One Way or the Other: Asian American Art Now

Asia Society and Museum

One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now
At Asia Society and Museum 725 Park Avenue (at 70th Street)http://www.AsiaSociety.org

“the Asia Society’s latest,and possibly best, foray into contemporary art.” Roberta Smith, The New York Times

Artists in the Exhibition Michael Arcega Xavier Cha Patty Chang Binh Danh Mari Eastman Ala Ebtekar Chitra Ganesh Glenn Kaino Geraldine Lau Jiha Moon Laurel Nakadate Kaz Oshiro Anna Sew Hoy Jean Shin Indigo Som Mika Tajima Saira Wasim Co-Curators Melissa Chiu Karin Higa Susette S. Min

One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now brings together 17 artists from across the country who challenge and extend the category of Asian American art. The title of the exhibition, inspired by the 1970s Blondie hit, suggests that there has never been a formulaic way of making or seeing art, either back then or now. Instead, these artists initiate a new set of conversations that highlight the multidimensional ways of conceptualizing and producing art today.The selected artists came of age in various parts of the United States during the late 1970s and 1980s. They have at their disposal a wide array of art historical practices, popular culture references, and local influences. What characterizes much of their art, as distinguished from the work of previous generations, is a freedom to choose, manipulate, and reinvent different kinds of languages and issues, whether formal, conceptual, or political. The works in the exhibition, many of them made especially for this show, reflect this energy. Together, the artists and their work defy a definitive conception of Asian American art.

A fully illustrated catalog, One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now, is available at AsiaStore, http://www.AsiaStore.org For information on related programs, visit the One Way or Another exhibition website or call the Asia Society box office at (212) 517-ASIA.

INTERCITY: URBAN ARTS FOR SOUTH EAST ASIA

VENUE: Galeri Seni Maya
No.12, 1st fl, Jalan Telawi 3, Bangsar Baru, 59100 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

DATE: Saturday, 23 September 2006

TIME: 3 PM

An Introduction to META HOUSE, Promotion of Cultural Exchange and International Dialogue

Nico Mesterham, a filmmaker from Berlin based in Phnom Penh, Cambodia will be at Maya Gallery on 23 September 2006, Saturday to introduce META HOUSE (“meta” means “compassion” in Khmer), Cambodia’s first Art & Communication Center and elaborate on the INTERCITY project. Meta House is scheduled to open on 5 January 2007 with an exhibition cum event entitled INTERCITY: URBAN ARTS FOR SOUTH EAST ASIA. Broad ranging creative activities are planned for the opening night and revenue donated to the “Children’s Help Cambodia” Foundation, which is building a children’s village for 96 orphans and vulnerable children in the outskirts of Phnom Penh.

This event will be the start of the first phase (COM.PILING/2007) of a 3-year long project. Within the second phase (COM.MUTING/2008) several SE Asian cities (Bangkok, Hanoi, Saigon, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Manila...) and artists are linked throughout an exchange program and workshops. The third phase (COM.PREHENDING/2009) will result in a catalogue, an interactive DVD and an exhibition in Berlin/Germany.

The three-year project INTERCITY is dedicated to city cultures from Phnom Penh to Berlin – from "New Asia" to “Old Europe", from the glitzy boulevards to the backyards of societies, to the basements and undergrounds and back to the future of our neighbourhoods. How do citizens envisage their living environments and how can they shape them? What skills are needed to survive in a hostile environment? Whose ideas prevail if they are not documented? Can art be a vehicle for social change, or should art be a self-critical discipline that pursues primarily aesthetic ends? What is the relationship between art and mass culture? They are not only encouraging artists, painters, sculptors, filmmakers, photographers, poets, performers or musicians, but also forethinkers, urban planners, architects, politicians, scientists and journalists to contribute something special and unique to the INTERCITY project."

We encourage those interested to attend this talk cum open dialogue to meet with Nico Mesterham and get a better understanding of Meta House’s 3-year plan and how you can be involved. For more info, contact Terry at +6-012 297 2357

Dirty Yoga: 2006 Taipei Biennial

Since the 1960s, people have gradually turned from radical politics and ideologies to a preoccupation with approaches to living, as manifested in the satisfaction of “desire” in our daily lives. Desire has replaced science and ethics as the primary social motivation for progress, while its essence and symbols have undergone constant change. This highlights the role played by consumerism and marketing mechanisms in shaping our perception of what it is we think we want. This expression of desire is also a manifestation of energy. Increased desire leads to greater fear of loss. People today are afraid of losing their health, their beauty, their youth and their wealth. To counter their fear of facing this reality, they invent different spectacular spaces and collective activities centered on the perfection and reinforcement of their lifestyle choices. Gradually, these spaces and activities are replacing abstract religion and turning into a universal belief.

As these broad social changes unfold, the underlying structure of rational thought is also changing. Rational binary logic has long transcended the status of mental tool and become a modality of thought in itself. Our largely dormant capacity to imagine productive thought occurring outside of binary dualisms subtly governs our way of perceiving and interacting with the outside world. With Western civilization slowly loosening its hegemonic grip on the rest of the planet, the power of the binary over our shared humanity shows corresponding signs of crumbling. ‘Them’ can be a useful category only when we possess an equally sharp notion of who ‘us’ is. Otherwise, we are all just ‘us,’ in a confusing and sloppy way, and there is nothing else. Enemies and allies, good and evil, beautiful and ugly, rich and poor…today they shift about on unstable supports, more relativized with each rhetorical effort to incorporate the outmoded codes into the new meta-language of fear and desire.

Through this lens, we will treat Taipei as the epitome of a globalized community, observing the different new and trendy lifestyles that people adopt through the extremely rapid social changes and fashions of living. These lifestyles amply illustrate the complexity of the issues surrounding the satisfaction of desire and the fear of loss. The new lifestyles sought by the contemporary urban population (organic food, reshaping the body, spiritual renewal etc.) suggest a fundamental conflict with existence and progress, and indirectly question the real values of civilization. This also applies to yoga, a burgeoning activity that seems to have moved away from its original spirituality towards an entirely different set of values of existence. It has become the quintessential model and symbol of contemporary lifestyle. From these themes of lifestyle, we will extend the discussion to include economic and political structures, and pose questions about history and about the contempor ary trends of globalization to find out exactly what we desire and exactly what we fear.

In recent years, artists everywhere have begun creating objects and situations that promote a ‘third way’ of understanding the world -- not according to direct opposition of thesis and antithesis, but beginning with a synthesis of the many, and leading to compromise, hybridity, consensus, and other forms of non-oppositional resolution. They are participating in a discourse of ‘between-ness’ that produces hybrid, mutated, nomadic meanings that are always contingent, and often subject to multiple interpretations, just as the noun ‘between-ness” suggests a state of possessing two meanings and neither of those meanings at the same time. While the state of “between-ness,” like a utopia, may never be realized, it often leads to the possibility of understanding and recognition through some kind of confrontation, like that implied by the meanings of the words “restricted” and “dirty” in our daily lives.

Rising up from far less exalted roots, ‘dirty’ is the all-purpose adjective for anything that social propriety cannot endorse. Whether it means being literally unclean or merely too demonstrably prone to lascivious impulses, something that is dirty seems to exist in a state of suspension, while awaiting its ultimate destiny: getting cleaned up. Until that state is achieved, whatever is currently dirty is not entitled to pass through the portals of high culture. Even in cases where the word ‘dirty’ suggests a liminal state where normal restrictions do not apply, the fact that civilization can be measured by our degree of success in expunging dirt from our lives speaks eloquently about the body’s unstoppable trajectory towards a state of inert matter.Coining the title Dirty Yoga for an international biennial of contemporary art is a way of foregrounding some of these inherent discrepancies. By underscoring the latent discord between the body’s living perfection and its ultimate state of demise, Dirty Yoga proposes tossing all of our preconceptions about the subject of mind-body relations overboard. With its echo of the various modernized branches of yoga practice, Dirty Yoga proposes a hypothetical state of heightened spiritual engagement with one’s lower order of impulses and actions. Although according to our latest information, ‘dirty yoga’ does not yet exist as a practice in any of the hundreds (if not thousands) of yoga centers opening up in the world’s major cities, the co-curators of the 2006 Taipei Biennial are convinced that it is only a question of time before it is widely available.

