hans is a part of that. He has long worked on complex interdisciplinary frontiers in art, creating hybrids and mash-ups of sculpture, architechture (as you can see above), installation and performance. His work is challenging and smart, as much so in it’s particulars as in the arc of his mid-stage career. His work is often about communicating psychological states and strategies spacially, i.e., about being an artist. But Hans’ work avoids the trap of self-referentiality because it remains based in objective correlatives of the unconscious. Imagine the young Freud, another Viennois of course, wandering around Hans’ installation (« Astronaut (be right back) ») in the main room at the Vienna Secession in 2003, or playing with trains in Hans’ atelier. At last, our Freud might think, an artist who understands my work! Maybe that’s why Hans is such a dreamer : he should have a sign that says DO NOT DISTURB ARTIST AT WORK over his head while he is sleeping. But of course he may be just taking a nap. Or he may be digging a train tunnel to the moon. Who can say, except Hans?
uick : name the only visual artist to ever win an oscar! It’s Pierre Bismuth, of course, the French Brain behind THE ETERNAL SUNHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND and creator of such films as “Quelques comédiens au milieu de quelques acteurs” (1997-1999). He has brought a brin of updated French situationism to Hollywood, along with a goût for conceptual narrative. He has scaled up new narrative tools for cinema, and put Hollywood in possession of raconteur’s dynamite, not to mention a new kind of psycho-geography. No wonder they gave this artist a refl ecting doll to play with. Will Pierre now go erring in La La Land? Has he outgrown galleries? Not if his recent book from onestar press is any indication (see article page 9 ). His artist’s book is a sort of conceptual koan to meditate on, about as far from Hollywood’s les paillettes dans les yeux as he could get. Maybe sometime Pierre will do a gigantic commercial topography of Hollywood, the way he did of Paris (“Sans titre,” in Châteauroux, 1992, 10m x 5m). That’s a map we sure would like to see.
t first look, onestar’s French-sized LARGE IMAGES (exactly the standard format of French billboards) invert the intimate, private space of the books: these digital images created by onestar’s artists have been scaled up for the “grand public.” We’ll bet you can’t fit one in your apartment or loft, no matter how much space you have! Another obvious way that onestar’s LARGE IMAGES differ from the books is that they are in color (the colors are sublime). But aside from the dramatic shifts in scale and chromaticity, these works adhere to onestar’s core principles: strictly unedited by the publisher, identical format for everyone, and each individual work becomes part of a collection. No work exists except in relation to others of its kind. Artists generally like the vertiginous feeling of an “Alice in Wonderland” change in perspective – onestar offers us this experience without perverting its principles. The distortion is all yours. (Follow the links under each Large Image to acquire the works from Multiples By Artists).
Just when you thought painting was dead again (yawn), here’s JOSH SMITH to change your mind and make you sit up straight. Remember he lives and works in NYC, a place where “bad” often means “good,” i.e., “Damn, dude, that is a BAAAADDD painting.” Cunning linguists will note that “ass” is often appended to “bad” (when it means “good”) as an enhancer: “Your girlfriend is bad-ass, man!” At any rate, Josh is one badass painter, and we look forward to seeing what he has up his smock sleeves in the years ahead.
The her & him American-Cuban art team Allora & Calzadilla (that’s Jennifer & Guillermo) live and work in Puerto Rico, the Caribbean island that Roosevelt made a protectorate of the U.S. in exchange for voting Democratic. Puerto Rico got welfare, Roosevelt got re-elected president. Puerto Rican independence was a political hot topic in NYC in the 80s, but then it disappeared. Allora & Calzadilla are bringing this complicated, beautiful island and it’s politics back onto our radar screens. Our duo asked the Mexican artist Abraham Cruzvillegas to select this LARGE IMAGE from their archives; “Bieké” is the Vieques language, and not speaking it is a kind of death. The image also subtly reminds us that the U.S. Navy for many years used the smaller offshore island of Vieques (snorkeling is excellent) as their private testing ground for some very dicey bombs (radioactive depleted uranium shells), and the cancer rates today reflect that.
CHLOE PIENE loves flirting with dark forces, and her LARGE IMAGE is a photograph of a tattoo worn by a prisoner in Ohio with whom she conversed by phone (her onestar book is a partial transcript of this conversation). Someone should write about the fascination that prisoners hold for the free – Truman Capote felt it deeply, as did Norman Mailer (with famously disastrous results). How far Chloe will go remains a mystery; in her notorious self-portrait of her body surfing at a heavy metal concert she arranged in Brooklyn, N.Y., she is a kind of saintly presence floating over this Goth underworld.
John Armleder’s the most elegant art guru around, and good luck keeping up with him. Don’t be fooled by his birth date. Got an idea? He had it yesterday. Remember Fluxus? John was there from the start. Heard of Ecart, the exhibition/performance space in Geneva? He founded it. Neo-Geo art/furniture morphs? You guessed it. Where would artists like Tobias Rehberger be without John? His onestar pieces (books and multiples) always reuse the onestar collection in some way, reflecting us all in the mirror of his sensibility. Here he takes art stars we are (or would be) literally, offering us all a vision of celestial power we can groove to. State of grace, ommmmmmmmmmm, Dude.
Everyone knows CHRISTOPHE BOUTIN is an artist/filmmaker/editor, but how many of you know he began life as a bluegrass musician and then as a punk rocker who made three albums with CBS in the late 1970s? This image is a still from his recent movie project with cinematographer Garret Linn with the help of Chris Hoover and Mélanie Scarciglia in West Virginia, where he revisited his musical roots by filming the bluegrass group Ernie Thacker Route 23. This is deep Amerika, far from coastal frivolities east& west. Christophe has caught an intimate moment between bluegrass musician Matthew Thacker and his girlfriend Jen, C. Boutin enlarged it for public viewing.
