MuseumZeitraum Leipzig

Gerhard Richter critical of 2011 German Pavilion

2010-05-26T16:36:00.000+02:00

Gerhard Richter is not at all amused with the choice of Christoph Schlingensief to represent Germany at the next Venice Biennale in 2011. “That’s a scandal,” said Richter, quoted by the Berliner Zeitung. “They’re taking a performer although we have thousands of artists.” Moreover, the painter associates the selection of the multitasking director Schlingensief with “the decline of painting.”

Curator Susanne Gaensheimer who made the choice has reacted with a written statement, published by Art magazine. While honoring Richter’s role as “the most important living artist of the twentieth century,” Gaensheimer consciously chose Schlingensief as an artist who challenges both the content and the form of decidedness while transgressing borders. “In association with the German pavilion, I view his work as a contribution to discussions about the deterritorialization of the arts and to questions regarding the social relevance of art.”

Bice Curiger Appointed Director of the 54th International Art Exhibition for 2011

2010-05-17T17:14:00.000+02:00

VENICE.- The Board of the Biennale di Venezia, chaired by Paolo Baratta, has appointed Bice Curiger as Director of the Visual Arts Sector, with specific responsibility for curating the 54th International Art Exhibition to be held in 2011.

A graduate of the University of Zurich, Bice Curiger is an art historian, critic and curator of exhibitions at an international level. Since 1993, she has been curator at the Zurich Kunsthaus, one of the most important museums in the world for modern and contemporary art, and which has for years implemented a major exhibitions programme of international significance. Bice Curiger is co-founder and editor-in-chief of “Parkett”, one of the most authoritative and innovative contemporary art magazines in the world, published in Zurich and New York since 1984. Since 2004, she has been publishing director of the “Tate etc” magazine produced by London’s Tate Gallery. She is also the author of various publications and catalogues of contemporary art.

On the occasion of her nomination, Bice Curiger declared: “It is a great honour and a privilege to be asked to be the director of the Venice Biennale, one of the world’s most important and exceptional overviews on contemporary art. I am very much looking forward to the great challenge. La Biennale is an exhibition, which is traditionally attracting a wide-ranging public, from professionals to so-called "amateurs" and art lovers. This offers the opportunity to reflect on the highly communicative aspect of today's art, which strongly engages and commits viewers - draughting a contemporary image of the individual in the broad collective and social context”.

For his part, the President of the Biennale, Paolo Baratta, declared: "Bice Curiger can boast great experience in research into contemporary art, in its criticism and exhibition, and has matured a profound knowledge and esteem of the world of artists. These characteristics ensure that among the themes of the next Biennale there can be one – particularly important today – dedicated to the quality and intensification of the relationship between artists, works of contemporary art and today’s public”.

ArtReview's 2009 Power 100

2009-10-17T07:24:00.003+02:00

Coming on the heels of 12 months of extraordinary financial stress, both in the artworld and the real world, the 2009 edition of the Power 100 reflects fundamental changes in influence. Previous No. 1s, both artists and collectors, have plummeted, while only the most ambitious of museums have stayed near the top; meanwhile, percolating up from the middle ranks is a new generation of highly networked, flexible, globetrotting curators – men and women at the very centre of a new way of working.

The ArtReview Power 100 is not just a who’s who to contemporary art but also a guide to general trends and forces that shape the artworld. With almost a third of entries new to the list this year, and sharp divisions among the panel of international experts making the selections, this edition is one of the freshest in years.

1. Hans Ulrich Obrist
2. Glenn D. Lowry
3. Sir Nicholas Serota
4. Daniel Birnbaum
5. Larry Gagosian
6. François Pinault
7. Eli Broad
8. Anton Vidokle, Julieta Aranda & Brian Kuan Wood
9. Iwona Blazwick
10. Bruce Nauman
11. Iwan Wirth
12. David Zwirner
13. Jeff Koons
14. Jay Jopling
15. Marian Goodman
16. Agnes Gund
17. Takashi Murakami
18. Alfred Pacquement
19. Peter Fischli & David Weiss
20. Mike Kelley
21. Barbara Gladstone
22. Steven A. Cohen
23. Dominique Lévy & Robert Mnuchin
24. Adam D. Weinberg
25. Marc Glimcher
26. Amy Cappellazzo & Brett Gorvy
27. Cheyenne Westphal & Tobias Meyer
28. Ann Philbin
29. Matthew Higgs
30. Matthew Marks
31. Tim Blum & Jeff Poe
32. Gavin Brown
33. Ralph Rugoff
34. Liam Gillick
35. Anne Pasternak
36. Dakis Joannou
37. John Baldessari
38. Isa Genzken
39. Paul McCarthy
40. Michael Govan
41. Eugenio López
42. Cindy Sherman
43. Ai Weiwei
44. Patricia Phelps de Cisneros
45. Annette Schönholzer & Marc Spiegler
46. Diedrich Diederichsen
47. Richard Prince
48. Damien Hirst
49. Bernard Arnault
50. Massimiliano Gioni
51. Amanda Sharp & Matthew Slotover
52. Joel Wachs
53. Victor Pinchuk
54. Udo Kittelmann
55. Marina Abramović
56. Michael Ringier
57. Gerhard Richter
58. Richard Serra
59. RoseLee Goldberg
60. Kasper König
61. Roberta Smith
62. Monika Sprüth & Philomene Magers
63. Germano Celant
64. Emmanuel Perrotin
65. Peter Schjeldahl
66. Beatrix Ruf
67. Okwui Enwezor
68. Nicolas Bourriaud
69. Karen & Christian Boros
70. Isabelle Graw
71. Maurizio Cattelan
72. Charles Saatchi
73. Jerry Saltz
74. Jasper Johns
75. Louise Bourgeois
76. Thaddaeus Ropac
77. Mera & Don Rubell
78. Thelma Golden
79. Sarah Morris
80. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev
81. Anita & Poju Zabludowicz
82. Paul Schimmel
83. Jose, Alberto & David Mugrabi
84. Sadie Coles
85. Daniel Buchholz
86. Victoria Miro
87. Maureen Paley
88. Johann König
89. Nicolai Wallner
90. Maria Lind
91. Massimo De Carlo
92. Mario Cristiani, Lorenzo Fiaschi & Maurizio Rigillo
93. Rirkrit Tiravanija
94. Toby Webster
95. Long March Space
96. Nicholas Logsdail
97. Harry Blain & Graham Southern
98. Claire Hsu
99. Peter Nagy
100. Glenn Beck

Goodbye Neo. Goodbye Leipzig.

2009-08-18T14:12:00.005+02:00

Replacing Neo Rauch as a professor is not going as smoothly as one might have hoped here at Leipzig’s Academy Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst. As Die Tageszeitung’s Robert Schimke reports, the Cologne painter Heribert C. Ottersbach has been selected as the successor to Rauch after the international star of the Leipzig School decided to give up his professorship, due to his workload. According to Schimke, Rauch had his own favorite replacement: the Belgian artist Michaël Borremans. Yet Borremans fell through the hiring process because he does not speak German well and lives too far away from the academy.

After convincing Borremans—both a painter and a filmmaker—to apply for the Leipzig position, Rauch reportedly believed that the artist’s twin specializations would be a nod to a portion of the faculty that has no warm feelings for the traditional Leipzig school of painting, including the academy’s rector Joachim Brohm. While Brohm insists that he was not involved in the hiring process, it doesn’t help matters that Ottersbach is a friend of Brohm and one of three painting professors who come from the Brohm’s Rhineland home in western Germany.

“Already in the past,” writes Schimke, “the rector had earned the reputation of taking his network into the Leipzig professorships.” Schimke doesn’t believe that the conflict represents a mere East-West career skirmish but rather a “cultural clash,” which began as a formalist debate in the 1950s in former East Germany and in the vilifications between state-branded German Democratic Republic painters and liberal-minded painters from the West.

Another antagonism lies in the marginalization throughout the 1990s of the Leipzig painters by new media art and more discursive artistic practices. Schimke speculates that Brohm—a photographer socialized by the arts scene in the Rhine region during the ’70s and ’80s—might just be quickening the end of the Leipzig School.

Daniel Birnbaum on "Making Worlds/Fare Mondi"

2009-06-01T07:03:00.000+02:00

La Biennale di Venezia
Making Worlds/Fare Mondi
The 53rd International Art Exhibition
Director: Daniel Birnbaum
7 June 2009 – 22 November 2009

Fare Mondi // Making Worlds // Bantin Duniyan // 制造世界 // Weltenmachen // Construire des Mondes // Fazer Mundos…

2009-05-24T13:38:00.003+02:00

Johann Dieter Wassmann, Et in Arcadia Ego, 1887. 20 x 16 x 12 cm.

In posts over the past several months, I’ve been looking at the terror and anxiety of history through the melancholy of Daniel Birnbaum’s 50 moons of Saturn for the Turin Triennale and more recently his soon-to-open Fare Mondi/Making Worlds for the Venice Biennale. By the 1880s, Johann Dieter Wassmann similarly found himself troubled by a deep melancholy, one which he responded to initially by retreating into the romantic past of his forefathers, a response having clear relevance today. But soon he entered into and created for himself a wholly new world, a world of modernist sensibilities leading to some of the most pioneering work of the late 19th century. From here, I’ll hand it over to Maime Stombock, quoting from her seminal essay, A Carpenter’s Tale:

“Despite his considerable achievements, Johann felt increasingly troubled as the century hastened toward its close... His suspicion that the deliberate progress of modernity was fast bearing down overwhelmed him with regular fits of fear and uncertainty. When he first caught sight of this brooding monolith his response was to back-pedal his way out of the 19th century and into his romanticized view of an earlier, less pressured era. As he came to feel more at ease with the medium of the wooden box he staged his retreat by venturing into works that he hoped might help him to combat this anguish. Here his creative impulse was most Germanic: a return to the ancient wood, with Goethe looming large, although his influences were equally eclectic. His great love of the American Transcendentalist authors Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau is apparent in several works. He had grown fond of their writings while living in Washington, D.C., where he consulted on a long overdue sewerage system for the nation’s capitol during Restoration—the first in the world to be built of concrete, a pioneering design solution born of necessity amid the poorly-drained swamplands of the Potomac.

"Whether conscious or not, his impulse to celebrate the ancient wood twenty years later can be read as an unsurprising response to the soulless concrete, brick and mortar that dominated his professional life. Johann had long found solace in the wood, a passion so deeply imbedded in the German psyche it was the subject of the Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus’ classic Germania; or, On the Origin and situation of the Germans, recorded in the year 98. For Roman readers, Germania served to explain why these primitive arcadians were such barbarians. For the Germans themselves, Tacitus’ portrayal of them as little more than arboreal hunters, gatherers and warriors was taken as a compliment. Germania eventually became a raw staple in their literary diet, all the more so after the first native translation was published in Leipzig in 1496.

“For Johann, delving into the ancient wood was an essential catharsis, just as it would be a hundred years later for his compatriot Anselm Kiefer. In a letter to his brother Wolfgang, dated November 10, 1885, Johann writes that from the moment his saw broke the grain of his rough planks of birch, oak, pine, beech, ash, walnut, elm or whatever else might be at hand, he was magically propelled through the looking glass, moving into the wood, first physically—as he cut, planed, joined and finished the timbers—and then mentally—as he deliberated what world might inhabit the inner space of these exquisite boxes.

“His experience of the wood spared none of the senses, however. The sweet freshness of pine, the acrid harshness of elm that burned the eyes and throat, the gentle pleasantries of oak: he genuinely believed as his father had that the souls of men inhabited these timbers and only by cutting into them and experiencing them fully could these souls find release. He reminded Wolfgang of the stories their father would tell them as children, the stories they would insist on hearing again and again of the family workshop in the years that followed the Battle of Leipzig, a time when their father himself was just a child. The terrible destruction of the city and surrounding villages had left such an abundance of floorboards, panelling and structural timbers that Leipzig’s woodcutters found no cause to fell a single tree for three years, instead harvesting their bounty from the rubble. But unlike fresh cut timbers, which house only old souls, August commanded to his sons that recycled timbers uniquely house the souls of those more recently departed.

“The oak parquetry of Madame Troufold’s salon, gracefully planed and mitered by their grandfather to make a small corner cupboard, had overwhelmed the workshop for a week with the perfumed elegance of a life cultured beyond their dreams. The softly worn pine floorboards of Herr Zächer’s bäckerie, despite being scrubbed with bucket and brush each morning, had brought such hunger to the journeymen when they cut into them to frame the carcass of a veneered chest of drawers that they finished their daily bread before noon, venturing out to find more before returning to their work. The walnut panelling recovered from Kapitän Brunheld’s library, the walnut that their grandfather fashioned into several fine wardrobes, had surrendered thick smoky tobacco, aged whiskey and a thousand tales of Saxon glory before the wardrobes left the shop. And the narrow ash planks from the stairway of Fräulein Nau’s bordell, the planks their grandfather had hoped to shape into dough bins, brought work to such a halt and lowered the integrity of the conversation to such a degree that he gave up in disgust, burning them as firewood, although the smoke from the fire provoked one of the men to partake in a debaucherous drinking binge lasting three days, ending with his arrest for committing unnatural acts in the public square.

“Wolfgang’s reply to his letter was that old men tell tall tales, so leave it at that, but Johann was undeterred, at least for the moment. While this period was both cathartic and crucial in defining the roots of Johann’s dissatisfaction, and while his output might seem to us today to be quite charming, within the decade he too would come to question the romantic overtones in his response.”

La Biennale di Venezia
Making Worlds
The 53rd International Art Exhibition
Director: Daniel Birnbaum
7 June 2009 – 22 November 2009

Easter in Leipzig

2009-04-12T07:42:00.003+02:00

Johann Dieter Wassmann, Nikolaikirche, Leipzig, 1894, 18 x 23 cm.

Fare Mondi // Making Worlds // Bantin Duniyan // 制造世界 // Weltenmachen // Construire des Mondes // Fazer Mundos…

2009-04-02T13:20:00.005+02:00

Johann Dieter Wassmann, Zeit-Raum (Space-Time), 1896. 47 x 27 x 16 cm.

Earlier today, I sat in conversation with a friend. Her five-year-old daughter approached, handing us a beautiful red Easter egg she had decorated in school. She asked if she might go outside to play.

“Five minutes, that’s all,” said her mother.

“I don’t know what that is,” her daughter said in reply. “I don’t know what five minutes is.”

If only the rest of us could say the same. What do we really know of the capriciousness of time?