The Exhibition encompasses a diverse range of contemporary artists, both Taiwanese and international.Artists: Alexandre ARRECHEA (Cuba/Spain), Monica BONVICINI (Italy/ Germany), CAO Fei (China), E Chen (Taiwan/US), CHOU Meng-te (Taiwan), Jonas DAHLBERG (Sweden), El Perro (Spain), Katharina GROSSE (Germany), GUO Fengyi (China), Subodh GUPTA (India), Emily JACIR (Palestine/US), JUNG Yeondoo (Korea), An-My LE (Vietnam/US), LEE Bul (Korea), Nalini MALANI (India), Yuko MURATA (Japan), Eko NUGROHO (Indonesia), Damian ORTEGA (Mexico), Arthur OU (Taiwan/US), Araya RASDJARMREARNSOOK (Thailand), Mauro RESTIFFE (Brazil), Robin RHODE (S. Africa/Germany), Carolee SCHNEEMANN (US), Shazia SIKHANDER (Pakistan/US), Regina SILVEIRA (Brazil), Valeska SOARES (Brazil), Jennifer STEINKAMP (US), Vivan SUNDARAM (India), Kazuna TAGUCHI (Japan), TAKE2030 (UK). Koki TANAKA (Japan), Francesco VEZZOLI (Italy), VIVA (Taiwan), Nari WARD (Jamaica/US), Hong-Kai WANG (Taiwan/US), Chun-Hui WU (Taiwan)

Architecture and Sculpture

Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg

ArchiSculpture Dialogues between Architecture and Sculpture from the 18th Century to the Present DayKunstmuseum WolfsburgHollerplatz 138440 WolfsburgGermany

info@kunstmuseum-wolfsburg.de
http://www.kunstmuseum-wolfsburg.de

The reciprocal relationship between sculpture and architecture is one of the most exciting artistic phenomena of the 20th century. From its inception in the 19th century, modern sculpture has continually absorbed important new influences from architectural history, such as Aristide Maillol from Classicism or, later, the Constructivists from Gothic. Installation art in the 1970s even transformed sculpture into walk-in architecture, giving the viewer an entirely new perception of their own body. Conversely, in the 1920s architects began to base their building designs on sculptural forms. Current architecture has developed such markedly sculptural qualities that it sometimes appears to continue the history of sculpture.ArchiSculpture, curated by Markus Brüderlin, the new director of the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, explores this process of mutual inspiration in striking spatial displays. Original pieces of art by outstanding sculptors are juxtaposed with models of world architecture. The exhibition includes examples of both disciplines from the past 200 years and brings together the work of around 120 artists.

Notable Thai artists 1: Wit Pimchankanapong

From Perfect Thais series: Perfect Thai passenger.

My Lawrence Chua profile: Art4D May 2006

The interest of Thailand to writers and intellectuals who work from a variety of perspectives is hardly a secret, questions of what is permissible within the country notwithstanding, yet the range and depth of contemporary writing about, or just inspired by, Thai culture can seem surprisingly unnoticed amidst the literature that is promoted within the region. Lawrence Chua is a cultural critic, novelist and academic who has drawn on Thailand throughout his career but his profile here remains somewhat minor. After being raised for his early years in Southeast Asia he grew up in North America and emerged during the late 80s as a writer of note in that part of the world. His output is diverse but underlined by a sense of directness and an exceptional capacity for translating insights and ideas from different traditions into accessible and widely relevant text. With essays such as "Speaking Parts: Silence, Language and the Postcolonial Faggot" Chua explored the power of language and the challenge of silence for disempowered groups, citing Khun Noi Chantawipa Apisuk of sex-workers' rights group EMPOWER on the necessity of language to gain control and avoid exploitation. Or, with 'Blood and Business: The Sweet Science of Thailand's Boxing World’ he builds a commentary on capitalism with highly evocative descriptions of the history and spectacle of Muay Thai. Fiction such as the short story 'Love in a Cold Climate' examines the dynamics of gender, desire and gay male identity for a young Thai couple. With so much divisive theorizing and argumentation over the cultural impact of globalization Chua effortlessly moves across or melds the forms of difference that can trap other writers.

He is currently a Fellow in the History and Theory of Architecture at Cornell University, where he is researching the conjoined genealogies of modernity and the sports stadium.Here Lawrence is concerned with the ways that contemporary experience is, I quote, "mediated by a scopic regime that was historically shaped in such arenas". Wembley Stadium is the particular object of this interest but as a lateral thinker and prolific writer he moves in many directions and was in Chiang Mai during December to present his paper titled (disarmingly enough) 'A Chink in the Works: Building, Dwelling and Translating the Penang Mansion of Zhang Bishi' at the 10th anniversary conference of SEASREP: the Southeast Asian Studies Regional Exchange Program.The conference was titled Southeast Asia, A Global Crossroads and Chua's paper traces the conjunction of modernity and tradition in the construction and design of the so-called Blue Mansion (Cheong Fatt Tze Mansion) in Penang, built by Hakka migrant Zhang Bishi in the late 19th century and subject to a UNESCO conservation award in 2000. Bishi has been described as China's first capitalist and last mandarin; he became a millionaire through various means (plantations, opium syndicates, trading with the Dutch army and navy) and held consular appointments in Singapore and Penang as well as being appointed a supreme mandarin by the Q'ing court. Chua is concerned with how Bishi's national, regional and global interests came to be represented by the Blue Mansion - which includes Gothic, Art Nouveau, Cantonese and Hokkien elements - at the historical juncture when Imperial China was approaching its death and European empires were expanding in Southeast Asia.He explained, "I'm interested in the ways that our lives are effected by and effect the built environment. We're the children, or grandchildren more likely, of a radical process of territorialization that created sovereign nations and colonies in the 19th century. Today we're experiencing another radical spatializing process: globalization. I'm interested in the relationship between these two historical moments. In short, I'm interested in the ways that the built environment conditions our habits and in how those habits, in turn, come to shape our lives".

Thailand has also been a notable source for such considerations and we met to discuss the significance this country holds for him. His 1998 novel Gold by the Inch, for example, entwined stunning descriptionsof Bangkok with accounts of an Asian-American man's return to sites of formative memories, meditations on the nature of migration and academic and popular discourses on colonialism and postcolonialism. The descriptions include 'the city as bitch, a sonorous lullaby of hungry flies', 'a sloppy patchwork of unassimilable stories' and, my personal favorite, the more prosaic 'ugly cities have great futures'. He told me, the most accurate and most simple thing to say is my relationship with Thailand is complicated. I was born in the region, so there's already that very complicated family genealogy. Although I went back a few times as a child, it wasn't until I was in my 20s that I really returned in a conscious way to the region. It was the 1980s and the cultural scene in the U.S. was immersed in the politics of identity. It was eye-opening to me to see the ways that a broad spectrum of Thai society (from artists to minor royalty; from sex workers to young professionals) dealt, and had been dealing, with similar issues of identity in a much more engaging and empowering way. It was an exciting time and for almost every time I was made to feel completely at home, there were moments where I was reminded of the tentative quality of that term. One of my interests in writing Gold by the Inch was how I could construct a novel that would somehow be true to the experience of someone returning 'home' in a way that revealed the many layers involved in the fantasy that there is a 'home' itself".