Pierre Bismuth is the first French artist to win an Oscar (in 2005 for “The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”), and he’s still in the movies! His LARGE IMAGE is part of a series of abstract drawings where he places a screen in front of a video and traces with a felt pen the movements of a hand of an actress or actor. He’s done Gene Tierney in “Laura,” for example, and here we have Marilyn Monroe righthand in “The Misfits.” Fasten your conceptual seat belt when Pierre’s around; the action doesn’t get any better than this.
Lawrence Weiner is an old friend at onestar press (there are still a few, but not many, of his amazing multiples from 2004 left). Here he fills the LARGE IMAGE format with a practiced master’s hand: Lawrence has been working in outsized formats since before some of you were born. He’s one of the guys who put a little retinal juice back in conceptual art in the early days, presiding over a very public ménage à trois consisting of concrete poetry, minimalism & color field painting. Or something like that. At any rate, who can count all the artists who owe part of their vision (not to mention their living) to this legend in his own time? thanks.
Diego Perrone is an earthy guy with deep roots in Italy. He’s great at juxtaposing people/places/animals/objects in ways that bring out inherent aesthetic/conceptual qualities. His projects sometimes have a sly, humorous twist to them, like his Pensatori di buchi (The Thinkers of Holes, 2002), where just the name gets our attention. For this project Diego and his father spent a couple of month digging holes on their property and then the artist photographed local guys, both naked and clothed, around them. His LARGE IMAGE is a self-portrait of him as a teenager with a pig. And aren’t all teenage boys pigs? But what makes this our kind of art is that the focus is on the pig and not Diego.
hat has happened to the land of the free and the home of the brave in four short years? Alexis de Toqueville’s famous tyranny of the masses has morphed into a television-fueled nightmare on Main Street. EVERYTHING is super-sized, not just the state’s repressive apparatus and the Bush regime’s oligopoly. FOX News, the Republican propaganda arm, reaches into the far corners of the country 24/7/365 and is slowly poisoning the American mind. This is racism for the masses, a primitive fear of the other made public policy. It’s a machine for the installation of low-grade perpetual war. The Cold War has become the Culture War. Where is Joseph Beuys when we need him? “To make people free is the aim of art, therefore art for me is the science of freedom.” Beuys liked America (and America liked him), but he wasn’t going to take any bullshit from it. Today, watching videos of his actions reminds us that art used to matter. Just look at him at his blackboard at the Tate in London, covered in chalk dust, earnestly discoursing about politics and art with anyone who wandered in. He actually believed that an artist could transform the world, change the course of history, bring down a government. In the U.S.A., the only people who believe that today are born-again evangelists. Someone has locked the ghost of Joseph Beuys in a very dark place. Freud thought that people love tyranny for the same reason that they love intoxicants and sex: temporary relief from cognitive dissonance. The dissonance provoked by the crises of globalization has given the US government enormous powers to establish control which daily diminish individual freedom. Afterart News believes that artists matter more than ever today if only because, for most of us, cognitive dissonance is our modus operandi. But we also know that if art is to be more than a pleasurable pastime for the rich or a barnacle on the underbelly of mass culture, then artists, collectors, curators and culture vultures of all stripes must be political (whatever their art may be). The freedom of our science is at stake. Beuys’s blackboards have become our flat screens. Let the presses roll.
M y life is better than yours”, it says with hand-painted letters on a big piece of paper. However, the melancholic setting of the photograph, showing the artist a bit sad and thoughtful looking, sitting on the floor next to her text piece, makes the assertion seem somewhat empty or untrustworthy if not pathetic. “texts by annika ström” the artist collected a series of photographs of her text pieces like: “This work refers to no one”, “I love to live but not with me”, “I am a better artist than I deserve” and “Everything in this show could be used against me”. The photos seem like they could be stills from one of her videos and the phrases could be lyrics from one of her love songs. Far from being a straightforward reproduction of her work, the text pieces are presented in various “lived” settings, often within an intimate context of her private surroundings and in the company of friends presenting her work or doing whatever they were doing, when the picture was taken. The way Annika Ström chooses to represent the text pieces transforms her book into a collection of verbi-visual poems, which play with images and words. The fact that both systems are open to multiple significations, i.e. that one and the same sentence can be perceived as an empty formal phrase as well as a heartfelt existential outcry, depending on the context. But Annika Ström’s text pieces and their visual context are hardly pointing in the same direction. Text and image are not trying to coax the viewer or anchor the meaning of the message. In fact, they rather seem to display a semantic gap, which has to do with a general confusion or openness regarding: Who is speaking? To whom? From which position? About what exactly? There is often a good deal of irony and especially self-irony in Annika Ström’s work. This is no exception when the text pieces are talking about themselves, their own making, their value and reception, commenting on the art market and addressing the viewers expectations. But the irony and apparent lightness are accompanied by an earnest tone. With the “staging” of phrases like “please help me” it seems as if the addresser is already beyond the point of rescue.
laire Staebler reports on the serious artistic update given to the cozy nostalgic world of radio at radiodays.org, which is broadcasting over the internet for 26 days from De Appel Stichting and includes curatorial work by Rael Artel, Kathrin Jentjens, Jelena Vesic, Huib van der Werf and Veronica Wiman as well as Claire herself. Internet and digital capabilities have not left the world of radio alone of course. We remember the fi rst time we listened to New York radio live here in Paris over an early broadband connection- hairs stood up all over the place. And a lot has sure happened since then. So here’s Claire’s take on this audio enterprise.