Here lies the great quandary the pioneering German modernist Johann Dieter Wassmann explored in his influential and far-reaching oeuvre of the late nineteenth century.

A century on, as Daniel Birnbaum approaches the 53rd Venice Biennale with his suggestive title, Fare Mondi/Making Worlds (discussed in recent posts), the question not only arises of what sort of worlds the contemporary artist envisions, but more poignantly, how did we ever come to make the world we live in today?

The Terror of History

History, it has been argued, originated with God’s call to Abraham that he should lead the ancient Hebrews from their land, setting off on a passage of faith through the desert. This one act ignited our perception of time, by creating the anticipation of a point–a moment in time–when the Israelites might return to their “promised land.”

Time itself we allow as having begun quite distinct from history, as part and parcel of creation. For the physicist, this moment arrived with the first resounding crack of the big bang; for the theologian its origin was implicit in the opening three words of Genesis: “In the beginning ...” St. Augustine of Hippo could have been endorsing either view when, in the fifth century, he wrote: “The world was made, not in time, but simultaneously with time.”

Tony Swain, a religious studies lecturer at the University of Sydney, complicates the argument still further:

“Time... is inherently capricious; its indolent openhandedness paving the way for imperialism. Were I asked to offer a tentative typology of spatio-temporal location, I would suggest linear time was a ‘fall’ from place. History, associated quintessentially with the Hebrews, was something which intervened when the Israelites had lost their place. The covenant, God’s promise, was to reinstate place, but this was only feasible by the Godhead entering a world given over to time. From the moment God said to Abraham ‘Leave your country’, instead of their place, the Hebrews had history and a promise of a land—and Zakhor, remembrance.”

In Egypt, Moses and his band of Israelites were the fettered guests of a culture as highly developed as any on the face of this good earth, but it was a culture entrenched in place. Of the thousand gods the Egyptians worshipped, all were gods of either place or weather. When the Israelites begrudgingly heeded their own God’s call to pack up and leave Egypt, they knew theirs was a God of time, transcendent of space—one who would lead them back out into the desert without risk of losing their spirituality.

The point is mute whether this God existed as a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, or whether he merely existed in the fertile imagination of Moses. Whatever the form of this strange all-knowing God, it was the freedom from place he instilled in the Israelites that gave them the strength to cope with a life void of creature comforts—indulgences like pagan idols, golden calves and physical boundaries.

Moses’ symbolic passage through the Red Sea signalled the rebirth of Israel, with one minor delay. For forty years the Israelites would be forced to wander the desert; not until they quit their grumbling would God allow them to return. Only once they truly understood the promised land was their reward for having faith, rather than a place in which to put their faith, would they be allowed to enter the Kingdom of Israel. This Judeo-Christian transcendence of place singularly freed Western man to march forth in conquest: into the annals of time, history and anyone else’s kingdom he might like.

But historical man was not just free to march; he believed he had been given the set responsibility to do so. God had created man in his image after all. This much he knew. And man’s salvation depended on his active pursuit of perfection. This he also knew. And for Christendom this pursuit covered all of mankind, not just the chosen ones. So, as he understood it, man’s salvation depended upon the conversion of the heathen and unwashed, not only so they too could know the love of Jesus, but because salvation would only come once the whole of mankind knew, and was following, The Word. Those pagans who had not yet found Jesus were not just condemning themselves to purgatory (or worse), they were jeopardizing salvation for the rest of mankind as well.

As the Age of Discovery gave way to the Enlightenment, Western man woke up to realize there were a lot more souls out there requiring conversion than he once might have thought. Undaunted, he soon rose to the challenge, and with true missionary zeal he set about the task of remaking the world to his image of perfection—his image of God’s image, his image of himself, that is.

Enter stage left René Descartes, Adam Smith, et al, and again Western philosophy provided man with the means to carry out God’s will. Out of the darkness of feudal Europe came a freedom of thought and deed in keeping with Christianity’s resurrected pursuit of perfection, while providing the basis for the modern capitalist state. Where the Crusades had introduced Christianity by the sword, the free flow of goods and capital advocated by the modern state made the way clear for a modestly more benevolent flow of ideas, among them those ideas pertinent to the spread of Christianity.

The dual responsibilities of perfection and conversion pursued by Christendom were well served by the needs of the capitalist state, for both kingdoms were driven by a hunger for raw materials and new markets. Hand in hand, the industrialist and the missionary could march forth, knowing their causes were not dissimilar; and should trouble ensue, the state was there to back them up or bail them out. So march they did.

As the great evangelical push mounted steam, and mission schools were established across Africa, the Pacific islands and into New Zealand and Australia, the first thing natives were taught wasn’t the love of Jesus or the wrath of God, but how to tell time. And not just how to read a clock to make it to class on time. Rather, they were taught the conceptual notion of minutes adding up to hours, hours dividing the day, days generating weeks and months, and months culminating into years—one year following the next.

Every culture has its own explanation for why day turns into night and seasons flow into years, but they are most often perceived cyclically, so the missionary’s task was much more than just a case of filling in the gaps with these additional demarcations of time. Regardless of faith, these men of God understood the most fundamental tenant in the Judeo-Christian tradition was the linearity of time, serving as it did as a mechanism for advancing the progress of history. They knew on the most basic level—even before language was fully bridged—that efforts to instruct on the teachings of Christianity were meaningless without first conveying the linear nature of Newtonian time.

The sustenance for modern man’s faith in an infinite progress he drew from his belief in the constancy of a rapidly unfolding future—a future-as-resource serving to fuel the military and economic dreams of the present. And only a conviction that the future was infinite could keep the prophesy self-fulfilling. Although, having said that, the prophesy was never wholly fulfilled, for as Kafka said, “To believe in progress is not to believe that progress has already taken place. That would be no belief.”

Progress had become, by this point, modern man’s beloved opiate, his one true religion. The faith that nourished his restless soul lay not in the memory of yesterday, or in the relief of today, but in the promise of a new tomorrow.

What brought the modern era to its close was the overriding angst man felt in the emptiness of this promise. His angst was born out to the full on September 11, 2001, when members of a radical Islamic sect slammed the terror of their own history headlong into the terror of Western history.

The purveyors of these tandem histories—histories that had been watchfully interwoven into the fabric of modernity for some 500 years—henceforth believed that there would be only one victor and that this victor and no other would go on to consciously and voluntarily create the history of tomorrow. But what hope is left for the history of tomorrow when its only promise is a long and intractable terror? With his angst utterly realized, modern man’s chief paradigm today lies in precipitous jeopardy.

The Conceit of Time

But it did not have to be so. In 1905 Albert Einstein revolutionized the world of physics with the publication of his special theory of relativity, although its implications were slow to sink into the rest of Western human endeavour. What modern man understood Einstein to be saying was that time and space aren’t fixed or readily determinable; they are, in fact, infinitely variable. And while they do exist in a relative sense, there is nothing absolute in their nature. They are instead interwoven, making one quite inseparable from the other. So time exists for me in the space I occupy, and time exists for you in the space you occupy, but there were no grounds for the then-held belief that time existed commonly and universally for the both of us.

That which modern man had known and thought of as time for so long was certainly no less real than the printing press or the motor car, but nor was it any less a product of his own invention. What time was not was some universal law governing the even flow of our physical world.

To remove Einstein’s theory from the theoretical and prove it, of course, meant doing things like sending a twenty-year-old identical twin off in a space ship at very nearly the speed of light for two years (in his time), and have him return to find his brother a very old man living comfortably in Tucson, Arizona with the rest of the feeble old scientists who had shot him off into the ether seventy years earlier (in their time) in the first place. So, in lieu of such an experiment taking place, it was easier for non-physicists to put Einstein and his theories on the back burner for the time being.

Three years after the publication of Einstein’s seminal paper, his mentor and one-time teacher, Hermann Minkowski, gave a lecture in Cologne elaborating on his former student’s findings, beginning with the proclamation that,

“Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.”

What Minkowski couldn’t predict was how painfully long it would take for our Newtonian belief in fixed time to actually fade into mere shadows.

For Johann Dieter Wassmann, these winds of change arrived some years earlier, in September of 1889 to be exact. On the 18th of the month, he had chance to travel north from Leipzig to Potsdam for a joint conference with colleagues from the University of Berlin. There he met the newly appointed 31-year-old physics lecturer Max Planck, who would go on to originate quantum theory, winning him the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1918. Planck was presenting a paper at the conference on the second law of thermodynamics, which had been the subject of his doctoral thesis. Planck’s appointment had raised many an eyebrow, as he was reputed to shun all laboratory, clinical or field research in favor of something he was calling theoretical physics.

According to Johann’s diaries, Planck opened the lecture by addressing this very issue. Planck expressed that his “original decision to devote myself to science was a direct result of the discovery... that the laws of human reasoning coincide with the laws governing the sequences of the impressions we receive from the world about us; that, therefore, pure reasoning can enable man to gain an insight into the mechanism of the world.”

This was sounding more like philosophy than science, which appealed to Johann, given the penchant of most of his colleagues for wholly distancing themselves from the arts. In explaining why he had chosen to pursue the theoretical, Planck argued that the very existence of physical laws allows us to presuppose that the “outside world is something independent from man, something absolute, and the quest for the laws which apply to this absolute appeared... as the most sublime scientific pursuit in life.” Could it be, a romantic with an eye on the future? Johann was at once intrigued with the prospect.

If he had uncovered anything in his reading in recent months, it was that his constant anxiety stemmed from an unease with the surgical precision with which man had learned to separate time from his perception of space, a conviction having its roots in the same Enlightenment Johann had so long idealized. He also came to appreciate that modern man’s Newtonian perception of a clockwork universe was rapidly merging with the uglier side of social Darwinism, giving rise to a grossly deterministic revelation of progress. Might makes right was now the watch-cry of presidents, foreign ministers and industrialists alike. The resultant restructuring of individual societies, political systems and world trading patterns based on the availability of labour, resources and capital, placed a premium on time at the very expense of space, while in the same breath commodifying space at the expense of the natural environment. And no one knew better what atrocities the duopoly of industrialization and urbanization wrought on the environment and the human condition than the man made responsible for sanitizing these conditions—Johann Dieter Wassmann—one of Europe’s most respected sewerage engineers.

His reading earlier in the year had led him to suspect the answers he was looking for might well rest somewhere or somewhen in the indeterminate future, rather than where and when he had been looking—in the fictive past. He spoke briefly with Planck after the lecture, outlining his concerns, asking Planck whether the second law of thermodynamics, the entropy law—the law which argues that every closed system tends toward a state of total disorder or chaos—might equally apply to societal systems.

Societal systems aren’t closed, was Planck’s terse reply, but he was nonetheless intrigued by Johann’s suggestion. Planck proposed they begin a correspondence to explore this issue further, but advised Johann to first read Ernst Mach’s The Science of Mechanics (1883), as well as his more controversial Analysis of Sensations (1886). While the latter stands in conflict with many of Planck’s own arguments about the role of the theoretical in science, he felt its excellent refutation of Newtonian physics might help Johann overcome the hurdles he was currently struggling with.

Johann soon found that Mach argues all knowledge is derived from sensation. Consequently, all scientific investigation is beholden to the experience, or “sensations,” of the observer in his encounters with phenomena. Further elaboration on this point allowed Mach to categorically reject the Newtonian notion of absolute space and time, laying the groundwork for Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity. Johann was ecstatic; not only did Mach provide the means by which he might restore the unity of space and time—at least within his own thinking—but he could do so without relying on the past and without abandoning his faith in the universal power of sensation.

“I don’t know what five minutes is,” says the child with her beautiful red Easter egg.

If only the rest of us could understand this, we might not have made the world we’re now stuck with.

Artists announced for Venice Biennale

2009-03-24T05:27:00.002+01:00

Venice, 23rd March 2009 (press release)

The 53rd International Art Exhibition, entitled Fare Mondi // Making Worlds // Bantin Duniyan // 制造世界 // Weltenmachen // Construire des Mondes // Fazer Mundos…, directed by Daniel Birnbaum (pictured), organized by La Biennale di Venezia chaired by Paolo Baratta, will open to the public from Sunday June, 7th to Sunday November, 22nd 2009 in the Giardini (50,000 sq.m.) and the Arsenale (38,000 sq.m.) as well as in various other locations around the city. The press preview will take place on June 4th, 5th, and 6th 2009.

The Director of the 53rd Exhibition, Daniel Birnbaum, has been Rector of the Staedelschule Frankfurt/Main and its Kunsthalle Portikus since 2001. Fare Mondi // Making Worlds, presented in the renewed Palazzo delle Esposizioni in the Giardini and in the Arsenale, is a single, large exhibition that articulates different themes woven into one whole. It is not divided into sections. Considering collectives, it comprises works by over 90 artists from all over the world and includes many new works and on-site commissions in all disciplines.

“The title of the exhibition, Fare Mondi // Making Worlds,” says Director Daniel Birnbaum, “expresses my wish to emphasize the process of creation. A work of art represents a vision of the world and if taken seriously it can be seen as a way of making a world. The strength of the vision is not dependent on the kind or complexity of the tools brought into play. Hence all forms of artistic expression are present: installation art, video and film, sculpture, performance, painting and drawing, and a live parade. Taking 'worldmaking' as a starting point, also allows the exhibition to highlight the fundamental importance of certain key artists for the creativity of successive generations, just as much as exploring new spaces for art to unfold outside the institutional context and beyond the expectations of the art market. Fare Mondi // Making Worlds is an exhibition driven by the aspiration to explore worlds around us as well as worlds ahead. It is about possible new beginnings—this is what I would like to share with the visitors of the Biennale.”

For the direction of the exhibition Daniel Birnbaum is supported by Jochen Volz, artistic organization. Additional advice is provided by an international team of correspondents consisting of Savita Apte, Tom Eccles, Hu Fang, and Maria Finders.

On the occasion of the 53rd International Art Exhibition – the Venice Biennale Foundation inaugurates a number of important structural and organisational developments:

At the Arsenale, the Italian Pavilion has been enlarged from 800 to 1,800 square meters, now opening out to the Giardino delle Vergini and adjacent to a new public entrance. Here a newly constructed bridge links the far side of the Arsenale to the Sestiere di Castello. This renewed Italian Pavilion will be reserved for exhibitions organised by the Italian Ministry for Cultural Affairs. The Italian participation at the 53rd International Art Exhibition is curated by Beatrice Buscaroli and Luca Beatrice. Furthermore, the Arsenale’s exhibition spaces have been extended by developing a larger part of the Giardino delle Vergini (Garden of the Virgins), now measuring 6,000 square meters and offering an enchanting new exhibition space for the main exhibition.