Chua has said elsewhere, "my background of growing up inside and outside of things, living between continents, nations, cities, houses, language and customs, is hardly remarkable but perhaps it has made [me] more ambivalent about identity, the tidiness of its spaces and the promises of empire". He expanded, "when I arrived in Bangkok in my twenties I fell into a place where I was made to feel empowered and, this sounds weird, liberated. I was struck by the ease with which people moved across boundaries of class and gender.The facility with which people from diverse backgrounds conversed. Possibly this wasn't the way itwas. Possibly I was drunk or high at the time, but I felt as if I was welcome into a discourse that was culturally empowering. Here I was, in a culture that appeared almost continuous with New York in terms of popular culture and yet it was being produced by black people. Nothing about it was marginal. Everyone I met, from noodle stall owners to princelings to bar owners to drag queens to magazine publishers knew that they were the producers of culture, they were at the center of it all. Not only that, they were descended from a long trajectory of cultural producers. Part of it is very simple, I suppose, and has to do with being in a culture where you suddenly realize you form part of the majority. Things weren't being defined for me in relationship to a hegemonic culture. You experience things differently in such a space. For one, you own your language instead of just using it (for better or worse). That was my initial, adoles-cent and mostly uninformed, impression of the place. Later I was exposed to Ajarn Sulak and other intellectuals. They really gave me the language to articulate my experience of conventions of identity. I think Ajarn Chah says it best, a convention is something that appears to be there but really isn't. It may be useful in some situations and even necessary, but it’s not a good idea to get too attached to it".

The comparison between Bangkok and New York would affirm many peoples' view and experience of the former. ‘Globalization has made this continuum obvious. I just read something Thongchai Winichakul wrote about post-Westernization in Thailand. He made the point that there can be no globalization without localization. Many interesting things can happen in that localization that recast the relationship of the local as being a merely passive space'.This is a point that has great pertinence for Thailand, the US academic Brian McGrath gave a university lecture last year and pointed out how Thai people can bring their lifestyles to all those new suburban estates popping up in places like Rangsit. So now Greek columns share space with spirit houses and food vendors and colors and decorations emerge on the houses in a way that wouldn't be allowed in most Western contexts."This is something that also interests a lot of Thai intellectuals. The invention of Thailand is inextricably linked with the invention of modernity and the instrumentality of classical forms to legitimize both nationhood and colonialism. During his tour of Europe, King Rama V wasn't that impressed with the modern architecture he saw but he was wowed by the baroque and rococo, all those things the moderns wanted to sweep under the rug. When he visited a casino in Monte Carlo he wrote a letter back home saying how beautiful it was and that 'it should have been a palace'. It's interesting to consider how the 19th century growth of Britain as both a nation and an empire are entwined and the ways that the classical was used by the British to establish both their own legitimacy as imperial rulers and as national subjects. I think a similar thing was happening in Siam at the time".

Finally, as a reviewer of Asian art and film since long before such a practice became fashionable, I ask Chua his view of Thai artists. His preoccupations remain consistent, "I'm inspired by Apichatpong Weerasathakul?s work and his architectural approaches to narrative. The experience of watching his films, even Iron Pussy, is a bit like navigating spaces in Bangkok or other Southeast Asian cities.The distinctions between inside and outside are sharp, sudden, and yet seem so ambiguous. It's like walking down a very busy, tight soi and suddenly turning into a gate and finding yourself in the middle of a garden and then moving into a dark, cool sala. I'm also a great admirer of the editing in his films, which is the work of another fine young filmmaker, Lee Chatametikool".

World Art

World Art Art World: Changing Perspectives on Modern and Contemporary ArtKeynote address, Friday, April 28, 6:30 p.m.Symposium, Saturday, April 29, 10:00 a.m.–4:30 p.m.

The Museum of Modern Art hosts its second annual graduate symposium, World Art Art World: Changing Perspectives on Modern and Contemporary Art, which examines the effects of accelerated globalization on art and scholarship. Papers presented and discussed address new forms, subjects, and interpretations of world art and culture.

Keynote Address: Friday, April 28, 6:30 p.m.Professor Wu Hung of the University of Chicago will present the keynote address. Professor Wu is the Harrie H. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor of Art History, East Asian Languages and Civilizations; Director, Center for the Art of East Asia; and Consulting Curator, Smart Museum of Art.Symposium:

Saturday, April 29, 10:00 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Morning session Larissa Buchholz, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New York “The Global Rules of Art”

Daniel Ricardo Quiles, The Graduate Center, City University of New York "Some Aspects of the South American Question: Tucumแn Arde’s Bid for an Argentine Public Sphere"

Jennifer Josten, Yale University"From Local to Global: Recovering Gabriel Orozco’s Naturaleza recuperada"

Afternoon session Roberta Bonetti, University of Bologna and l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Science Sociales, Paris "In Transit: Fantasy Coffins between Ghana, the Art Market and Museums"

Wendy Morris, Institute for Research in the Arts, University of Leuven, Belgium" (Un)Lived Situations: Mem๓rias อntimas Marcas"

Leora Maltz, Harvard University "William Kentridge's Rock and the 'Weight of Europe Leaning on the Tip of Africa'"

Tickets can be purchased at the lobby information desk and the Film and Media desk at The Museum of Modern Art or online at http://www.ticketweb.com

Please visit http://www.moma.org/education/symposium.html for updated information about the graduate symposium.

Favourite Artist 2: Lisa Yuskavage

Lady Military Boys

Thai military to declassify transgenderism as a “mental disorder”From this year, Thai transgenders (and transsexuals) who are called up for mandatory military conscription will no longer have to suffer a “mental disorder” label being slapped on them.

The drafting of new recruits this year begins April 1-10 nationwide. The landmark agreement was reached recently by Ministry of Defence, a group of local LGBT organisations and the National Human Rights Commission of Thailand. Advocates expect the ministry to eventually drop transgenderism from a list of diseases used in exempting conscripts. In the old-aged list, the word transgenderism, when translated into Thai, could mistakenly fall into the same category as hermaphrodism (a person with two sexual organs). Up till now, post-operative transgenders (or transsexuals) are classified as having a mental disorder as their reassigned gender is not reflected on official documents. The terms described in exemption certificates of transgenders could also be varied, depending on the personal view of the doctors in charge and their choice of terms. Thailand's celebrity transsexual kick-boxer Parinya Charoenphol, known as Nong Toom, was registered as having “a mental disorder-with the mind of a woman” in 2002, while another, Samart Meecharoen, was registered as having "permanent mental disorder" in 2005. Samart said she have had problems when looking for a job. The label causes problems for transgenders not only for applying for a job, but also legal complications such as insurance, passport and contracts as they are considered mentally disabled persons. Many employers are found using the draft exemption certificate issued to them, as an excuse not to hire them, said Naiyana Supapeng from the Human Rights Commission.

In April, men aged 21 have to show up at draft venues for physical examinations. The drafting of new recruits this year begins April 1-10 nationwide. In Bangkok alone with 50 districts open for the drafting, there is an average of one transgender per one district, said deputy army spokesman Colonel Chalermphol Thammasoonthorn, a spokesman of the ministry.As legal amendments will take a substantial amount of time and advocates want the new ruling to go into effect as soon as possible to benefit those who have been called up for conscription this year, the military has agreed not to classify transgendered conscripts with breast enlargement or who have undergone sex change surgery as having a "mental disorder." While they will be exempted, military doctors and officials will have to adopt other terms such as “problems with body features” or “body type” as a temporary solution.

However, pre-operative transgenders still have to go through the draft and physical check-up as other conscripts. While regular conscripts undergo physical examinations and assessment as a batch, transgenders who have undergone hormone therapy and have begun sex reassignment surgery will be examined in private rooms and will not be required to go shirtless as other recuits are required to. The military has also held training for officers at the drafting venues nationwide. Newspapers and the media have previously featured transgenders with bare breasts being ridiculed in the drafting venues. Naiyana said for those who were given “mental disorder” in their certificates, they are encouraged to file legal complaints to make cases so that the court will open hearing and the process of legal changes will hastened. Thailand’s mental health department has announced in 2002 that homosexuality is not regarded as a mental disease to reflect World Health Organization’s 1992 resolution on the same subject.

Funny Bunny

Telepresence & Bio Art: Networking Humans, Rabbits, and Robots by the artist Eduardo Kac.

This book presents a compendium of writings spanning 12 years by Kac that explore the multiple implications of his own art. Crisscrossing the boundaries of inventor/artist and questioning basic notions of creation, Kac writes to investigate internet art, robotics, and bio art.

While best known for genetically engineering a live rabbit to glow in the dark, Kac has worked on a range of projects that push the boundaries of new media art towards merging with the fields of electronics, telerobotics, and biotechnology. As an artist utilizing new technologies, Kac performs detailed research into past methods and approaches writing as integral to his work. He stresses a commitment to communication in order to create artwork where the active participation of the viewer forms an essential component in the reception of the piece as opposed to a more traditional model where information flows one-way from the artwork to viewer.