In the Giardini, the historic Italian Pavilion has been renamed Palazzo delle Esposizioni della Biennale and extensively transformed, now providing a permanent exhibition and multi-functional venue opened to the public throughout the year. The transformed Palazzo delle Esposizioni includes a newly refurbished wing housing the library of the Historic Archives of Contemporary Arts (ASAC), made available again to the public after ten years of closure. The Archive comprises documents, books, catalogues and periodicals, freely consultable by researchers and exhibition visitors. Apart from exhibition spaces, the Palazzo delle Esposizioni also comprises a new bookstore, a new café and new spaces for educational activities, respectively designed by three artists participating in the main exhibition. The Palazzo delle Esposizioni will therefore become an important platform for the Foundation’s permanent activities and a point of reference for the other Pavilions in the Giardini.

Ca’ Giustinian, the beautiful 15th century palace on the Canale Grande near San Marco and the traditional site of the Foundation’s headquarters, will reopen in June after several years of renovation. Apart from housing the offices of the Biennale, it will then also become an “open house” for the general public, among others boosting a café on the Grand Canal.

The Awards and Opening Ceremony of the 53rd International Art Exhibition will take place on Saturday, June 6th in the Giardini. Following Director’s suggestion, the President and the Board of the Foundation are this year awarding two Golden Lions for Lifetime Achievement , one to Yoko Ono and one to John Baldessari.

The other Golden Lion Awards – the Golden Lion for Best National Participation of the 53rd International Art Exhibition; the Golden Lion for the Best Artist of the exhibition Fare Mondi // Making Worlds; and the Silver Lion for a Promising Young Artist of the exhibition Fare Mondi // Making Worlds – will be selected by an International Jury chaired by Angela Vettese (Italy), and comprising Jack Bankowsky (USA), Homi K. Bhabha (India), Sarat Maharaj (South Africa), and Julia Voss (Germany).

The National Participations of the 53rd International Art Exhibition, presented in the historical Pavilions in the Giardini, in selected areas of the Arsenale and in numerous venues throughout the city, are this year amounting to the record number of 77 Nations participating, including first-time participations of Montenegro, Principality of Monaco, Republic of Gabon, Union of Comoros, and United Arab Emirates.

Furthermore there is a record number of 38 Collateral Events, proposed by international organizations and institutions, which will organize their own exhibitions and initiatives in Venice during the occasion.

Inaugurating the renovated headquarters of the Biennale as yet another exhibition venue, The Vision Machine: Futurists in the Biennale will be presented at Ca’ Giustinian from June to November 2009. The exhibition explores the presence of Futurist artists, ideas and works in the Biennale. Curated by IUAV, International Semiotics Laboratory Venice, it is the result of a research undertaken at the Historic Archive of the Contemporary Arts (ASAC).

The two volume catalogue of the 53rd International Art Exhibition will be published by Marsilio.

Participating Artists:

Jumana Emil Abboud
Born in Shefa-Amer, Palestine, 1971
Lives and works in Jerusalem, Israel

Georges Adéagbo
Born in Cotonou, Benin, 1942
Lives and works in Cotonou, Benin

John Baldessari
Born in National City, USA, 1931
Lives and works in Santa Monica, USA

Rosa Barba
Born in Agrigento, Italy, 1972
Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Massimo Bartolini
Born in Cecina, Italy, 1962
Lives and works in Cecina, Italy

Thomas Bayrle
Born in Berlin, Germany, 1937
Lives and works in Frankfurt, Germany

Simone Berti
Born in Adria, Italy, 1966
Lives and works in Milan and Berlin, Germany

Bestué /Vives
Born in Barcelona, Spain, 1980
Born in Barcelona, Spain, 1978
They live and work in Barcelona, Spain

Mike Bouchet
Born in Castro Valley, USA, 1970
Lives and works in Frankfurt, Germany

Ulla Von Brandenburg
Born in Karlsruhe, Germany, 1974
Lives and works in Paris, France

André Cadere
Warsaw, Poland, 1934 - Paris, France, 1978

Paul Chan
Born in Hong Kong, Hong Kong, 1973
Lives and works in New York, USA

Chen Zhen
Shanghai, China, 1955 – Paris, France, 2000

Nikhil Chopra
Born in Calcutta, India, 1974
Lives and works in Mumbai, India

Chu Yun
Born in Jiangxi, China, 1977
Lives and works in Beijing, China

Tony Conrad
Born in Concord, USA, 1940
Lives and works in Buffalo and New York, USA

Keren Cytter
Born in Tel Aviv, Israel, 1977
Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Nathalie Djurberg
Born in Lysekil, Sweden, 1978
Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Anju Dodiya
Born in Mumbai, India, 1964
Lives and works in Mumbai, India

Gino De Dominicis
Ancona, Italy, 1947 – Roma, Italy, 1998

Elena Elagina, Igor Makarevich
Born in Moscow,Russia, 1949
Born in Trialety, Georgia, 1943
They live and work in Moscow, Russia

Öyvind Fahlström
São Paulo, Brazil, 1928 – Stockholm, Sweden, 1976

Lara Favaretto
Born in Treviso, Italy, 1973
Lives and works in Turin, Italy

Hans-Peter Feldmann
Born in Düsseldorf, Germany, 1941
Lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany

Spencer Finch
Born in New Haven, USA, 1962
Lives and works in New York, USA

Ceal Floyer
Born in Karachi, Pakistan, 1968
Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

William Forsythe
Born in New York, USA, 1949
Lives and works in Frankfurt, Germany

Yona Friedman
Born in Budapest, Hungary, 1923
Lives and works in Paris , France

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster
Born in Strasbourg, France, 1965
Lives and works in Paris, France

Sheela Gowda
Born in Bhadravati, India, 1957
Lives and works in Bangalore, India

Tamara Grcic
Born in Munich, Germany, 1964
Lives and works in Frankfurt, Germany

GUTAI

Akira Kanayama
Nara, Japan, 1924 – Nara, Japan, 2005

Sadamasa Motonaga
Born in Iga, Japan, 1922
Lives and works in Takarazuka City, Japan

Saburo Murakami
Kobe, Japan, 1925 – Nishinomiya, Japan, 1996

Shozo Shimamoto
Born in Osaka, Japan, 1928
Lives and works in Kyoto, Japan

Kazuo Shiraga
Amagasaki, Japan, 1924 – Amagasaki, Japan, 2008

Atsuko Tanaka
Nara, Japan, 1932 – Nara, Japan, 2005

Tsuruko Yamazaki
Born in Ashiya, Japan, 1925
Lives and works in Ashiya, Japan

Jiro Yoshihara
Osaka, Japan, 1905 – Ashiya, Japan, 1972

Michio Yoshihara
Ashiya, Japan, 1933 – Ashiya, Japan, 1996

Guyton\Walker
Born in Indiana, USA, 1972
Born in Georgia, USA, 1969
They live and work in New York, USA

Gonkar Gyatso
Born in Lhasa, Tibet, 1961
Lives and works in London, Great Britain

Jan Håfström
Born in Stockholm, Sweden, 1937
Lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden

Anawana Haloba
Born in Livingstone, Zambia,1978
Lives and works in Oslo, Norway

Rachel Harrison
Born in New York, USA, 1966
Lives and works in New York, USA

Susan Hefuna
Born in Cairo, Egypt, 1962
Lives and works in Egypt and Germany

Carsten Höller
Born in Brussels, Belgium, 1961
Lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden

Huang Yong Ping
Born in Quanzhou, China, 1954
Lives and works in Paris, France

Joan Jonas
Born in New York, USA, 1965
Lives and works in New York, USA

Miranda July
Born in Barre, USA, 1974
Lives and works in Los Angeles, USA

Rachel Khedoori
Born in Sydney, Australia, 1964
Lives and works in Los Angeles, USA

Toba Khedoori
Born in Sydney, Australia, 1964
Lives and works in Los Angeles, USA

Koo Jeong A.
Born in Seoul, Korea, 1967
Lives and works in Paris, France

Moshekwa Langa
Born in Bakenburg, South Africa, 1975
Lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Arto Lindsay
Born in Richmond, USA, 1953
Lives and works in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil

Renata Lucas
Born in Ribeirao Preto, Brazil, 1971
Lives and works in Sao Paulo, Brazil

Goshka Macuga
Born in Warsaw, Poland, 1967
Lives and works in London, Great Britain

Gordon Matta-Clark
New York, USA, 1943 – New York, USA, 1978

Cildo Meireles
Born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1948
Lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Aleksandra Mir
Born in Lubin, Poland, 1967
Lives and works in Palermo, Italy

Moscow Poetry Club

Yoko Ono
Born in Tokyo, Japan, 1933
Lives and works in New York, USA

Jorge Otero-Pailos
Born in Madrid, Spain, 1971
Lives and works in New York, USA

Blinky Palermo
Leipzig, Germany, 1943 - Kurumba, Maldives, 1977

Lygia Pape
Novo Friburgo, Brazil, 1927 – Rio De Janeiro, Brazil, 2004

Anna Parkina
Born in Moscow, Russia, 1979
Lives and works in Moscow, Russia

Philippe Parreno
Born in Oran, Algeria, 1964
Lives and works in Paris, France

Pavel Pepperstein
Born in Moscow, Russia, 1966
Lives and works in Moscow, Russia

Alessandro Pessoli
Born in Cervia, Italy, 1963
Lives and works in Milan, Italy

Falke Pisano
Born in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 1978
Lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Michelangelo Pistoletto
Born in Biella, Italy, 1933
Lives and works in Biella, Italy

Att Poomtangon
Born in Bangkok, Thailand, 1973
Lives and works in Frankfurt and Chiangmai, Thailand

Marjetica Potrč
Born in Ljubljana, Slovenia, 1953
Lives and works in Ljubljana, Slovenia

Sara Ramo
Born in Madrid, Spain, 1975
Lives and works in Paris, France

Tobias Rehberger
Born in Esslingen, Germany, 1966
Lives and works in Frankfurt, Germany

Pietro Roccasalva
Born in Modica, Italy, 1970
Lives and works in Milan, Italy

Tomas Saraceno
Born in Tucuman, Argentina, 1973
Lives and works in Frankfurt, Germany

Amy Simon
Born in New York, USA, 1957
Lives and works in Stockholm and Tel Aviv, Israel

Simon Starling
Born in Epsom, Great Britain, 1967
Lives and works in Copenhagen and Berlin, Germany

Pascale Marthine Tayou
Born in Kamerun, Africa, 1967
Lives and works in Brussels, Belgium

Wolfgang Tillmans
Born in Remscheid, Germany, 1968
Lives and works in London, Great Britain

Rirkrit Tiravanija
Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1961
Lives and works in New York, USA

Grazia Toderi
Born in Padua, Italy, 1963
Lives and works in Milan, Italy

Madelon Vriesendorp
Born in Bilthoven, The Netherlands, 1945
Lives and works in London, Great Britain

Tian Tian Wang
Born in Qingdao, China, 1980
Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Richard Wentworth
Born in Samoa, Oceania, 1947
Lives and works in London, Great Britain

Pae White
Born in Pasadena, USA, 1963
Lives and works in Los Angeles, USA

Cerith Wyn Evans & Florian Hecker
Born in Llanelli, Wales, 1958
Born in Augsburg, Germany, 1975
Lives and works in London, Great Britain
Lives and works in Vienna, Austria

Xu Tan
Born in Wuhan, China, 1957
Lives and works in Shanghai and Guangzhou, China

Haegue Yang
Born in Seoul, Korea, 1971
Lives and works in Berlin and Seoul, Korea

Héctor Zamora
Born in Mexico City, Mexico, 1974
Lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil

Anya Zholud
Born in Saint Petersburg, Russia, 1981
Lives and works in Moscow, Russia

Fare Mondi // Making Worlds // Bantin Duniyan // 制造世界 // Weltenmachen // Construire des Mondes // Fazer Mundos…

2009-02-17T04:19:00.005+01:00

At this curious place in time, the once exuberant art world stands stunned and bedazzled — like a deer in the glaring headlights of the oncoming global financial crisis. The inability of the art world to respond in any meaningful way is testament to the cul-de-sac it has been driving headily and headlong into in recent years.

In a debate last week at New York’s Rockefeller University, the proposition was put forward that “the art market is less ethical than the stock market.” Speaking against were Christie’s deputy chair Amy Cappellazzo, painter Chuck Close, and critic Jerry Saltz. Despite their humour, charm and best efforts, the proposition was carried: 55 percent for, 33 percent against, with 12 percent undecided.

In the most recent Sunday New York Times, Holland Cotter sums up our current state in an article titled “The Boom is Over. Long Live the Art!” He writes, “ethical firewalls are not this industry’s style.”

In these depths of winter, the art world sits by the fire, lost and befuddled, reading Sarah Thornton's Seven Days in the Art World, pining in remembrance of things past.

Few industries have been left more exposed and bereft by their own inadequacies than the art world. On Monday, Standard & Poor’s warned that it may cut its rating of Sotheby’s bonds to below investment grade, a rating known appropriately as “junk.” Much the same could be said for the industry at large.

In further news out of New York this week, Guild & Greyshkul closed its doors on Tuesday, following on from the recent closures of Roebling Hall and Cohan and Leslie in Chelsea; Rivington Arms in the East Village and 31 Grand on the Lower East Side.

The moral failure of the art market is by no means peculiar to New York City. Writing in the New Statesman earlier this month, Alice O’Keeffe observes, “I remember, in March 2007, going to see Tony Blair make a speech on the arts at Tate Modern, in which he boldly claimed to have presided over a cultural ‘golden age’. The arts, he told the gathered great and good, were a vital component of Britain's continued economic success: ‘A nation that cares about art will not just be a better nation. In the early 21st century, it will be a more successful one.’

“In new Labour parlance, the arts had become the ‘creative industries’. Like bankers and stockbrokers, artists were expected to prop up the wobbly edifice of consumer capitalism, to generate profit, attract tourists, help Britain market itself as a cultural — and therefore financial — ‘hub’.

“Placing culture firmly at the service of finance had its advantages for the arts administrators in the audience, too, as it gave them a clear claim on their slice of the government pie. Blair's speech was received with enthusiastic applause and was followed by polite questions about future funding. Nobody asked whether generating cash was an appropriate raison d'être for the arts — let alone what, if anything, a man who holidayed with the Bee Gees and Cliff Richard could tell us about cultural value.”

Here in Leipzig, it’s been hard, if not impossible, to tell the collector from the curator over the past year. The city’s Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst (Gallery of Contemporary Art) has faced stinging criticism for hosting a series of exhibitions giving dealers, collectors and corporate art collections total freedom to display their works as they wish. Chris Dercon, the director of the Haus der Kunst in Munich, describes the initiative, entitled “Carte Blanche”, as “exactly the kind of thing that we do not need in public galleries”.  The GfZK, which is a public-private partnership, receives much of its funding from public sources. It has now ceded curatorial control of half of its galleries until 2010.  Many German museum directors, including myself, have expressed disquiet at the exhibitions which will give commercial galleries such as Leipzig’s Dogenhaus and Eigen + Art free run of the museum space.  Further exhibitions will be drawn from collections assembled by the publishers Leipziger Verlags, industrialist Arend Oetker and his wife Brigitte; consultant Klaus and Doris Schmidt; and collectors Leon Janucek, and Vivian and Horst Schmitter. The costs are being met by the private participants, who may display the works as they please. 

Quoted in The Art Newspaper, Dr. Dercon points out, “You can raise questions about public and private museums, but what we need to discuss is the usurping of intellectual power by the commercial world.” Dr Dercon criticises these contemporary collectors, saying many viewed art collections as “luxury goods”. He adds, “We all deal, with private collectors and many, especially old master collectors, have been generous with loans, gifts and sharing scholarship, much more so, in fact, than many contemporary art collectors.”  But he questions the Leipzig initiative, saying “it may be intelligent [politically] but it is not intellectual and if we are trying to find a way to work with the private sector, this is not it. It is partly an issue of public responsibility and partly an issue of transparency. One of the biggest problems in the art world is that the same people can be critics, curators, dealers, crypto-collectors, even museum directors. I don’t think this is going to shed much light on what is an opaque situation.”

The challenge facing Swedish curator Daniel Birnbaum, as he plans this summer’s Venice Biennale — and many other curators as they prepare upcoming events — is to prove they’re anything more than yesterday’s junk bond dealers. Will the goods they have on offer provide any real meaning to a world teetering on the brink of Depression, or are they just so many more Bernie Madoffs, peddling their Ponzi schemes as they have in recent years.

The greater challenge, however, falls upon artists themselves. The collapse of the art market has meant a realignment of power, with once mighty gatekeepers now unemployed also-rans and artists back in the studio facing an enviable blank canvas on which to build a new world.

As Holland Cotter writes, “This has happened more than once in the recent past. Art has changed as a result. And in every case it has been artists who have reshaped the game. At the same time, if the example of past crises holds true, artists can also take over the factory, make the art industry their own. Collectively and individually they can customize the machinery, alter the modes of distribution, adjust the rate of production to allow for organic growth, for shifts in purpose and direction. They can daydream and concentrate. They can make nothing for a while, or make something and make it wrong, and fail in peace, and start again…

“But there will be many, many changes for art and artists in the years ahead. Trying to predict them is like trying to forecast the economy. You can only ask questions. The 21st century will almost certainly see consciousness-altering changes in digital access to knowledge and in the shaping of visual culture. What will artists do with this?

“Will the art industry continue to cling to art’s traditional analog status, to insist that the material, buyable object is the only truly legitimate form of art, which is what the painting revival of the last few years has really been about? Will contemporary art continue to be, as it is now, a fancyish Fortunoff’s, a party supply shop for the Love Boat crew? Or will artists — and teachers, and critics — jump ship, swim for land that is still hard to locate on existing maps and make it their home and workplace?

“I’m not talking about creating ’60s-style utopias; all those notions are dead and gone and weren’t so great to begin with. I’m talking about carving out a place in the larger culture where a condition of abnormality can be sustained, where imagining the unknown and the unknowable — impossible to buy or sell — is the primary enterprise. Crazy! says anyone with an ounce of business sense.

“Right. Exactly. Crazy.”

Palestine c/o Venice

2009-02-16T06:23:00.000+01:00

Palestine c/o Venice marks the first Palestinian participation at the Venice Biennale. Rather than adopt one theme, the exhibition takes on a conceptual framework that embraces the Palestinian people questioning the disproportionate use of the media image of nameless faces and voiceless people. Two of the art projects are collaborative interventions with diverse Palestinian communities whose members will travel to Venice to participate in the art performance and/or the Symposium.

In the same spirit, it is appropriate and necessary to insure that the Palestinian communities under siege, unable to obtain travel passes, join in celebrating the first Palestinian exhibition at the Venice Biennale. In this respect, six Palestinian art institutions in Palestine will exhibit duplicates of the art works, thereby allowing Palestinian audiences to participate in the opening of the exhibition simultaneously to its opening in Venice. The Palestinian venues are: A.M. Qattan Foundation, Birzeit University Art Museum, Al-Hoash Palestinian Art court, International Academy of Art Palestine, Al Ma'mal Foundation for Contemporary Art, and Riwaq Center for Architectural Conservation.

The seven participating artists, commissioned to create new works, were chosen for their outstanding commitment to their art and their ability to bridge local and global themes. Among them are emerging and established artists. They employ diverse techniques including sound installation, multimedia performance installation, site specific work, animation, photography, and video. Their art references Palestinian issues within an international artistic discourse. It is self-reflexive on the artistic process outside the boundaries of the traditional exhibition space, tackles themes ranging from the epistemology of the concept of biennales to the dialogue of cultures within architecture and urban design, and explores visual perception of objects in the mechanical state, marginality via the structural geography of the refugee camp, and the activation of an almost non-exiting community discourse on the colonialist socio-spatial reconfiguration of urban centers.

Participating Artists
Taysir Batniji, lives and works in Paris
Shadi HabibAllah, lives and works in Ramallah
Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti, live and work in Bethlehem
Jawad Al Malhi, lives and work in Jerusalem
Emily Jacir, lives and works in Ramallah/New York
Khalil Rabah, lives and works in Ramallah
Curator: Salwa Mikdadi, Independent Curator based in Berkeley, CA
Commissioner: Vittorio Urbani, Director Nuova Icona

Symposium: Conversations
Date: June 5th, 2009 9:30 until 5:00 pm
Free Admission. Limited seating, early registration required
Contact: info@palestinecoveniceb09.org

Issues to be discussed will focus on art in the time of perpetual crisis, the role artists play in civil society as activist and as catalysts of democratic discourse, and the artists' activation of public spaces as alternative venues in the absence of museums and state support.

Symposium participants include the artists as well as art historian Yazid Anani (Birzeit University, W. Bank), Kamal Boullata (artist & art historian), Salwa Mikdadi, Vittorio Urbani, Tina Sherwell (art historian and director of The International Academy of Art Palestine), Jack Persekian (curator, al Ma'mal Foundation for the Arts, Jerusalem & artistic director of the Sharjah Biennale) architects Suad Al Amiry (Director, Riwaq Center for Architectural Conservation) and Farhat Yousef (Head of Planning Unit, Riwaq), Ramallah.

Making Worlds
Director: Daniel Birnbaum
La Biennale di Venezia
7 June 2009 – 22 November 2009

Making Worlds, Building Bridges at the Venice Biennale

2008-12-17T00:02:00.003+01:00

A project that will redefine the exhibition venues at the Arsenale and Giardini was approved by the Biennale Board on 12th December. At the Arsenale, the Italian Pavilion in the Tese delle Vergini area will be enlarged, expanding into another facility and facing the adjoining Giardino delle Vergini. The Pavilion will be linked by a new entrance to the Arsenale via a bridge to be built between the Garden and the Castello neighbourhood. The board is hoping the renewal will be in place for the 53rd International Art Exhibition (7th June - 22nd November 2009).

The Biennale intends to rename this new facility as "Padiglione Italia". The Board also proposed the City Council to change the name of the historical building in the Giardini area, that is to bear the name of "Palazzo delle Esposizioni" of the Venice Biennale. This will emphasize its new nature, considering that this facility will be open all year round both for exhibitions and for the audience.

La Biennale di Venezia
Making Worlds
The 53rd International Art Exhibition
Director: Daniel Birnbaum
7 June 2009 – 22 November 2009

Whitney Announces Curators for 2010 Biennial

2008-12-12T23:09:00.002+01:00

Carol Vogel reports in today's New York Times that Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari have been selected as curators for the 2010 Whitney Biennial. Bonami, fifty-three, is a seasoned Italian-born curator with an international reputation, while Carrion-Murayari, twenty-eight, is a homegrown senior curatorial assistant. Bonami will serve as curator for the biennial, with Carrion-Murayari acting as associate curator.

“It seemed like a good fit on a lot of levels,” said Donna De Salvo, the Whitney’s chief curator. “Francesco is well known to the Whitney”—he helped organize the Rudolf Stingel retrospective in 2007—“and he has been thinking about and looking at biennials. Gary is about investing in a younger generation of curators. Not youth for youth’s sake but tapping into the way they see.”

This year, the biennial spilled over into the Park Avenue Armory for part of its run. At other times, it has spread into Central Park. The 2010 edition, it seems, will be a more concentrated affair, occupying only the museum’s landmark Marcel Breuer home. The two men also said they were considering weaving works from the Whitney’s holdings into the biennial, which would be a departure. “We have talked about using the permanent collection,” Carrion-Murayari said. “We definitely want to consider it.”

Abu Dhabi to Stage Independent Exhibition at Venice Biennale

2008-12-10T08:10:00.002+01:00

Abu Dhabi—Although the United Arab Emirates as a whole will have its first-ever pavilion at the next Venice Biennale, from June 7 – November 22, 2009, Abu Dhabi has announced it will mount its own independent exhibition as well, reports Artnet. The show's goal is to represent the "contemporary visual arts and culture from the perspective of Abu Dhabi and beyond."

The Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture & Heritage has tapped Paris–based curator Catherine David to organize a "Platform for Venice" for the biennale, which will see her produce a survey of the city "visually interpreted by photographers, artists, and filmmakers from the region and abroad." David directed Documenta 10 in Kassel in 1994–97, the Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam in 2002–04, and will curate the 2009 Lyon Biennial. (ARTINFO)

La Biennale di Venezia
Making Worlds
The 53rd International Art Exhibition
Director: Daniel Birnbaum
7 June 2009 – 22 November 2009

Frohe Weihnachten!

2008-12-09T07:26:00.004+01:00

Johann Dieter Wassmann, untitled, Dessau, 1895. Albumen silver print, 18 x 23 cm

Always the first with new technology, and saddened in the knowledge that once again this year I have faint chance of getting around to posting Christmas cards to MuseumZeitraum’s many friends, I have decided to experiment by sending greetings harnessing the latest in communications awareness. So here’s a warm cheerio this holiday season to you and yours, via Google-alert. Knowing full well that every damn one of you has a Google-alert on yourself (what a vain lot we are in the art world - as Sarah Thornton will attest to), if you clicked through to see whose company you're keeping in the blogosphere after receiving your alert, happy holidays from all of us here at MuseumZeitraum! And as long as you’re here - gathered together on this cold winter’s night (unless you're still in Miami) - how about joining in the festive moment by adding a greeting down below.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all… Gute Nacht.

Jerry Saltz & Roberta Smith, Daniel Birnbaum, Paolo Baratta, Gabriel Orozco, Jeff Wassmann, François Pinault, Knight Landesman, Charles Guarino, Tony Korner, John Baldessari, Yve-Alain Bois, Paul Grabowsky, Ai WeiWei, Abigail von Bibera, Francesco Bonami, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Onkwui Enwezor, Walid Raad, Harold Rosenberg, Charles Saatchi, Roman Abramovich & Daria Zhukova, Ed Ruscha, Beatrice Buscaroli, Luca Beatrice, Jochen Volz, Savita Apte, Tom Eccles, Hu Fang, Maurizio Cattelan, Vanessa Beecroft, Francesco Vezzoli, Sally Smart, Magdalena Sawon & Tamas Banovich, Jan Verwoert, Jennifer Higgie, Jörg Heiser, Mary Boone, Jeff Poe & Tim Blum, Paul Chan, Doug Aitken, Zhao Bandi, Benjamin Buchloh, Jim Hart, Lee Rosenbaum aka CultureGrrl, Amy Cappellazzo, Dara Mitchell, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Elizabeth Ann Macgregor, Roger Buergel & Ruth Noack, Paula Cooper, R. Crumb, Larry Gagosian, Jay Jopling, Tacita Dean, Hal Foster, Sarah Thornton, Damien Hirst, Laura Hoptman, Rosalind Krauss, Holland Cotter, Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, Jan Avgikos, Ute Meta Bauer, James Elkins, Sussane Ghez, Thomas Crow, Richard Flood, Pamela Lee, Molly Nesbit, Michael Kimmelman, Lynn Cooke, Isabelle Graw, Jori Finfel, Tim Griffin, Don McMahon, Jeff Gibson, Michael Kuo, Scott Rothkopf, Elizabeth Schambelan, Kyle Bentley, Alexander, Scrimgeour, Laura Hoffmann, Barry Schwabsky, Carolie Busta, Nicole Lanctot, Lloyd Wise, Germano Celant, Dennis Cooper, Arthur C. Danto, David Frankel, Bruce Hainley, John Kelsey, Kazue Kobata, Donald Kuspit, Rhonda Lieberman, Greil Marcus, Declan McGonagle, Ida Panicelli, Robert Pincus-Witten, Peter Plagens, John Rajchman, David Rimanelli, Katy Siegel, Philip Tinari, Jack Bankowsky, Jean-Hubert Martin, Rosa Martinez, Maria de Corral, Cordula Grewe, Andreas Gursky, Lenore Manderson, Giancarlo Politi, James Meyer, Renee Price, Michael Lewis, Abigail Solomon-Goreau, Ulrich Keller, Hal Foster, Chrissie Iles, Hou Hanru, Peter Galassi, Maria Morris Hambourg, Sylvia Wolf, Madeleine Grynsztejn, Chris Ofili, Gerhard Richter, Peter Schjeldahl, David Zwirner, Carol Vogel, Kathy Halbreich, Sir Nicholas Serota, Iwan Wirth, Eli Broad, Steven A. Cohen, Brett Gorvy, Tobias Meyer & Cheyenne Westphal, Richard Prince, Dominique Lévy & Robert Mnuchin, Michael Govan, Marc Glimcher, Annette Schönholzer, Marc Spiegler, Alfred Pacquement, Matthew Slotover & Amanda Sharp, Barbara Gladstone, Matthew Marks, Agnes Gund, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan, Dakis Joannou, Bernard Arnault, Sadie Coles, Julia Peyton-Jones, Donna De Salvo, Don Rubell & Mera Rubell, Ann Philbin, Paul Schimmel, Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, Michael Ringier, Jose Mugrabi, Alberto Mugrabi, David Mugrabi, Chris Kennedy, Olafur Eliasson, Harry Blain & Graham Southern, Peter Doig, Bruno Brunnet, Nicole Hackert, Philipp Haverkampf, Marlene Dumas, Gavin Brown, Victoria Miro, Mitchell Rales, Yvon Lambert, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Banksy, Emmanuel Perrotin, William Acquavella, Victor Pinchuk, Cai Guo Qiang, Maureen Paley, Thelma Golden, Ralph Rugoff, Robert Gober, Iwona Blazwick, Richard Armstrong, Massimiliano Gioni, Reena Spaulings, Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, Shaun Caley Regen, Liam Gillick, Miuccia Prada, Francesca von Habsburg, Christian Boros, Nicholas Logsdail, Subodh Gupta, Peter Nagy, Casey Reas, Anita Zabludowicz & Poju Zabludowicz, Guy Ullens & Myriam Ullens, Laurent Le Bon, Thomas Kinkade and Anna Wintour.