The writings in Telepresence & Bio Art are arranged to reflect different aspects of Kac's artistic practice. They include essays that trace the development of telecommunications art since the beginning of the twentieth century, offer a theoretical framework to understand robotic art as separate from sculpture, and consider the significance of the Internet for the future of art. The book also includes texts that discuss the creation of new life in art. Kac's signature essays, including "The Dialogic Imagination in Electronic Art", "Transgenic Art", and "GFP Bunny", are all collected in this volume.

Published by University of Michigan Press, the book is 320 pages with 145 photographs and diagrams with 8 color plates that include previously unpublished images. The forward is by James Elkins, a professor of Art History at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, who specializes in the history and theory of images in art, science, and nature.

More information about the artist is available at his website: ekac.org For additional information, please contact James Hoff, Director of Development at (212) 925-0325 or at jhoff @ printedmatter.org.

Archipeinture: Artists build architecture at Le Plateau, Paris

Between the instantaneous metropolitan diagrams of Julie Mehretu (Ethiopia), the clashing contemporary urban worlds of Franz Ackermann (Germany), the realist architectural paintings of Yves Bélorgey (France), and the utopian housing complexes of Berdaguer and Péjus (France), the representation of the modern city has grown to be a theme of vast importance in the contemporary art world.

Created in collaboration with the Camden Arts Center of London, the exhibition “Archi/Peinture” has thus been doubly conceived to better grasp the various contexts (socio-political, cultural and architectural) in which the two arts centers currently function. A thematic exhibition, “Archi/Peinture” intends to explore the different ways in which urban architecture and contemporary art tend to influence one another, including: the use of painting as an architectural form in public or private spaces; the effect of recent developments on the representation of the modern metropolis; the links between architecture and other mental or psychological spaces…Here the representation of architecture will be less a question of mixing together various structural remnants than one of going beyond the typical exhibitory framework towards a whole new modeling of space and time.

The exhibition will above all serve to represent a multitude of architectural forms and practices, anchored more or less in painting, which the visitors will discover as they pass from constructed to deconstructed spaces, from architectural representations to mental landscapes…

Neterotopia

Neterotopia: Artists online in advertising space
http://www.neterotopia.net

Curated by: Daniele Balita project by: NICC ( http://www.nicc.be) and Love Difference ( http://www.lovedifference.org), in collaboration with: Cittadellarte - Fondazione Pistoletto ( http://www.cittadellarte.it)

From 16th March to 31st March 2006. Locations: Palais de Tokyo - site de création contemporaine Paris. NICC, Antwerp. Careof, Milan.

Artists: 0100101110101101.ORG, Christophe Bruno, Ghazel, Susan Hefuna, Nathalie Hunter, Yuji Oshima, Peter Lemmens and Eva Cardon, Adam Vackar, Stephen Vitiello, Luca Vitone, Version (Gabriela Vanga, Ciprian Muresan and Mircea Cantor).

Internet Sites: http://www.arman.fm, http://www.corriere.it, http://www.film.it, google ad words, http://www.inrockuptibles.com, http://www.liberation.fr, http://movies.tenuae.com, http://www.sortiraparis.com, http://www.viamichelin.it, http://www.villagevoice.com, http://www.wunderground.com

Neterotopia is an event that takes place from 16th to 31st March in various spaces on the Net. Eleven artists from different countries have been invited to choose an Internet site and use the spaces usually reserved for advertising: Christophe Bruno on http://www.liberation.fr, Ghazel on http://www.sortiraparis.com, Susan Hefuna on http://movies.tenuae.com, Nathalie Hunter on http://www.google.com, Yuji Oshima on http://www.arman.fm, Peter Lemmens and Eva Cardon on http://www.wunderground.com, Adam Vackar on http://www.inrockutibles.com, Stephen Vitiello on http://www.villagevoice.com, Luca V itone on http://www.viamichelin.it, Version (Gabriela Vanga, Ciprian Muresan and Mircea Cantor) on http://www.corriere.it, 0100101110101101.ORG on http://www.film.it. These spaces are thus transformed into exhibition surfaces and points of access to a pathway branching through the public and virtual space of the Internet, the major node of which is the http://www.neterotopia.net website. The project, ideated and curated by Daniele Balit, is the result of works between the European organisations NICC (New International Cultural Center), Love Difference and the Pistoletto Foundation. Neterotopia is simultaneously hosted via web by three European exhibition spaces, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the NICC in Antwerp and the Careof in Milan. Through the stations installed in physical space, the public can see the artworks on-line, and experiment with digit@al, a special device by artist Pierre Mertens that puts a new slant on the rules of chatting. Neterotopia traces the confines of a hybrid space, with a changeable and heterogeneous geography, drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of Heterotopia. As opposed to the non-places of Utopia, Heterotopias (literally: places of difference), are defined by Foucalt as “other spaces” capable of accepting difference and possibility, while not detaching from the real world. Neterotopias are therefore inserted into the Network system of communication, observing its rules and limits, while giving a new value to these advertising spaces.

Wangechi Mutu

Notable Moments in Art Criticism

Biennial in Babylon
Crossing swords with conventions that have brought us to the brink of madness
by Jerry Saltz Village Voice
March 1st, 2006 5:40 PM

"Day for Night" is the liveliest, brainiest, most self-conscious Whitney Biennial I have ever seen. In some ways it isn't a biennial at all. Curators Chrissie Iles and Philippe Vergne have rebranded the biennial, presenting a thesis, not a snapshot, a proposition about art in a time when modernism is history and postmodernist rhetoric feels played out. This show, and the art world, are trying to do what America can't or won't do: Use its power wisely, innovatively, and with attitude; be engaged and, above all, not define being a citizen of the world narrowly.

"Day for Night" is filled with work I'm not interested in; it tries to do too much in too little space; it is often dry. Nevertheless, the show is a compelling attempt to examine conceptual practices and political agency, consider art that is not about beauty, reconsider reductivism, explore the possibility of an underground in plain sight, probe pre-modern and archaic approaches, posit destruction and chaos as creative forces, and revisit ideas about obfuscation and anonymity. This show is less market driven than usual—in fact, it attempts to cross swords with conventions that have brought us to the brink of madness. It's also an anti-manifesto, taking on romanticism, expressionism, and decorative psychedelia.

Kant said, "The day is beautiful; the night is sublime." "Day for Night" isn't about the sublime in any old-fashioned awe-inspiring sense, but it hints at types of darkness. All the windows of the museum have been boarded up. "Day for Night" will be seen by the masses, but it isn't really for them. It is the art world meeting around fires, taking stock, and trying to work things out.

This biennial is positively un-American. Iles and Vergne are European, more than a quarter of the 101 participating artists were born outside the U.S., and sundry others live elsewhere part-time. Even the show's title comes from a French movie, François Truffaut's 1973 film, although the movie's original title describes the biennial and the country better, The American Night.

The show is not without problems. Sometimes the curators seem to be second-guessing themselves before they've even first-guessed. Their propensity for cool art by cool artists suggests "Day for Night" could be called "The Black-and-Silver Biennial." The outstanding catalog includes flashy foldout artist pages and excellent essays by the curators, critic Johanna Burton, and gallerist Lia Gangitano, as well as an ingenious "quiz" by critic Bruce Hainley. But the exhibition also suffers from such aggravating tics as an invented curator and a low percentage of women (25 percent) when you count only the individual artists on view in the museum. Good paintings are present, notably by Mark Grotjahn, Mark Bradford, Rudolf Stingel, and Marilyn Minter. Yet these curators, like so many curators these days, don't really get painting's alchemical qualities or appreciate how old mediums can carry new thoughts.