Making worlds of our own

2008-12-05T06:48:00.005+01:00

Johann Dieter Wassmann, Hôtel de l’Étoile, 1897, 140 x 51 x 26 cm.

While Daniel Birnbaum is busy weltenmachen for the 53rd Venice Biennale next summer, here at MuseumZeitraum we’re no less frantic making rooms to house the constructed worlds of Johann Dieter Wassmann for our September 2009 opening. Despite our all-too-well chronicled financial difficulties earlier this year, MuseumZeitraum is back on track, a little wiser and a little leaner maybe, but still surviving. In the current climate, can you ask for much more?

Here’s a photograph of Johann Dieter Wassmann’s charming Hôtel de l’Étoile, 1897, installed in the museum’s newly completed entry for a recent function. Several galleries are also near completion, as are staff offices, which, while meagre, are functional.

Until the winds of change bring some warm breathe of hope to our beleaguered planet, plans will remain on hold for completion of the museum’s conference room, library, café and conservation facilities.

Christov-Bakargiev appointed director of Documenta 13

2008-12-04T12:36:00.002+01:00

Writing in Rupert Murdoch's The Australian, Corrie Perkin reports that Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev has been appointed new artistic director of Documenta 13. Christov-Bakargiev has until 2012 to research and plan her exhibition. Like her predecessors, the curator will travel internationally to observe current art practices. In recent months, the ten-person selection panel, which included Kathy Halbreich, associate director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and Joseph Backstein, director of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Moscow, whittled down the list of candidates to six. Elizabeth Ann Macgregor, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, who was on the Documenta 13 selection panel, describes the German event as the “art Olympics.” She says the artistic director’s role “is probably the plum job in the art world because of its high profile, but that high profile also makes it problematic. Carolyn’s appointment will cause a lot of discussion, as these things usually do.”

No Expense Spared As Arab Nations Party Their Way to the Venice Biennale

2008-12-04T08:04:00.003+01:00

The Venice Biennale is to play host to the first pavilion from the United Arab Emirates next year.

If anyone is in any doubt that the Gulf states are a coming power in art and culture, then lay it to rest. The Venice Biennale - that barometer of the ebb and flow of artistic trends - is to play host to the first pavilion from the United Arab Emirates next year. If there's a political message here, it's that the UAE is not just building cultural palaces - witness Abu Dhabi's Saadiyat Island, where a performing arts center by Zaha Hadid and a Guggenheim museum by Frank Gehry are also being constructed - but also producing artists, though none have yet been named for Venice. One thing's for certain: no expense will be spared.

Meanwhile, in Qatar, the vast new Museum of Islamic Art in Doha opened to the public on Monday. Designed by IM Pei, it houses a stupendous collection of Islamic artworks; the chair of the board is Sheikha Mayassa, daughter of the emir. The opening celebrations were apparently lavish: wonderful food, a performance by cellist Yo-Yo Ma and all the movers and shakers in attendance - Tate director Nicholas Serota, British Museum director Neil MacGregor, both the outgoing director and the director designate of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst. No demon drink, of course - which certainly makes a change from boozy British art parties, not least Monday's Turner prize.

The Guardian Newspaper 12/2/2008

La Biennale di Venezia
Making Worlds
The 53rd International Art Exhibition
Director: Daniel Birnbaum
7 June 2009 – 22 November 2009

Manhatta (1921)

2008-11-18T05:08:00.002+01:00

Making worlds... making cities.

Manhatta (1921), an experimental film by Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand. A modernist vision of old New York, this 10 minute delight was restored over the past two years and screened at the Museum of Modern Art earlier this month. For more on this landmark work, here's an article in The New York Times.

Paris-Vienna-Düsseldorf (1892-1897)

2008-11-18T05:05:00.005+01:00

Making worlds... making progress!

The early modern photographic works of Johann Dieter Wassmann.

I can see Saturn from my house.

2008-11-06T02:10:00.006+01:00

Ragnar Kjartansson (Iceland), God, 2007.

Turin, Italy – What was billed as the opening night of Daniel Birnbaum’s 50 Moons of Saturn for the Turin Triennale became instead a celebration of the triumph of democracy as the champagne flowed long into the night, first at the Triennale and later at the palazzo of collector Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, honouring the victory of President-elect Barack Obama. If not for all the art on the walls and a lot of people speaking Italian, we could have just as easily been in Chicago’s Grant Park with Oprah for all the joy oozing from the crowd over the election of the United State’s first African-American president.

Nicolas Sarkozy could have spoken for each and every one of us when he wrote in a personal note to Obama, “As we all face tremendous challenges, your election brings to France, to Europe and across the world tremendous hope.”

As for the art, it was good, it was very good, but you might better go to the Triennale’s website for a description, the night belonged to Obama. And by the way, if you’re leaving one of the Venice Biennale openings for Making Worlds // Fare Mondi // Bantin Duniyan // 制造世界 // Weltenmachen // Construire des Mondes // Fazer Mundos… in a few months time, and a handsome young Icelandic artist asks to borrow money for the cab ride home, you can kiss those lire goodbye.

50 Moons of Saturn
Curator: Daniel Birnbaum
Torino Triennale
6 November 2008 – 1 February 2009

Making Worlds: Speculations on the 53rd International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia 2009

2008-11-04T12:32:00.016+01:00

04.11.08 Leipzig-München-Milano-Torino IC89

With 5 hours down and 10 to go – Leipzig to Turin by rail – I thought I’d peck out a post via iPhone and a very intermittent IC/3G line. Connections permitting, tomorrow night I’ll join Daniel Birnbaum for the opening of 50 Moons of Saturn at the Turin Triennale. Eight months from today, we’ll meet again for a week of openings celebrating Daniel’s directorship of the 53rd Venice Biennale.

Much praise has already been lauded on Daniel’s choice of artists for Turin, but his picks for Venice remain shrouded in secrecy. If I have any luck in lifting the shroud in Turin, I’ll report back; in the meantime, speculation remains rife as to his interpretation of his chosen theme for Venice: Making Worlds.

In a statement released Friday by Biennale president Paolo Baratta, Daniel is quoted as saying he’ll be looking at relationships between key artists and successive generations. “A number of historical reference points will anchor the exhibition. These artistic roots are still active, productive. They give energy to the branches of the tree of art, and perhaps also to that which emerges today, to the ‘sprouts’. I would like to explore strings of inspiration that involve several generations and to display the roots as well as the branches that grow into a future not yet defined”.

The key question arising then: where to begin? How deep can one dig in looking for roots when curating a contemporary art exhibition? On the first leg of my journey from Leipzig to Munich this chilly November morning, it was hard not to imagine Caspar David Friedrich at every bend in the river… leading one to ponder Anselm Kiefer kicking off his career photographing himself in Friedrichesque poses, in emulation of the romantic icon, aka Wanderer Over the Misty Sea. In 1980, Kiefer represented the Federal Republic of Germany in the 39th Venice Biennale, completing the tree – roots, branches, sprouts – but does the curator reach as far back as Friedrich for inclusion?

Likewise, the work of Johann Dieter Wassmann has weighed in with enormous influence over the past century, even if his work is little known outside the German art world. Wassmann was in attendence at the opening of the very first Venice Biennale on 30 April 1895 – he had travelled to Venice that spring to consult on the city’s woeful sewerage system – but his art work has never been shown in Venice subsequently. The first to grasp his importance was Kurt Schwitters, followed by Duchamp, Cornell, Rauschenberg and many others – the roots, the branch, the sprout – but does he too deserve a place in Venice? Those of us here at MuseumZeitraum would certainly like to think so, but it will be for Daniel to decide how deep the roots run.

We can rest assured he won’t be following the Museum of Modern Art’s canonical model of the 52nd Exhibition. Some may make it, Louise Bourgeois (pictured) and Elizabeth Murray would be strong contenders, but it’s unlikely the big boys will be leaving 53rd Street.

More likely, Daniel will be scouring the margins of European intellectual circles for artists influenced by fellow philosophers and theoreticians. Figures such as Edmund Husserl and Gilles Deleuze will wield a strong hand. Artists under their gaze would include Paul Chan, Tacita Dean, Doug Aitken, Stan Douglas and Pierre Huyghe.

We can also assume several of the Italian artists chosen for Turin will be making a command performance in Venice. Rarely has a director had the opportunity to look so closely at Italy’s contemporary art scene in the year prior to their appointment, allowing something more substantial than the usual token inclusion of Italian artists.

Few curators know the work of contemporary artists here in central and northern Europe as well as Daniel either, so we can expect his choices to be well conceived – let’s just hope they’re not too predictable.

Regionally, there is considerable pressure this year to include a larger number of artists from Asia and the Middle East; with traditional funding tenuous at best (Deutsche Bank announced Monday it has withdrawn funding from the German Pavilion), it may be tempting to rely on better-funded institutions in Dubai, Shanghai, Tokyo and elsewhere in the region for assistance. Government officials from Hong Hong met this week with Paolo Baratta, releasing a communiqué signalling closer cultural ties with the Biennale. The origins of art movements in these countries are poorly known in the West, so here too there is considerable scope for delving deeply into the psyche of the region, arcing fully from the roots of the cherry tree to the blossom.

His choice of title – Making Worlds – was the moniker for an exhibition at the Auckland Art Gallery earlier this year, so let’s hope he gives the Kiwis a ‘fair go’. Neighboring Australia has been a wasteland for contemporary art in recent years, so it seems unlikely he will find much of interest in the land down under.

Also interesting will be how he handles Africa and the Americas. The Africans are represented more and more in the Pavilions, but after Robert Storr‘s debacle it will be curious how Daniel chooses to handle the sub-continent in the big tent. Jochen Volz, curator of the 27th São Paulo Biennial and a colleague of Birnbaum's in Frankfurt, is helping to organise the international section, so Latin America will be thoroughly covered. We may well see artists such as Juan Araujo, Mabe Bethônico and Marilá Dardot. Additional curators assisting with selection include Savita Apte (India and Art Dubai), Tom Eccles (Glasgow), Hu Fang (Guangzhou) and Maria Flinders (Art Basel).

The big loser is likely to be North America; well-represented in the Pavilions, in the commercial fairs and in the 52nd, it may be tempting to give short shrift to this part of the world in lieu of emerging artists and nations.

And then there’s Beuys.

50 Moons of Saturn
Curator: Daniel Birnbaum
Torino Triennale
6 November 2008 – 1 February 2009

Making Worlds
Director: Daniel Birnbaum
La Biennale di Venezia
7 June 2009 – 22 November 2009

Making Worlds // Fare Mondi // Bantin Duniyan // 制造世界 // Weltenmachen // Construire des Mondes // Fazer Mundos

2008-11-03T03:05:00.005+01:00

On Friday, Venice Biennale director Daniel Birnbaum announced the title for his 2009 exhibition will be Making Worlds. Carrying on from his thinking for the Turin Triennale, 50 Moons of Saturn, which opens Wednesday night, Birnbaum appears set to continue his longstanding interest in the metaphysics of space and time. In the opening passage of CHRONOLOGY (Sternberg Press: 2005) he writes, “I tend to return – eternally – to the Eternal Return.”

The life of Johann Dieter Wassmann (1841-1898) was one similarly preoccupied by the metaphysical qualities of space and time – both in his art, as well as in his professional role as a sewerage engineer. In this, the International Year of Sanitation, there are some surprising parallels to be drawn between the field of sewerage management that Johann Dieter Wassmann personified in the nineteenth century and the current art climate that Birnbaum will be divulging with Making Worlds.

Out of the miasma

Until the microbiological discoveries of Robert Koch in Germany, Louis Pasteur in France and John Snow in the UK, among others, disease was seen to spread from miasmatic causes, arising from poisonous exhalations exuded by putrefying animal remains, rotting vegetation and stagnant water: bad environments generated bad air, which then turned pestilential.

The great sanitation works of the mid-century, many of which Wassmann was involved in engineering on the Continent, were directed at expunging waste in order that air might be cleared of miasmas. As the English social reformer Edwin Chadwick described it, “All smell is, if it be intense, immediate, acute disease.” While these engineering works made significant gains in improving the health of urban dwellers, it was not, as Wassmann, Chadwick and others believed at the time, a result of their elimination of miasmas.

Koch’s landmark discovery of microbiological causes for diseases such as tuberculosis (1882) and cholera (1883) led to the most radical paradigm shift in the history of modern sanitation engineering. (It should be noted that these were also the years Wassmann began in earnest his boxed constructions.) No longer was plague and fever attributable to a spatial and temporal presence of this veil of miasma, rather disease was defined microscopically by the presence of bacteria transferable by contaminated water supplies or direct contagion. Suddenly and irrevocably the engineer was forced to cease thinking in the broad, indefinite and expansive terms of the miasma, instead focusing his efforts on the microscopic and definitive world of bacterium.

In our current climate of economic despair and recession, it could be said that the collapse of the global financial system has thankfully lifted a similar miasmatic veil from the art world – one which for too many years has painfully led to a wholesale and myopic belief in the corrupted values of the commercial art market. With this miasma now clearing, it is indeed a critical moment in space and time for Daniel Birnbaum to be exploring the constructed worlds of those artists whose integrity has remained intact through these years of deceit and folly.

Here at MuseumZeitraum Leipzig, we anticipate with earnest Daniel Birnbaum’s vision of a post-miasmatic world.

50 Moons of Saturn
Curator: Daniel Birnbaum
Torino Triennale
6 November 2008 – 1 February 2009

Making Worlds
Director: Daniel Birnbaum
La Biennale di Venezia
7 June 2009 – 22 November 2009

La Biennale di Venezia

2008-11-02T14:16:00.001+01:00

Biennale President invites nations to open their Pavilions for the rest of the year

Venice, 31 October 2008

The President of the Venice Biennale, Paolo Baratta, along with the Director of the 53rd International Art Exhibition, Daniel Birnbaum, met today in Venice the representatives of the nations participating in the 53rd Exhibition, to be held between 7th June and 22nd November 2009 in the Giardini and the Arsenale main venues (vernissage 4th, 5th and 6th June), and elsewhere in Venice.

The President, Paolo Baratta, began the meeting by informing those present that the Biennale has approved the project by which the paper documents of the Historic Archive of the Contemporary Arts (ASAC) will be moved to the Padiglione Italia (Pastor Wing) in the Giardini, comprising the historic archive, documentary archive, books, catalogues and periodicals. Moreover, by the 53rd Exhibition 2009, the Padiglione Italia will already have been reorganised to offer more space and activities for the public and for educational purposes, with areas also set aside for artists at the exhibition to work. The rooms on the principal facade of the Padiglione Italia will be transformed to provide a bookshop, while those facing the canal will offer a bar-cafeteria, and those towards the Pastor wing will house educational activities, with room for workshops, seminars and meetings.

The transfer of the ASAC to the Pastor Wing, with reading and consultation rooms for researchers and visitors, will transform the Padiglione Italia into a place dedicated to the arts, and able to operate throughout the year. President Baratta also invited the participating nations to follow the example of the Biennale and offer a more frequent use of the Pavilions in the Giardini, and not only for the major exhibitions of visual arts and architecture.

The President also sent special greetings to the countries present for the first time: Andorra, Gabon, Montenegro, Pakistan, Principality of Monaco, South Africa, and United Arab Emirates; greetings were extended to those countries that will take part again in the next Exhibition: Iran, Morocco, New Zealand and San Marino. For this edition, too, there will be selected collateral events, organised by international institutions, which will hold their exhibitions at the same time as the Biennale. The catalogue will be published by Marsilio. The Director, Daniel Birnbaum, is working on the 53rd Exhibition with the help of an international group of experts: Jochen Volz (artistic organiser), Savita Apte, Tom Eccles, Hu Fang, Maria Finders (correspondents).

Inviting Daniel Birnbaum to indicate the main themes of his exhibition, President Baratta recalled that alongside the international exhibition, the Padiglione Italiano would also be opening its doors, organised by PARC - Department for the quality and safeguarding of the territory, architecture and contemporary arts at the Ministry for Cultural Affairs – for which the curators are Beatrice Buscaroli and Luca Beatrice.

Following on from the President, the Director of the 53rd International Art Exhibition, Daniel Birnbaum, outlined the salient points of his exhibition and indicated its title: Making Worlds // Fare Mondi // Bantin Duniyan // 制造世界 // Weltenmachen // Construire des Mondes // Fazer Mundos…

Birnbaum stressed that the 53rd Exhibition will not be divided into sections but instead weave a few themes into an articulated whole, and he pointed out three aspects in particular:

· the proximity to the processes of production, which “will result in an exhibition that remains closer to the sites of creation and education (the studio, the workshop) than the traditional museum show, which tends to highlight only the finished work itself. Some of the works - declared Birnbaum - will represent worlds in the making. A work of art is more than an object, more than a commodity. It represents a vision of the world, and if taken seriously it can be seen as a way of worldmaking”

· the relationship between some key artists and successive generations: “A number of historical reference points will anchor the exhibition. These artistic roots are still active, productive. They give energy to the branches of the tree of art, and perhaps also to that which emerges today, to the ‘sprouts’. I would like to explore strings of inspiration that involve several generations and to display the roots as well as the branches that grow into a future not yet defined”.

· an exploration of drawing and painting, with respect to recent developments and the presence in the latest editions of the Biennale of many videos and installations: “the emphasis on the creative process and on things in the making will not exclude works in classical media”.

Next year's Venice Biennale to break with tradition

2008-11-01T09:25:00.005+01:00

ROME (AFP) — Next year's prestigious Venice Biennale art show will focus on the creative process, breaking with longstanding museum-style exhibitions, organisers said Friday.

Titled "Making Worlds", the international show, to be held June 7 to November 22, 2009, will be "closer to the process of production and the venues of creation and training -- the studio, the laboratory -- than traditional museum-style exhibitions", said next year's curator Daniel Birnbaum.

Swedish-born Birnbaum, currently head of Frankfurt's Stadelschule Art Academy, is an art critic and philosopher.

"A work of art is more than an object, or a product. It represents a vision of the world and, if taken seriously, can be considered as a way of constructing worlds," he said in a statement.

Among countries to take part for the first time in the 53rd edition of the "Mostra" are the United Arab Emirates, Gabon, Montenegro, Pakistan and South Africa.

Iran, Morocco and New Zealand will be staging a return.

The 2007 edition awarded a Golden Lion lifetime achievement to Malian photographer Malick Sidibe, who will become the first African to clinch the top honour.

The theme for the 52nd Biennale was "Think with your senses -- Feel with your spirit" and hosted 77 national pavilions, as well as artists from around the world.

Editors note: Daniel Birnbaum is presently curating 50 Moons of Saturn for the Turin Triennale, which opens this Thursday, November 6 and continues until February 1, 2009.

On the Origin and situation of the Germans

2008-09-18T10:24:00.011+02:00

Johann Dieter Wassmann, Et in Arcadia Ego, 1887. 20 x 16 x 12 cm.

As autumn approaches, with the world around us seemingly in free-fall, I thought it might be useful to reflect for a moment on the very birth of our tempestuous modern era. In recent weeks I’ve been looking at the rise of modernist sensibilities in the work of the pioneering German artist Johann Dieter Wassmann. Johann’s later works would come to wholly encapsulate the energy and hopefulness of the modern era, but his early works express an anxiety and apprehension not unlike that which grips us in our current deleveraged age.

In posts over the past several months, I’ve been looking at this contemporary anxiety through the melancholy of Daniel Birnbaum’s upcoming 50 moons of Saturn for the Turin Triennale. By the 1880s, Johann Dieter Wassmann similarly found himself troubled by a deep melancholy, one which he responded to initially by retreating into the romantic past of his forefathers, a response having clear relevance today. From here, I’ll hand it over to Maime Stombock, quoting from her seminal essay, A Carpenter’s Tale:

“It is this very relevance, a relevance permeating his entire oeuvre, that imbues these works with the ability to not only leap through time, entering into our 21st century lives, but more importantly to side-step the rat race of time, a trait unique to the arts in general and great art in particular. I can imagine no sweeter compliment befalling a man whose life’s ambition was to re-unite the wonder of space with the splendor of time, all the more so given how thoroughly disenfranchised the two have since become. The works from these early years would become known as the “Dresden Boxes” after their extended display in a Dresden clinic. (Their brief popularity played a small part in the eventual establishment of Dresden’s Deutsches Hygiene-Museum in the 1920s, an institution that thrives even today.)

“Despite his considerable achievements, Johann felt increasingly troubled as the century hastened toward its close... His suspicion that the deliberate progress of modernity was fast bearing down overwhelmed him with regular fits of fear and uncertainty. When he first caught sight of this brooding monolith his response was to back-pedal his way out of the 19th century and into his romanticized view of an earlier, less pressured era. As he came to feel more at ease with the medium of the wooden box he staged his retreat by venturing into works that he hoped might help him to combat this anguish. Here his creative impulse was most Germanic: a return to the ancient wood, with Goethe looming large, although his influences were equally eclectic. His great love of the American Transcendentalist authors Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau is apparent in several works. He had grown fond of their writings while living in Washington, D.C., where he consulted on a long overdue sewerage system for the nation’s capitol during Restoration—the first in the world to be built of concrete, a pioneering design solution born of necessity amid the poorly-drained swamplands of the Potomac.

"Whether conscious or not, his impulse to celebrate the ancient wood twenty years later can be read as an unsurprising response to the soulless concrete, brick and mortar that dominated his professional life. Johann had long found solace in the wood, a passion so deeply imbedded in the German psyche it was the subject of the Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus’ classic Germania; or, On the Origin and situation of the Germans, recorded in the year 98. For Roman readers, Germania served to explain why these primitive arcadians were such barbarians. For the Germans themselves, Tacitus’ portrayal of them as little more than arboreal hunters, gatherers and warriors was taken as a compliment. Germania eventually became a raw staple in their literary diet, all the more so after the first native translation was published in Leipzig in 1496.

“For Johann, delving into the ancient wood was an essential catharsis, just as it would be a hundred years later for his compatriot Anselm Kiefer. In a letter to his brother Wolfgang, dated November 10, 1885, Johann writes that from the moment his saw broke the grain of his rough planks of birch, oak, pine, beech, ash, walnut, elm or whatever else might be at hand, he was magically propelled through the looking glass, moving into the wood, first physically—as he cut, planed, joined and finished the timbers—and then mentally—as he deliberated what world might inhabit the inner space of these exquisite boxes.

“His experience of the wood spared none of the senses, however. The sweet freshness of pine, the acrid harshness of elm that burned the eyes and throat, the gentle pleasantries of oak: he genuinely believed as his father had that the souls of men inhabited these timbers and only by cutting into them and experiencing them fully could these souls find release. He reminded Wolfgang of the stories their father would tell them as children, the stories they would insist on hearing again and again of the family workshop in the years that followed the Battle of Leipzig, a time when their father himself was just a child. The terrible destruction of the city and surrounding villages had left such an abundance of floorboards, panelling and structural timbers that Leipzig’s woodcutters found no cause to fell a single tree for three years, instead harvesting their bounty from the rubble. But unlike fresh cut timbers, which house only old souls, August commanded to his sons that recycled timbers uniquely house the souls of those more recently departed.

“The oak parquetry of Madame Troufold’s salon, gracefully planed and mitered by their grandfather to make a small corner cupboard, had overwhelmed the workshop for a week with the perfumed elegance of a life cultured beyond their dreams. The softly worn pine floorboards of Herr Zächer’s bäckerie, despite being scrubbed with bucket and brush each morning, had brought such hunger to the journeymen when they cut into them to frame the carcass of a veneered chest of drawers that they finished their daily bread before noon, venturing out to find more before returning to their work. The walnut panelling recovered from Kapitän Brunheld’s library, the walnut that their grandfather fashioned into several fine wardrobes, had surrendered thick smoky tobacco, aged whiskey and a thousand tales of Saxon glory before the wardrobes left the shop. And the narrow ash planks from the stairway of Fräulein Nau’s bordell, the planks their grandfather had hoped to shape into dough bins, brought work to such a halt and lowered the integrity of the conversation to such a degree that he gave up in disgust, burning them as firewood, although the smoke from the fire provoked one of the men to partake in a debaucherous drinking binge lasting three days, ending with his arrest for committing unnatural acts in the public square.

“Wolfgang’s reply to his letter was that old men tell tall tales, so leave it at that, but Johann was undeterred, at least for the moment. While this period was both cathartic and crucial in defining the roots of Johann’s dissatisfaction, and while his output might seem to us today to be quite charming, within the decade he too would come to question the romantic overtones in his response.”

In memorium

2008-09-11T17:16:00.003+02:00

The Dresden Boxes (1881-85)

2008-09-11T14:00:00.007+02:00

Johann Dieter Wassmann, Schutzen Euere Klempnerarbeit (Protect Your Plumbing), 1883. 70 x 49.5 x 7 cm.

“[Johann Dieter] Wassmann created his first box works in 1881. As an engineering lecturer at the University of Leipzig, he was anxious that creative thinking was being discouraged from education. Relying on the Enlightenment understanding that ‘knowledge is… a kind of visual field and that vision, like science, illuminates reason,’ [Robert Schubert, Brief notes on radical evil, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 1997] he attempted to attract his young male students’ attention by juxtaposing peculiar diagrams of the human body from medical journals, bottles, medical instruments and other paraphernalia in odd ways. Works like Protect your Plumbing 1883 and Amputare 1881 were to encourage interest in dealing with issues like syphilis and the treatment of infectious disease (respectively), but also to encourage questions towards modern medical practice and the way it viewed and treated the human body. Foucault’s Pendulum 1884, demonstrating the earth’s rotation, indicates broader concerns which transpired in his later works. After hanging in a Dresden clinic for some time, these became known as the Dresden Boxes (1881-85).

“Wassmann recognised the power of objects through his fascination and, as times changed, a humanist concern for the loss of imagination. In order to subvert the logic and rationality of industrialisation, he juxtaposed everyday, discarded objects in often unexpected relations to allow them to act as conduits to individual consciousness. Sitting in their boxes, the now fetishised objects elicited personal narratives from the viewer, sometimes with unsuspected and/or revelatory connections.

“It is also interesting to note his use of a grid-like device to compartmentalise his objects and images. A practicing sewerage engineer, Wassmann thought nothing of using a grid as an ordering principle for keeping waste and disease away from the populace. But in his art-work it was a visual device used to delineate space and simplify viewing, as well as instigating questions of the Enlightenment association between perception and knowledge in a clever, sometimes amusing, way. This was to become an important symbol of Modernism, particularly with artists like Malevich (Suprematism) and Mondrian (De Stihl), who saw it as a spiritually liberating organising principle, and the American abstractionist (Josef Albers, Sol Le Witt), who used it as a structural format emphasising form, colour (light) and space.”

Kirsten Rann, curator
Bleeding Napoleon: The Art of Johann Dieter Wassmann (1841-1898) exhibition brochure, 2003
Melbourne International Arts Festival 2003

Johann Dieter Wassmann, Foucault’s Pendulum, 1884. 40 x 45 x 33.5 cm.

The birth of the modern

2008-09-08T14:23:00.008+02:00

Johann Dieter Wassmann, Untitled, Mexico City, 1897. Albumen silver print, 18 x 23 cm.