This brings us to an irksome feature of this show and many like it: The curators regularly treat two-dimensional media as if they were second-class citizens, jamming them in, splitting them up, or using them as filler. Meanwhile, conceptual work, video, and installation are given ample space. Jennie Smith, Kelley Walker, and Adam McEwen belong in the biennial, but all are short-changed. Some things just don't work: Jutta Koether belongs but her installation feels forced; paintings by JP Munro, Spencer Sweeney, Todd Norsten, Chris Vasell, and Monica Majoli are unimpressive to say the least. Nari Ward is good but this wasn't a biennial year for him; Peter Doig's paintings aren't up to stuff; videos by Jim O'Rourke, Jordan Wolfson, and Mathias Poledna are all weak; Paul Chan's floor piece is evocative but unoriginal.

A number of artists stand out. Especially impressive are Sturtevant's room of art that looks like Duchamp's work but throws representation out the window; Dorothy Iannone's video of herself climaxing (as she says, "The one fleeting moment when you can see the soul as it passes over the face"); Billy Sullivan's heartrending Nan Goldin–like slide show depicting an afternoon in a life and a whole life simultaneously; Robert Gober's journey into hatred; Angela Strassheim's penetrating photographs of people who are living more for the next life than this one; Jonathan Horowitz's 19 portraits of the 9-11 hijackers placed surreptitiously throughout the museum; photos by Florian Maier-Aichen, Zoe Strauss, and Anne Collier; Trisha Donnelly's blasting sound piece. Also, don't miss the terrific videos by Francesco Vezzoli, Cameron Jamie, Pierre Huyghe, the collective Don't Trust Anyone Over Thirty, and especially Ryan Trecartin's retina-bursting all-pores-open A Family Finds Entertainment.

Weirdest of all is a 1991 painting by Miles Davis. Since there is no Davis entry or artist page in the catalog, my own paranoid fantasies and assorted rumors have led me to believe that the painting was submitted by that true artist of the American night, David Hammons. Finally, to anyone who thinks that the Peace Tower, right now on Madison Avenue in front of the Whitney but originally built in 1965 to protest the Vietnam War, is silly or ineffectual: Now is the first time it has needed to be built again.

Flaws and all, "Day for Night" speaks to a nation that is no longer an ideal but only a country. That makes this the Post-America Biennial.

Architect's Dream

Julee Holcomber 2006

Catherine Opie

Self-portrait nursing 2004

Architecture and Design Blogs

From Artkrush

Architects and designers are notorious for their eccentrically stylish accessories — from eyeglasses to briefcases to toilets — and their blogs are no exception. Sleek, minimal, and intelligent, these architecture and design blogs are the new source for up-to-the-minute commentary on emerging talent, broad trends, and nifty new products.Reference sites such as Archinect offer one-stop shopping for news, reviews, job postings, and discussion groups, while personal architecture blogs provide more specialized information. They range from the dead serious to the impudent. In the former category is Progressive Reactionary, which melds political and architectural criticism, and Kazys Varnelis' site, which probes the intersection of architecture and network society. BLDGBLOG also offers lengthy analysis of trends in architecture, as well as reviews of art and film. At the other extreme, Archibot runs a "Hot or Not" contest for buildings, allowing you to rate canonical and amateur designs just like you rate desperate college kids.These cyber critics are global travelers, and their efforts connect the architectural communities of the East and West. Brett Steele, the director of the famously experimental Architectural Association School in London, posts his curriculum and photos of student work on the site Resarch. Chicago architect John Hill runs Archidose, a series of sardonic postings on international architecture and Midwestern oddities, and Eizo Okada uploads photos of buildings all over the world onto his Japanese site, dezain.net. The site fabprefab follows the rise of affordable, modernist prefab houses around the world, and the Center for Land Use Interpretation documents the shifting contemporary landscape.

Product-design aficionados are buying up web real estate even faster than their architectural counterparts, generating hundreds of blogs devoted to furniture, interiors, lighting, and gizmos. These sites are dangerous territory for anyone who covets over-designed coffee tables and throw pillows. Designboom and Design Addict offer extensive news, images, interviews, and links, while personal blogs unearth the quirkier inventions (a PC computer in a whiskey bottle?). MoCo Loco, Reluct, and Sensory Impact all select the most alluring products and offer commentary on global design trends. Core 77 finds more bizarre objects, and idgrid highlights the best of industrial design. Perhaps the most useful sites are design*sponge and Apartment Therapy, which showcase affordable home products and solutions for tiny apartments.And for those of us who just can't shake our loyalties to certain print publications, Domus, Frame, Icon, and Dwell have lively websites with online forums and full-text articles from back issues.

Dubious Japanese Kitsch

Peculiar Art Objects: Siobhan Hapaska and Alice Maher

Artists I like but know little about

Merlin James

Notes for an Art School

Notes for an Art School, the first publication of Manifesta 6 School Books, was commissioned by the International Foundation Manifesta in Amsterdam and Manifesta 6 in Nicosia. It is an anthology of essays and interviews by international artists, curators, theorists and educators on the topic of art education. Contributors are Mai Abu ElDahab, Babak Afrassiabi, Julie Ault, Martin Beck, Liam Gillick, Boris Groys, Olaf Metzel, Haris Pellapaisiotis, Tobias Rehberger, Walid Sadek, Nasrin Tabatabai, Jan Verwoert, Anton Vidokle and Florian Waldvogel.The book lays the theoretical ground for Manifesta 6, the European Biennial of Contemporary Art, for which the curators Mai Abu ElDahab, Anton Vidokle and Florian Waldvogel propose to challenge the conventional format of the large-scale exhibition and, alternatively, set up an art school - the Manifesta 6 School - in Nicosia, from 23 September to 17 December 2006.The contributors to the book rethink the goals and structure of an art school, its ideological contexts, the positioning of its students to the art world, its relationship to social and political conditions, and the level of its discursive involvement, drawing on specific examples and on their own experiences to interrogate the appropriateness and validity of existing school models.In their collaborative essay, Julie Ault and Martin Beck speak about the democratization of academies as a means of generating active social engagement. Boris Groys conjectures that ‘the goal of education is to make the students able to read an apology as a critique’, Liam Gillick addresses ‘the rift between the theoretical components of an art school environment and other practical working aspects of the same place’, and Jan Verwoert tackles the academy as a site of production from the viewpoint of both its defender and critic. Olaf Metzel looks at some possibilities of reaction outside of institutional frameworks, Walid Sadek argues that by positioning itself as an institution in constant flux, the art academy can become a safe haven supporting the proliferation of multiple significations, and Babak Afrassiabi and Nasrin Tabatabai, dissecting the example of Abbas Kiarostami’s film First Case, Second Case, call for knowledge production based on an understanding of the changing nature of discourse. Haris Pellapaisiotis writes about Artalk, a lecture series he organises in Nicosia in absence of alternative institutional frameworks for critical cultural dialogue, while Tobias Rehberger discusses his teaching method as a process of destroying the clichés and preconceived notions that students bring with them into art school, and also provides some personal insight into his own education.Each of the Curators of Manifesta 6 also contributes an essay addressing the issues facing the Manifesta 6 School from different standpoints: Mai Abu ElDahab considers the way in which the School can assert its socio-political role; Anton Vidokle looks at the Manifesta 6 School a project in dialogue with the history of experimental art education, and Florian Waldvogel proposes the School as an alternative model in contrast to the existing European academies.

Notes for an Art School is designed and typeset by Dexter/Sinister, Nicosia, and distributed internationally by IDEA Books: http://www.ideabooks.nl It can be ordered through http://www.manifesta6.org.cy and http://www.manifesta.org A digital version of the book’s essays can be found on the Manifesta 6 website: http://www.manifesta6.org.cy An online forum on the topics of the book will soon launch alongside the essays.

Pia Ronicke

Pia Rönicke is concerned with urban realities and fantasies. She continuously investigates how we as ‘users’ can influence (and are influenced by) what urban planners, architects and designers do. She has studied 20th century utopianism, how it looks ‘on paper’ and ‘in reality’. The exhibition traces the development of Pia Rönicke’s practice through various modes of narration. She has worked with purely visual formats like computer-aided animation, and she has staged situations and documented them in images and text. Increasingly, she also scripts, directs and produces films.