As a pioneer in the field of sewerage management, Johann Dieter Wassmann travelled extensively through the 1880s and 1890s, designing and overseeing the construction of waste disposal systems in Europe, the Americas and the Asia/Pacific region. He took passage on his final voyage in 1897, travelling to Cuba and Mexico, where he consulted with Mexico City officials on the ponderous task of devising a gravity sewerage system for an ancient city built in a lake at the bottom of a valley.

Most of Wassmann’s overseas travels took place prior to his gaining an interest in photography, leaving previous adventures largely undocumented. By 1897, however, his photographic skills were well-honed, as was his dexterity with the new hand-held roll film cameras widely available at the time, allowing him a degree of mobility and spontaneity unimagined until the late 1890s. Nowhere is this more evident than in his breathtakingly modernist vision of Mexico City.

This portfolio is often compared to the early work of Manual Álvarez Bravo, but any similarity may be more attributable to content than either style or intent. Wassmann’s motivation and sensitivity sits more comfortably with that of his fellow Europeans, sharing more closely the strong geometric, volumetric and spatial concerns of Aleksandr Rodchenko, Boris Ignatovic and Eugéne Atget, whose work would, of course, only come a decade or more later. All the same, the birth of the modernist vision, arising at any number of places and over a number of years, expressed itself universally with an energy, originality and clarity unencumbered by all that came before.

The untitled photograph I’ve pictured above is often cited as one of Wassmann’s most pioneering works, an image of absolute purity, reduced to minimal geometry and form. Die Mut zur Lücke, as Kurt Schwitters would later confide: the courage to leave things out. The charm of this image, however, also rests subtly in its content. Johann was, after all, a sewerage engineer; he has chosen here to record curbing and channelling and the passage of storm water on its journey to a drain somewhere beyond the picture’s edge. Like Rodchenko, he has placed his photograph beyond personal ego, elevating it rather to the service of a larger societal good, that of technological advancement. This subtext of the utopian dream so evident in the early modernist movement is without precedent in the history of art.

Over these past three years, I have done my best to place this blog in the service of a larger good as well, that of raising our understanding of the foundations of modernism itself. To this end, I have often merged Wassmann’s work into the contemporary dialogue, as in my discussions of Roger Buergel’s leitmotif “Is modernity our antiquity?” during last year’s Documenta and currently with Daniel Birnbaum’s “50 moons of Saturn” for the upcoming Turin Triennale. It is my conviction that without a thorough understanding of the great hopes of the modernist dream, it is impossible to assess the failings of the modern movement today. Toward this end, I hope our efforts to better understand the works of Johann Dieter Wassmann have brought readers a measure closer to understanding what expectations we should hold for the contemporary artist.

At the foot of the Flatiron, 1903.

2008-09-04T15:17:00.000+02:00

50 moons of Saturn and the force of Imagination

2008-09-03T16:21:00.005+02:00

Johann Dieter Wassmann, Todesstrecke (Deathtrap), 1897. 16 x 16 x 7.5 cm.

“WHAT imagination is, I have sufficiently declared in my digression of the anatomy of the soul. I will only now point at the wonderful effects and power of it; which, as it is eminent in all, so most especially it rageth in melancholy persons, in keeping the species of objects so long, mistaking, amplifying them by continual and strong meditation, until at length it produceth in some parties real effects, causeth this and many other maladies. And although this fantasy of ours be a subordinate faculty to reason, and should be ruled by it, yet in many men, through inward or outward distemperatures, defect of organs, which are unapt, or otherwise contaminated, it is likewise unapt, or hindered, and hurt. This we see verified in sleepers, which by reason of humours and concourse of vapours troubling the fantasy, imagine many times absurd and prodigious things, and in such as are troubled with incubus, or witch-ridden (as we call it), if they lie on their backs, they suppose an old woman rides, and sits so hard upon them, that they are almost stifled for want of breath; when there is nothing offends, but a concourse of bad humours, which trouble the fantasy. This is likewise evident in such as walk in the night in their sleep, and do strange feats: these vapours move the fantasy, the fantasy the appetite, which moving the animal spirits causeth the body to walk up and down as if they were awake. Fracast. l. 3. de intellect., refers all ecstasies to this force of imagination such as lie whole days together in a trance: as that priest whom Celsus speaks of; that could separate himself from his senses when he list, and lie like a dead man, void of life and sense. Cardan brags of himself, that he could do as much, and that when he list. Many times such men when they come to themselves, tell strange things of heaven and hell, what visions they have seen; as that St. Owen, in Matthew Paris, that went into St. Patrick's purgatory, and the monk of Evesham in the same author. Those common apparitions in Bede and Gregory, Saint Bridget's revelations, Wier. l. 3. de lamiis, c. 11. Cæsar Vanninus, in his Dialogues, &c. reduceth (as I have formerly said), with all those tales of witches' progresses, dancing, riding, transformations, operations, &c. to the force of imagination, and the devil's illusions. The like effects almost are to be seen in such as are awake: how many chimeras, antics, golden mountains and castles in the air do they build unto themselves?

"I appeal to painters, mechanicians, mathematicians. Some ascribe all vices to a false and corrupt imagination, anger, revenge, lust, ambition, covetousness, which prefers falsehood before that which is right and good, deluding the soul with false shows and suppositions. Bernardus Penottus will have heresy and superstition to proceed from this fountain; as he falsely imagineth, so he believeth; and as he conceiveth of it, so it must be, and it shall be, contra gentes, he will have it so. But most especially in passions and affections, it shows strange and evident effects: what will not a fearful man conceive in the dark? What strange forms of bugbears, devils, witches, goblins? Livater imputes the greatest cause of spectrums, and the like apparitions, to fear, which above all other passions begets the strongest imagination (saith Wierus), and so likewise, love, sorrow, joy, &c. Some die suddenly, as she that saw her son come from the battle at Cannæ, &c. Jacob the patriarch, by force of imagination, made speckled lambs, laying speckled rods before his sheep. Persina that Æthiopian queen in Heliodorus, by seeing the picture of Perseus and Andromeda, instead of a blackamoor, was brought to bed of a fair white child. In imitation of whom belike, a hard-favoured fellow in Greece, because he and his wife were both deformed, to get a good brood of children, Elegantissimas imagines in thalamo collocavit, &c., hung the fairest pictures he could buy for money in his chamber, ‘That his wife by frequent sight of them, might conceive and bear such children.’ And if we may believe Bale, one of Pope Nicholas the Third's concubines by seeing of a bear was brought to bed of a monster. ‘If a woman (saith Lemnius), at the time of her conception think of another man present or absent, the child will be like him.’ Great bellied women, when they long, yield us prodigious examples in this kind, as moles, warts, scars, harelips, monsters, especially caused in their children by force of a depraved fantasy in them: Ipsam speciam quam animo effigiat, fœtui inducit: She imprints that stamp upon her child which she conceives unto herself. And therefore Lodovicus Vives, lib. 2. de Christ. fœm. gives a special caution to great-bellied women, ‘That they do not admit such absurd conceits and cogitations, but by all means avoid those horrible objects, heard or seen, or filthy spectacles.’ Some will laugh, weep, sigh, groan; blush, tremble, sweat, at such things as are suggested unto them by their imagination. Avicenna speaks of one that could cast himself into a palsy when he list; and some can imitate the tunes of birds and beasts that they can hardly be discerned: Dagebertus' and Saint Francis' scars and wounds, like those of Christ's (if at the least any such were), Agrippa supposeth to have happened by force of imagination: that some are turned to wolves, from men to women, and women again to men (which is constantly believed) to the same imagination; or from men to asses, dogs, or any other shapes. Wierus ascribes all those famous transformations to imagination; that in hydrophobia they seem to see the picture of a dog, still in their water, that melancholy men and sick men conceive so many fantastical visions, apparitions to themselves, and have such absurd apparitions, as that they are kings, lords, cocks, bears, apes, owls; that they are heavy, light, transparent, great and little, senseless and dead (as shall be showed more at large, in our sections of symptoms), can be imputed to nought else, but to a corrupt, false, and violent imagination. It works not in sick and melancholy men only, but even most forcibly sometimes in such as are sound: it makes them suddenly sick, and alters their temperature in an instant. And sometimes a strong conceit or apprehension, as Valesius proves, will take away diseases: in both kinds it will produce real effects. Men, if they see but another man tremble, giddy or sick of some fearful disease, their apprehension and fear is so strong in this kind, that they will have the same disease. Or if by some soothsayer, wiseman, fortune-teller, or physician, they be told they shall have such a disease, they will so seriously apprehend it, that they will instantly labour of it. A thing familiar in China (saith Riccius the Jesuit), ‘If it be told them they shall be sick on such a day, when that day comes they will surely be sick, and will be so terribly afflicted, that sometimes they die upon it.’ Dr. Cotta in his discovery of ignorant practitioners of physic, cap 8. hath two strange stories to this purpose, what fancy is able to do. The one of a parson's wife in Northamptonshire, An. 1607, that coming to a physician, and told by him that she was troubled with the sciatica, as he conjectured (a disease she was free from), the same night after her return, upon his words, fell into a grievous fit of a sciatica: and such another example he hath of another good wife, that was so troubled with the cramp, after the same manner she came by it, because her physician did but name it. Sometimes death itself is caused by force of fantasy. I have heard of one that coming by chance in company of him that was thought to be sick of the plague (which was not so) fell down suddenly dead. Another was sick of the plague with conceit. One seeing his fellow let blood falls down in a swoon. Another (saith Cardan out of Aristotle), fell down dead (which is familiar to women at any ghastly sight), seeing but a man hanged. A Jew in France (saith Lodovicus Vives), came by chance over a dangerous passage or plank, that lay over a brook in the dark, without harm, the next day perceiving what danger he was in, fell down dead. Many will not believe such stories to be true, but laugh commonly; and deride when they hear of them; but let these men consider with themselves, as Peter Byarus illustrates it, If they were set to walk upon a plank on high, they would be giddy, upon which they dare securely walk upon the ground. Many (saith Agrippa), ‘strong-hearted men otherwise, tremble at such sights, dazzle, and are sick, if they look but down from a high place, and what moves them but conceit?’ As some are so molested by fantasy; so some again, by fancy alone, and a good conceit, are as easily recovered. We see commonly the tooth-ache, gout, falling-sickness, biting of a mad dog, and many such maladies, cured by spells, words, characters, and charms, and many green wounds by that now so much used Unguentum Armarium, magnetically cured, which Crollius and Goclenius in a book of late hath defended, Libavius in a just tract as stiffly contradicts, and most men controvert. All the world knows there is no virtue in such charms or cures, but a strong conceit and opinion alone, as Pomponatius holds, ‘which forceth a motion of the humours, spirits, and blood, which takes away the cause of the malady from the parts affected.’ The like we may say of our magical effects, superstitious cures, and such as are done by mountebanks and wizards. ‘As by wicked incredulity many men are hurt (so saith Wierus of charms, spells, &c.), we find in our experience, by the same means many are relieved.’ An empiric oftentimes, and a silly chirurgeon, doth more strange cures than a rational physician. Nymannus gives a reason, because the patient puts his confidence in him, which Avicenna ‘prefers before art, precepts, and all remedies whatsoever.’ 'Tis opinion alone (saith Cardan), that makes or mars physicians, and he doth the best cures, according to Hippocrates, in whom most trust. So diversely doth this fantasy of ours affect, turn, and wind, so imperiously command our bodies, which as another Proteus, or a chameleon, can take all shapes; and is of such force (as Ficinus adds), that it can work upon others, as well as ourselves. How can otherwise blear eyes in one man cause the like affection in another? Why doth one man's yawning make another yawn? One man's pissing provoke a second many times to do the like? Why doth scraping of trenchers offend a third, or hacking of flies? Why doth a carcass bleed when the murderer is brought before it, some weeks after the murder hath been done? Why do witches and old women fascinate and bewitch children: but as Wierus, Paracelsus, Cardan, Mizaldus, Valleriola, Cæsar Vanninus, Campanella, and many philosophers think, the forcible imagination of the one party moves and alters the spirits of the other. Nay more, they can cause and cure not only diseases, maladies and several infirmities, by this means, as Avicenna de anim. l. 4. sect. 4. supposeth in parties remote, but move bodies from their places, cause thunder, lightning, tempests, which opinion Alkindus, Paracelsus, and some others, approve of: So that I may certainly conclude this strong conceit or imagination is astrum hominis, and the rudder of this our ship, which reason should steer, but overborne by fantasy cannot manage, and so suffers itself and this whole vessel of ours to be overruled, and often overturned… I have thus far digressed, because this imagination is the medium deferens of passions, by whose means they work and produce many times prodigious effects: and as the fantasy is more or less intended or remitted, and their humours disposed, so do perturbations move, more or less, and take deeper impression.”

Robert Burton
The Anatomy of Melancholy
1621

50 Moons of Saturn
Curator: Daniel Birnbaum
Turin Triennale
6 November 2008 – 1 February 2009
http://www.torinotriennale.it/

George Orwell: blogger.

2008-08-28T13:00:00.005+02:00

Night before last an hour’s rain. Yesterday hot & overcast. Today ditto, with a few drops of rain in the afternoon. The hop-picking due to start in about a week.

So reads George Orwell's diary entry for August 28, 1938, recorded in Suffolk, England, a chronicle now being trickled out in daily blog form 70 years on by the Orwell Trust. An intriguing idea and one well worth bookmarking. Accepting that we're all virtual anyway, why not skip back 70 years to learn how the blackberries are ripening this season.

Highly recommended.
http://orwelldiaries.wordpress.com/

AUGUST 25, 1900. NIETZSCHE IS DEAD.

2008-08-25T16:02:00.009+02:00

Johann Dieter Wassmann, Nietzsche 306P, 1897. 37 x 28 x 10 cm.

I'm still in holiday mode as August winds to a close, so here's one last look back at our more popular posts from these past three years. Next week, we're back in business here at MuseumZeitraum, promise.

Today, on this 108th anniversary of the death of Nietzsche, it seems only appropriate to revisit Johann Dieter Wassmann's audience with the master and the creative outcome from this brief passing of souls. This post appeared on July 8, 2007. But first, here's rare footage of Nietzsche and his sister Elisabeth, believed to be recorded in 1899, not long before his death.

In recent posts I've been examining the first of three leitmotifs posed by the Documenta 12 team, "Is modernity our antiquity?" If I may, I'd like to skip ahead to the second question for a moment, "What is bare life?" as further means of addressing the first.