Pia Rönicke’s new film Zonen (‘The Zone’, 2005) is premiered at Lund Konsthall. It shows three young Danish architects (Tue Hasselberg-Foged, Kristoffer Lindhardt Weiss and Sinus Lynge) on a visit to a site they have proposed to transform into a town for 20,000 people. The film is based on their theoretical jargon, and becomes a commentary on the relation between ideas and their realisation. Some infrastructure is already in place in the Zone, but it is strangely suspended between the real and the fictional, the past and the future.In her practice, Pia Rönicke interprets what is going on in contemporary society from her specific point of view. Who benefits from the grand utopian visions of societal development? Can we influence the changes our surroundings are undergoing? How will the future look? Can we see glimpses of it in an artist’s vision? Welcome to Lund Konsthall to see how Pia Rönicke tackles these issues.

Pia Rönicke (b 1974) lives and works in Copenhagen. After graduating from the Royal Danish Art Academy in Copenhagen and California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles she has worked in the Nordic region and internationally. She has exhibited at Moderna Museet in Stockholm (2001), Tate Modern (2005), the Nordic biennial Momentum 2 in Moss, Norway (2000) and the European biennial Manifesta 4 in Frankfurt (2002).

Fresh Talk/Daring Gazes: Conversations on Asian American Art

Elaine H. Kim, Margo Machida, Sharon Mizota, Lisa Lowe

Fresh Talk/Daring Gazes chronicles the blossoming of Asian American art and anticipates the growing democratization of American art and culture. Pairing work by twenty-four contemporary Asian American visual artists with responses provocatively drawn from cultural critics, other artists, activists, and intellectuals, this book explores themes of geographical movement, the sexuality of Asian bodies, colonization, miscegenation, hybrid forms of immigrant cultures, the loss of home, war, history, and memory.
Elaine H. Kim's historical introduction charts the trajectory of Asian American art from the nineteenth century to the present, offering a comprehensive account of artists, major artworks, and major events. Commentaries by writers, artists, and cultural activists examine the work of visual artists such as Pacita Abad, Albert Chong, Y. David Chung, Allan deSouza, Michael Joo, Hung Liu, Yong Soon Min, Manuel Ocampo, PipoNguyen-Duy, Roger Shimomura, Carlos Villa, and Martin Wong. Prominent artists and critics such as Homi K. Bhabha, Luis Camnitzer, Enrique Chagoya, Gina Dent, Ellen Gallagher, Arturo Lindsay, Kobena Mercer, Griselda Pollock, Jolene Rickard, Faith Ringgold, Ella Shohat, Lowery Stokes Sims, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, and Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie offer thought-provoking reflections on each artist. Sharon Mizota's extended captions further elucidate the paintings, graphics, photography, installations, and mixed-media constructions under discussion.

As a set of dialogues, simultaneously visual and textual, Fresh Talk/Daring Gazes encourages the cross-cultural conversation that is shaping the emerging art of Asian Americans and of the United States in general. Alternately personal, intellectual, aesthetic, and political, these essays and the art they consider provide unique perspectives on both the past and the future of American art.

Museum of Arts & Design, New York

Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art
A traveling exhibition co-oraganized by the Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago and iCI, New York. Curated by Stephaine Smith On view: February 2 – May 7, 2006Museum of Arts & Design40 West 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues New York City

http://www.madmuseum.org
http://www.ici-exhibitions.org
http://www.smartmuseum.uchicago.edu

Sustainable design has the potential to transform everyday life through an approach that balances environmental, social, and aesthetic concerns. Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art is a traveling exhibition that examines some of the ways in which contemporary artists are exploring a socially and environmentally conscientious – in other words, sustainable – way of living and working. This emerging strategy emphasizes the responsible and equitable use of resources and links environmental and social justice. By doing so, it moves past a prior generation of more narrowly eco-centered or ‘green’ approaches to architecture and industrial design. Enacted around the world in large and small ways by architects and designers, as well as, a growing numbers of activists, corporations, policymakers, Beyond Green ventures into the fertile new zone of sustainability in the arena of contemporary art.Beyond Green, curated by Stephanie Smith of the Smart Museum of Art, explores the ways in which sustainable design resonates in the work of an emerging generation of international artists hailing from cities in the United States and Europe, including Brooklyn, Chicago, San Francisco, Copenhagen, London, San Juan, and Vienna. The exhibition’s thirteen artists and artists’ groups combine a fresh aesthetic sensibility with a constructively critical approach to the production, dissemination, and display of art. They embed environmental concerns within larger ethical and aesthetic explorations, building paths to new forms of practice that go beyond green.

Artists in the exhibition
Allora & CalzadillaFree Soil (Amy Franceschini, Myriel Milicevic, Nis Rømer)
JAM (Jane Palmer and Marianne Fairbanks)
Learning Group (Brett Bloom, Julio Castro, Rikke Luther, and Cecelia Wendt)
Brennan McGaffey with Temporary Services
(Brett Bloom, Salem Collo-Julin, Marc Fischer)
Nils Norman
People Powered
Dan Peterman
Marjetica Potrc
Michael Rakowitz
Frances Whitehead
WochenKlausur
Andrea Zittel

Peculiar internet appeals I

I am Unhappy
I really don't understand...

When I was in Hong Kong, i can sleep pretty well, even though the hostel is kinda dirty.....
But when I came back to Singapore, my sleep disorders symptons are coming back.........

I feel more lonesome in Singapore than in Hong Kong.....

My stupid colleagues are making some stupid suggestions...... i hate my work...

I can't workout properly.... i lost my motivation

I can't breathe properly......

I hate myself

I have been having frequent colds... my immunity is dropping......

I am also monitoring my suicide intention level.... Its at about 20 - 30% now.

What else is there ......except for misery, unhappiness............... Why is my life becoming fucked up?

I used to be a lively and happy cheerful person.... but not now.....

I shall cease to exist......

The most cerebral artist in Asia

Lim Tzay Chuen

THINGS THAT FALL!

SnowflakesTeardropsFlowerpetalsDirtSilenceIdolsBalladsSleepCubismCoffins
StoresShippingCartonsUtopiasEntropyCommerceBooksNestinBookcasesWords

Americans love destruction. Since September 11, 2001, it has become increasingly apparent that “things that fall” present unrivaled opportunities for emotional manipulation, economic profit, and political gain. Even the phrase itself—“Since 9/11”—has become a reliable preamble to any situation that is ripe for exploitation. Whether world leaders, stock prices, the World Trade Center, or Martha Stewart, each thing that falls marks a downward motion that inspires widespread speculation about its eventual rise. It is a kind of blood lust. Not for the destructive event itself, but for the profits to be made after the event has taken place.

Economist Joseph Schumpeter called this cyclical drive “creative destruction.” By his definition, capitalism cannot advance without perpetually destroying itself in order to profit from its own regeneration. This reflex has become so innate to American culture that its media, its citizens, its politicians and its stockbrokers all crave things that fall solely for the gains that are certain to follow, and the reaffirmation of capitalism’s ruthless success that accompanies them.Even Robert Smithson, the conscience of American Art, understood that organizing rocks in metal bins for distribution and sale was not only a way to make the concept of entropy visible, but a way to profit from it as well. Just before he died, Smithson said as much when he told Moira Roth it was time for artists to stop trying to transcend the corruption of commercialism, and industry, and bourgeois attitudes. Lost in the glow of his current hagiography is the fact that when Smithson drew a comparison between the rosy escapism of art and the cruddy workings of commerce, he sided with commerce.

Thus a great shift is occurring in the American psyche. Where for the past forty years we have been obsessed with the upward potential of Warholian celebrity—the belief that riches and fame can happen to anyone, and everyone will get their fifteen minutes’ worth—we are now obsessed with the downward potential of Smithsonian entropy, and the belief that everyone and everything will have its fall. Which means that not only has America’s mood changed, but its profit motive has as well. That’s where we come in. Death! Destruction! Hurricanes! Snowflakes! Empires! Forsythia! Entropy! They’re all here, all organized into nice simple categories that are pleasing to look at and easy to understand.

http://www.thingsthatfall.com.

Artworks by Friends III

St. Agatha Listens to Heavenly Music
by George Bolster

Photo archive of David Alfaro Siqueiros

Carlos Amorales

An Image Bank for Everyday Revolutionary Life

based on the photo archive of David Alfaro Siqueiros

http://www.e-flux.com/projects/siqueiros/

Favourite artworks II

Bastards 2000 by Jack Pierson

Sakiko Nomura

Born 1967 in Shimonoseki, Yamaguchi Prefecture; lives in Tokyo; 1990 graduated from the Department of Photography, Kyushu Sangyo University, Fukuoka; since 1991 works as a photographer at Aat Room, Tokyo.

Artworks by friends II

Macau Handover by Hanspeter Ammann
VDO, 2000, 27'00'', Switzerland

Commissioned by the Institute of European Studies of Macau to commemorate the return of the Portuguese territory to China on 20 December 1999, 'Macau Handover' offers an elliptical, back-door view of an historic event. Though the official ceremony can be heard on the soundtrack in the form of a live television broadcast, it remains tantalisingly off screen. Excluded from the sacred rites of power, we take our place among the milling crowds at street level and await the fulfilment of a destiny beyond our control. The departing brass pose stiffly for a last official portrait, the Chinese army trucks roll in, but Ammann undercuts the stately pomp with vignettes that imply the resilience of common humanity.
Peter Matthews, Sight and Sound

Artworks by friends I

Pirates by Breda Lynch

Collier Schorr

How German Is It: An endless, shifting hall of mirrors where every image is haunted
by Leslie Camhi, Village Voice, November 28th, 2005

I would love to know what the photographer Collier Schorr said to Jens F., a German adolescent whom she met on a train, in order to convince him to pose for her. Schorr, who is American and Jewish, spends her summers in an intensely Catholic region of southern Germany. In a brief, eloquent essay published in her richly layered and complex new artist's book Jens F. (Steidl/MACK), she recounts that, during that particular journey through Hitler's former heartland, she was "reading Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz, which was my self-imposed punishment and seemed a fair compromise after reading Cynthia Ozick's essay, 'Why I Will Never Go to Germany.' "

Schorr was 37 at the time of this encounter, in 2000, while the red-haired Jens still possessed the soft, inchoate beauty of boyhood. I assume they spoke German. It's likely the question "What are you reading?" would have been a conversation-stopper. Did they chat about sports or movies, or the slow-moving train? Was he curious about New York and the life she led there?

Did she say, There's an American artist named Andrew Wyeth, long out of favor in the avant-garde art world precincts where my work is welcomed. He drew and painted a woman, his German-born neighbor Helga Testorf, in secret for some 15 years. I'd like to do something similar with you—to pose you as he did her, to fashion you in another's image while mining your private moods and least gestures, to record the changing lines of your body and the gradual hardening of your flesh, occasionally diverting my attention to others; in short, to attempt to possess you, as any portraitist does his or her model, knowing all the while that you will elude me, that the search is all.

However put—and who, in truth, is privy to the furtive, often unspoken negotiations between artist and subject?—the deal was struck. "Collier Schorr: Jens F.," the show currently at Andrew Roth gallery, includes single and collaged photographs produced over five years, mostly of Jens, clothed at times in German military surplus or semi-nude and striking poses inspired by Wyeth's Helga. Included are a few pictures of Jens's sister, a blond-braided mädchen in a field (an ideal of purity dear to Nazi propagandists) with an uncanny resemblance to Helga's daughter, who also modeled for Wyeth. Cameo appearances by a small cast of stand-ins and body doubles—a girl who looks like a boy, a friend of Jens with whom we occasionally confuse him, and an American woman who is Helga's doppelg matters even further.

The result is an endless, shifting hall of mirrors, where every image is haunted by the ghost of at least one other, where the distances between painting and photography, boyhood and womanliness, conceptual art and classicism, figure and ground, guilt and innocence, Wyeth's high-WASP attraction to Helga's Teutonic heritage and Schorr's Jewish ambivalence regarding the ghosts haunting German soil—to mention only a few—are temporarily collapsed, and near-opposites are rendered interchangeable. Schorr's handwritten notes, scribbled in margins of her collages and on the pages of Jens F. (which meticulously reproduces a dense scrapbook of Polaroids and contact prints that Schorr pasted into a catalog of The Helga Pictures), mention Henry James, whose American characters went to Europe only to find their own shattered reflections. One is reminded of Proust (and of Hitchcock in Vertigo), for whom love—the desire to possess another—is never an original feeling but an illusory edifice resting on the unstable foundation of past affections.

That this exchange took place in 21st-century Germany raises its stakes inordinately. Schorr, best known for her tender, silken, vulnerable depictions of testosterone-driven youths—most recently, New Jersey private-school wrestlers—has passed this way before, with a series portraying German adolescents in woods and fields, both nude and wearing military garb, including what appear to be fragments of Wehrmacht uniforms. The pictures were at once unsettling—in an interesting way—and irksome in their coyness. The display of Third Reich insignia remains illegal in Germany, presumably because it still inspires in some people a rather unhealthy nostalgia. Schorr works intuitively, and ambiguity is a key component of her art, but was it worth breaching this particular taboo for what seemed a private fantasy? It's hard to be sure. But the broader work reveals those photographs as one episode of a sustained investigation into landscape and memory, an attempt to unravel, ever so slightly, the tightly knit relation between "blood and soil" (as they once called it in Germany), nationhood and identity.

JT Leroy II

Comment from Lawrence Chua:

I have never really seen the literary value of JT Leroy's writing but the fact that there is a collaborative process involved in the creation and selling of the work provides valuable insight into the machinations of the American publishing industry. The industry is full of ghost writers and pseudonyms, mostly with more widely published trade books. Why should we expect something different in mid-list writers?

JT Leroy

Transnational - Bangkok/Dublin - response to the JT Leroy thing. Between me and friend, one Roisin Collins.

Brian: I think the response to the hoax is bullshit. The hoax shows up white middle class arty types obsession with 'beautiful and damned' figures - the hoax doesn't undermine the literary merit of the work, and literary merit does not have to be grounded in real experience, it is irrelevant that the experiences of a HIV-transgendered-sex-working novelist were 'faked'.

Roisin: The middle classes, as you say, quietly appreciate the spectacle of 'authentic' abuse, while getting to feel virtuous because the boy is now sucking up to starlets rather than sucking off truckers. Thus, having achieved a sort of quirky celebrity, the 'author' has been handsomely rewarded for his pains. There's also that whole naif thing, where everybody gets to feel superior and protective to the artist, because you believe that he's an ignorant child , till it turns out you've been played by the kid.

I found a quote from Armistead Maupin about JT Leroy to the effect that when you believe that he's a retired rentboy the writing is effective and moving but when you reread it knowing that the author's somebody else entirely, it's just kitsch. I can't believe this; Maupin writes fiction so you'd think he'd have the whole literature/biography thing straight in his head, and as to the whole question of its literary quality resting on its author's lifestyle. So, you have to conclude that not only are all these American publishers/literati/hangers on hypocrites, and intellectually vain, they are also thick. It's a pretty basic category confusion, it suggests that texts adhere to their contexts in a way that only a fool could believe, it's obssessively fixated on the whole Reality thing in a way that makes Baudrillard seem commendable. I'm getting carried away...

Yesterday's Utopia

Yesterday's Utopia: What can we learn by looking back at large-scale modernism?
Brian Ackley

"Modernism's alchemistic promise-to transform quantity into quality through abstraction and repetition-has been a failure, a hoax: magic that didn't work. Its ideas, aesthetics, strategies are finished. Together, all attempts to make a new beginning have only discredited the idea of a new beginning. A collective shame in the wake of this fiasco has left a massive crater in our understanding of modernity and modernization."
Rem Koolhaas S,M,L,XL, 1995

What has become of experiments in modernist housing? That utopian project was inspired by the radiant city of towers, highways and green spaces but instead produced giant block housing projects whose morphologies, according to the usual criticism, destroyed street life by walling off neighborhoods and locking inhabitants in the sky. These huge public experiments transformed the landscape, redefined urban experience and forced a new social organization.The alchemy, as Koolhaas put it, of the materialization of a perfect urbanism may have failed, but another urbanism has arisen in its place. Giant carcasses survive-legacies of abandoned theories-and communities mutate into unexpected forms as daily life within these sites presses on. A perversion of scale is the typical attack directed toward extra large-scale modernist developments, but there is nothing inherently wrong with really really big. Problems arise from a lack of diversity and differentiation within the projects and from their isolation from existing urban fabrics. Because modernist architecture did not yield to its surroundings-to the social and cultural contexts in which it was placed-societies coped by growing around developments like a scar, becoming neither skin nor wound.Then there are moments when the tensions mount to a breakpoint, as in the weeks of rioting across France that began in late October. The one-way integration policy that protected the sacrosanct culture of France by resisting the culture of its immigrants has exacerbated isolation within the country's suburban ethnic ghettos. A now famous observation of Francois Mitterrand's from 1990 lays the blame on architecture: "What can a young person hope for who is born in a soulless neighborhood, lives in an ugly building, surrounded by other ugliness, gray walls on a gray landscape for a gray life, while all around him there is a society that prefers to look away and only intervenes when it has to get angry and forbid things?" Beneath this seemingly sympathetic attitude lurks a denial of responsibility. These same "soulless neighborhoods" were the utopian projects of the 1960s-their slip into wasteland was not some accident of ill-conceived planning but rather the product of neglect and racial inequality.After a distressing silence following the first weeks of rioting, lame duck president Jacques Chirac came forward with a cautious admission of fault. While still maintaining a focus on clamping the violence by granting emergency powers (a euphemism for the suspension of the civil rights of non-white French), Chirac sited the ubiquitous discrimination as one of the factors leading to what he called France's "crisis of identity." Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, on the other hand, clearly denied any government accountability and ignored the charge that he was in part responsible for the riot's escalation by slinging such nasty epithets such as "scum" and "gangrene." In the same statement, Chirac made promises of reform, yet we shall see if these will translate into real solutions or if Sarkozy's (and more importantly, Jean-Marie Le Pen's) rhetoric will provoke a backlash that escalates France's xenophobia. In any case, the rehabilitation of France's housing projects will surely come to the table.

In the following series of articles, Bidoun assesses the state of XL scale modernism in the Middle East. First came Le Corbusier's Plan Obus for Algiers, an unrealized urban plan to overlay a massive modern infrastructure on the city and establish it as a world capital, thereby ensuring colonial dominance. The plan, Le Corbusier's most ambitious, demonstrated his new interest in forms inspired by encounters with other cultures. Next we look at Medinet Nasr, a development zone on the edge of Cairo gripped by modernist sprawl, and the communities that have emerged there despite deep infrastructural flaws. Contrasting Medinet Nasr is the mega-scale housing development of Ekbatan in the center of Tehran, which has dealt with its isolation by moving toward self-sufficiency. Finally, leaving the modernist epoch but following the tangent of discrete housing communities within an urban context, we discuss the self-imposed isolation of gated communities in Istanbul. In some ways, these communities are a reaction to the failed idealism of modernism; they intend to blot out urban experience in favor of a leisure lifestyle and a sense of security.

http://www.bidoun.com/current/04_all.html#article

Diann Bauer

Diann Bauer uses the attraction of violent images from a number of diverse cultures to create large-scale paintings and installations. Her work addresses the image as spectacle: seducing us while simultaneously refusing the easy construction of narrative. The integration of varied visual styles in Bauer’s work generates a sense of confusion and dissolution between space, object and subject, which leaves us trying to decipher a narrative that seems graspable, but is just out of reach. Combining source material from nineteenth century Japanese woodcuts, European Baroque painting and experimental contemporary architecture, Bauer situates us within a swirling visually complex representation of space, time and movement.

21 Aphorisms

1 There are no errors in art, only various forms of corrigibility.
2 There are only errors in art, only they are disguised as various forms of incorrigibility.
3 In art we should not confuse errors with mistakes. Just as mistakes are not accidents, accidents are not failures, and failure is not incompetence.
4 To fail in art is to be neither incompetent nor in error, but to fail in art is no excuse for incompetence or error.
5 Some accidents in art demand the undivided attention of the artist; this is because the best accidents are the result of ambition, the worst of incuriousness.
6 Authentic accidents in art are found not made, but what is found is always made.
7 For the artist to recognize an unintended consequence as meaningful is to bring back into reflection the force of the artist’s critical powers. To recognize an unintended consequence, therefore, is to already havetaken value from it.
8 Assimilating the unintended consequence is what drives the risk of meaning.
9 Fashion a coin from every mistake, said Wittgenstein; but this is only worthwhile if you have something in the bank already.
10 In psychoanalysis, to talk of mistakes is to give the inconscient speech; in art, to talk of mistakes is to give the inconscient work to do.
11 The pleasures of recognizing the accidental are not to be confused with the pleasures of interpretation. Rather, they are a recognition of the point where power convulses itself.
12 To grasp the meaning of an error is to grasp the instructiveness of failure, but there can be no instructive failures without the desire to avoid errors.
13 Accidents are what reason leaves unguarded, not what makes reason lose face.14 Artists cannot make mistakes; however, they can mistake what they think is unmistakable.15 Acting on errors in philosophy allows thought to reestablish its critical responsibility; acting on accidents in art allows art to recover its future.
16 To know the truth of the accidental is indivisible from self-will.
17 To admit one’s errors from a position of power is to give moral authority to intellectual ambition. To transform one’s errors into an aesthetic is to lose all intellectual ambition.
18 For the philosopher the threat of incompetence is a crisis continually stalled. For the artist the threat of incompetence is a crisis continually performed.
19 The artist wants to resist what is taken for competence, but does not want to be taken to be incompetent.
20 To know the truth of incompetence is to know that art cannot speak from where it is most knowledgeable.
21 The performance of incompetence is the victory of failing over the failure of beauty.

John Roberts is the author of The Art of Interruption: Realism, Photography and the Everyday (St. Martin's Press, 1998) and has written for a wide number of journals and magazines, including New Left Review, Radical Philosophy, and the Oxford Art Journal. He is currently finishing his first novel.

Cabinet magazine Issue 1 Winter 2000/01

Favourite artworks 1

Elizabeth Magill's Burma

Associated Press Sunday, January 22, 2006 / 10:54 AM

SINGAPORE -- A court has spared a Thai transsexual drug dealer from caning because Singaporean law does not allow women to be sentenced to that punishment, a newspaper reported Friday.

Thai prostitute Mongkon Pusuwan, who underwent a sex change from male to female a decade ago, was instead sentenced on Wednesday to six years in jail after a medical report concluded that she was a woman, The Straits Times reported.

District Judge Bala Reddy handed down the sentence after the long-haired Mongkon, 37, pleaded guilty to charges including trafficking in cocaine and tablets containing ketamine, the report said.

The amount of drugs in her possession was too small for her to qualify for Singapore's mandatory death penalty for some drug cases.

Thailand -- Thursday, August 4, 2005 / 03:54 PM

A leading Thai boxer has been fined for allowing nude photos of himself to be published in a magazine targeted to gay men, according to press reports.

Sirimongkol Singwancha was found guilty of allowing pornographic pictures of himself to be taken and published in Thai magazine Heat, according to the Fridae.com Web site.
The magazine is aimed at gay men and features naked, full-frontal images.

The report claims the champion boxer has had his fine and jail term reduced because he apparently cooperated with local police.

He was due to spend six months in jail for the incident, but his sentence was suspended for two years, during which time he must maintain "good behavior." His fine was reduced to Bt4,000 (approximately $100).

He was reportedly paid Bt200,000 (approximately $4,800) for the pictures, which have become well-known among Thailand's gay community. The move comes as Thailand pushes a clamp-down on porn -- both in print and online.

Link courtesy of one Hanspeter Ammann, artist, erstwhile psycho- and now bar owning gallerist...

http://shanghaistudio.blogspot.com/

SHANGHAI STUDIO PRESENTS AN ART OPENING ON FRIDAY 24TH FEBRUARY 2006
THE COLLECTIVE DREAM: NEW VIDEOART FROM BANGKOK
Exciting new single screen pieces from Bangkok Thailand, selected by a Korean Media artist JUNG-CHUL HUR

Welcome to day 1 of my blog. Postings are forthcoming.