In 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche suffered a mental breakdown, often attributed to his contraction of syphilis, resulting in his admission to various clinics before he was moved to Naumburg, where his mother looked after him until her death in 1897. At this point his sister Elisabeth shifted him to Weimar, where she continued his care, as well as promoting his legacy and allowing the occasional audience with guests until his death in 1900.

It was in Weimar that Johann Dieter Wassmann briefly visited Nietzsche, but finding only a shell of a man he returned home to produce this work, depicting simply and eloquently the empty collar of the man, an organ stop with the name 'Nietzsche' printed on it, and an opium-stained bone apothecary spoon; a life stripped bare. These objects are placed against a dappled blue wall, reflecting Nietzsche's penchant for blue-lensed spectacles.

Johann's ability to take the contemporary moment of his visit with Nietzsche and so confidently convert it into the iconography of modernism speaks legions about the raw vitality of the modern movement at the dawn of the 20th century. In no time, however, modernity fell victim to the second law of thermodynamics, with entropy holding sway, but it was not until the close of the century that we realised the paradigm had simply collapsed en route.

Today it is essentially modernity stripped bare that we address as artists and curators, an ongoing post-mortem of abject failure. So in this sense is modernity our antiquity? The answer is not so clear.

50 Moons of Saturn: Is there life on Enceladus, Major Tom?

2008-08-17T04:49:00.005+02:00

The New York Times

August 16, 2008

By KENNETH CHANG

Exquisite close-ups of fissures on a tiny frozen moon of Saturn will provide the latest clues in solving the riddle of how a 310-mile-wide ice ball could possibly be shooting geysers of vapor and icy particles.

Since the discovery of the jets in 2005, the moon, Enceladus, has jumped to near the top of the list of potential places for life in the solar system. A warm spot near Enceladus’s south pole powers the jets and may also melt below-surface ice into water, a necessity for living organisms.

On Monday, the NASA spacecraft Cassini made its latest flyby of Enceladus (pronounced en-SELL-ah-dus), passing 30 miles above the moon’s surface at 64,000 miles per hour.

Despite the high speed, Cassini was able to take razor-sharp images that, at seven meters per pixel, offer a resolution 10 times greater than earlier views. Scientists can now clearly see the V-shaped walls of the fractures, which are nearly 1,000 feet deep. Team members likened the accomplishment to taking a photo of a roadside billboard using a telephoto lens held out the window of a speeding car.

“If there is one set of images from this mission that illustrates how skilled we have become as planetary explorers, this is it,” said Carolyn Porco, leader of Cassini’s imaging team. “They are the most astounding images of any planetary surface that our cameras have so far taken.”

The observations should help scientists understand how geological processes can persist on such a small body, which is being heated by tidal distortions induced by Saturn.

A series of long fissures known as tiger stripes scars Enceladus’s south polar region, and earlier observations allowed the Cassini scientists to triangulate the origin of the jets within the fissures and show that the warm spots coincide with them.

In a flyby in March, Cassini flew through the plume and detected organic molecules, the carbon-based molecules that could provide the building blocks for life. Cassini also detected water vapor, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. The composition was surprisingly similar to that of a comet, scientists said.

At first glance, nothing in the landscape differentiates the active jet areas from other parts of the fissures. “We have a lot of interpretation to do,” Dr. Porco said. “The effects appear to be subtle.”

Comparison with other data taken during the flyby — like temperatures — should provide more clues.

The researchers see smooth areas on Enceladus that appear to be piles of ice particles that have fallen back to the surface. “Like snow,” Dr. Porco said. “We’re pretty sure we’re seeing that in these pictures.”

Paul Helfenstein, the team member who developed the technique for taking the high-speed, up-close pictures, said: “We can actually count boulders on the surface. We can look at details and distinguish fresh deposits.”

In the fall, Cassini is to make an even closer near-miss of Enceladus, passing within 15 miles of the moon’s surface.

Photo courtesy NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute, recorded on August 11, 2008 by the Cassini Orbiter.

50 Moons of Saturn
Curator: Daniel Birnbaum
Torino Triennale
6 November 2008 – 1 February 2009
http://www.torinotriennale.it/

Venice called on to stage a "Biennale for Islamic Dissent"

2008-08-14T16:38:00.003+02:00

Naples, 11 August (AKI) - Islamic leaders have welcomed a proposal to stage an international forum at the Venice Biennale arts festival to promote debate in the Muslim world.

Ahmad Vincenzo, president of the Association of Muslim Intellectuals and lecturer in Islamic rights at Naples' Federico II University said the proposal was positive.

Carlo Ripa Di Meana, former president of the Venice Biennale, moved to dedicate the 1977 Venice Biennale to the theme of "dissent" in relation to the Communist countries of the eastern bloc, a move opposed by Moscow.

He has called for the creation of a similar "Biennale for Islamic Dissent" to enhance debate in the Muslim world.

But Vincenzo said the proposal advanced by Carlo Ripa Di Meana, should not be compared to the event that generated widespread debate among Communists in 1977.

"The Venice Biennale is a prestigious institution," Vincenzo told Adnkronos International (AKI).

"The possibility of having a great initiative dedicated to the Islamic world would certainly have vast interest, even though I don't think you could in any way compare it to the meeting of dissidents of the Communist bloc in 1977."

“I imagine that it would speak about dissent with regard to the regimes of many countries that have an Islamic majority. Not dissent towards Islam as a religion," he said.

According to the Muslim lecturer, few know that the distinction between religion and politics is part of Islamic history.

He stressed there was a profound difference between the situation in Muslim countries and those of the former Communist bloc.

"In these, there was in many cases a democratic opposition, capable in a certain sense to create a turning point in the entire country.

In the Islamic world, on the contrary, the opposition is often more totalitarian and anti democratic than the regimes they want to change. I am referring particularly to the fundamentalist movement of the Muslim Brotherhood."

Karima Moual, president of the Association of Young Moroccans in Italy, said he welcomed the proposal providing it was not designed to promote "anti-Islamic" positions.

"I believe that this initiative would benefit if it made people from the Arab Islamic world participate, rather than those who are hostile towards Islam," she told AKI.

"It would be interesting to invite Muslim intellectuals but also non-Muslims from Arab countries to debate the 'cancer' that is destroying the Arab-Islamic world.

"I believe that the real problem in our countries is the absence of debate."

Is modernity our antiquity? (revisited).

2008-08-13T08:39:00.003+02:00

In these lazy days of August, I'm revisiting some of our more popular posts from previous years, here our entry for July 18, 2007:

Dada and Surrealism were still years away when Johann Dieter Wassmann struck out with this monumental, if misunderstood, work, “Of the Stealing of Women” 1896. Never before published or exhibited, the work merges an early 18th century English case-law text, open to a page describing the (limited) rights of women from being, yes, that’s right, stolen, with a medical engraving of mid-19th century bandaging practices, all linked by a harmony of violin pegs and tailpiece. In his notes on the work, Johann enthusiastically describes the piece in terms that we now might read as empowerment and liberation, closing with an enigmatic quote from his beloved muse, Goethe: ‘Man sieht nur, was man weiss.’ One sees only what one knows. Some critics have hesitated at themes they (mis)read as bondage and repression, with one Australian curator going so far as to have the work removed from the exhibition BLEEDING NAPOLEON at the 2003 Melbourne International Arts Festival.

Personally, I believe the work can be read as a nod to the rising sentiment across Europe in support of women's suffrage. Three years earlier, in 1893, New Zealand was the first country to introduce universal suffrage, generating headlines world-wide. The use of an English case-law book would suggest some reference to the British empire here. The image of a woman bandaged suggests a play on the word suffrage. Violin pegs are, of course, necessary to tune the instrument, implying an adjustment or refinement of the social politic to enhance the role of women in 19th century society.

Whatever its inner meaning, the work stands as a significant precursor to the explosive power Dada and Surrealism would have on the course of 20th century modernism.

Zeitraum & the progressive present perfect.

2008-07-30T09:20:00.008+02:00

Johann Dieter Wassmann, Vorwarts! (Go Forward!), 1897. 57.5 x 31 x 9.5 cm.

Rather than pulling the shutters and closing shop as August approaches, I thought I’d revisit several of our more popular posts from these past three years. Last summer I devoted considerable time to airing the three leitmotifs posited by Documenta 12, most notably the first: Is modernity our antiquity? This summer I’ve been similarly perusing the themes Daniel Birnbaum has hinted at for his upcoming Torino Triennale, 50 Moons of Saturn.

The following is an extended version of a post that appeared on March 29, 2007 in the run-up to Documenta; the questions it raises are no less pertinent to Husserl’s phenomenology, which I anticipate will feature strongly in Birnbaum’s 50 Moons of Saturn:

On March 11, 1992 Anselm Kiefer gave a lecture in Adelaide that is still widely discussed in Australian intellectual circles. In it, he expressed intrigue that Aboriginals should possess such a deep-seated relationship with their art. He envied Aboriginal artists for what he saw as their ability to inhabit their work as deeply as they inhabited their land. He mourned Western art as a curtain descending into its own cultural morass, a no man’s land, a terra nullius of the soul. (He further asserted that the current state of decline in Western art commenced with the fall of Byzantium.)

Despite its quirky tales, its idiosyncratic logic and its apparently non-empirical structures, he argued the Aboriginal Dreaming offers us a far more valid user’s guide to the universe than any Western paradigm.

In bringing up the Dreaming in relation to antiquity and modernity alike, I may sound like a wayward musician wandering off-key mid-song -- stumbling with the present tense when it would seem more appropriate to speak of the Dreaming in the past, as Aboriginal antiquity -- but I have just cause for abiding in the hear-and-now. For one thing, these beliefs still dominate Aboriginal life, so to refer to them otherwise would be untowardly dismissive. But the more telling reason is that elders themselves are very specific in the syntax they use to describe their Dreamings -- always speaking in either the present or something close to the progressive present perfect tense when telling these stories. This progressive present perfect tense is the tense used for action that began in the past and continues into the present (e.g. I have been working on the railroad, all the live-long day; which is to say I was earlier and I continue to be working on the railroad).

It was as Aboriginal groups developed their own versions of Creole English in the 19th century that these thought processes became most apparent. Aboriginals stuck to the verb tenses that made sense to them, including the present, the past in referring to the recent past, the progressive present perfect in referring to the distant past, and similar progressive future tenses in referring to events linking the past and present to the future.

The use of this verb tense retains a core value in the Aboriginal world-view, which itself reaches back to Dreaming events, or to be more precise, their world-view reaches through to Dreaming events. Reaching back implies a reverse movement in time and history; reaching through expresses movement in space. And it is this very space -- the space of the Dreaming -- that they are cleverly describing in the present perfect.

But who’s been listening? Only a smattering of Westerners, such as Kiefer, have picked up on the possibility that a whole new wealth of philosophical puzzles and paradigms might rest in this linguistic clue -- a possibility the ancient Greeks had toyed with, and Western physicists inched toward from a different tack for the better part of the twentieth century.

The clue that lay unnoticed for so long in the present perfect is that the conceptual notions of time and history, past and present, have simply never entered into Aboriginal culture; that is, they never entered into Aboriginal culture until the arrival of Europeans. The anthropologist William Stanner remarked, “I have never been able to discover an Aboriginal word for time as an abstract comment... And the sense of history is wholly alien here.”

All clans naturally have a sense of the immediate past, or the past within one’s lifetime -- the known past -- but once a death occurs the soul is seen as returning to the land, not to be forgotten, but to rejoin the ancestors in an ongoing cycle of renewal. Talk of human lineage beyond living generations and the most recent to have passed away is rare, and even when referring to the recently departed there are elaborate taboos on how they can be discussed, if at all.

In the West, our belief in a linear sequence -- creation/past/present/future -- has, since the original sin, shaped and supported our notions of time, history, antiquity, modernity, progress and by inference, space. But among the Aboriginal people of Australia, the creation and the present aren’t linked in any linear sense by history; quite the contrary, they are defined in a purely spatial sense by the simple, direct and irrefutable existence of place.

And because the Dreaming defines place rather than history, the ancestors are just as much alive today as they were yesterday or they will be tomorrow, living as they do, in the realm of something close to what we in the West see as eternity. So by returning to one’s place in death, spatiality also imparts salvation, along with a measure of immortality, to the Aboriginal believer.

Among non-Aboriginals, the Dreaming has come to represent many things to many people. One who took a keen interest and whose influence was far-reaching was Mircea Eliade. Eliade was well respected for his views on a wide array of theological issues, but his conceit that ‘primitive’ creation stories, Dreamings included, were an effort to escape the parameters of time -- by means of retaining a continuous link to the mythical era of the ancestors -- shows the mark of his bias. As Eliade saw it, “spirituality introduced freedom into the cosmos. It allows the possibility of transcending the boundaries.”

Where Eliade ran afoul was in believing that the preponderance of place ascribed to by these cultures represented some sort of subconscious substitution, or ongoing rebellion, against the historical notion of time. How could they have? These people knew nothing about the historical notion of time. That was the West’s later doing (and our current undoing). So if time and history had never entered into their realm, where and how could they have come to replace or reject them? These boundaries requiring transcendence Eliade spoke of are constructs of Western culture, not universal boundaries and certainly not the Aboriginal’s.

In the first issue of the documenta 12 Magazine, the question "Is modernity our antiquity?" was broadened to ask, “Which modernity and whose antiquity?” but even this repositioning is problematic, for in the Aboriginal case it still suggests the Dreaming as an antiquity, imposing as it does linearity where there was none previously. If we take modernity as the late arrival the European, are we offering the Aboriginal anything more than an invitation to join our wretched terror of history?

By extension, we must ask ourselves if modernity has been anything more than a wolf in sheep’s clothing for the rest of us as well? Are not antiquity and modernity both simply the tormented march of History on its ill-begotten pursuit of Armageddon, and by implication salvation, as we await the Day of Judgment? God forbid.

To his credit, Eliade was one who saw it coming. He had once defined modern man by his ability to “consciously and voluntarily create history,” having as he did, “faith in an infinite progress.” Eliade went on to point out that modern man’s most adept means of creating history (and his own anxiety), from the seventeenth century onwards, was through the technology of war. This precocious new science took advantage of realignments in labor markets, and improvements in agricultural technologies, to create power alliances that made the Crusades look like a holiday in the Holy Land.

The sustenance for his faith in an infinite progress modern man drew from his belief in the constancy of a rapidly unfolding future -- a future-as-resource serving to fuel the military and economic dreams of the present. And only a conviction that the future was infinite could keep the prophesy self-fulfilling. Although, having said that, the prophesy was never wholly fulfilled, for as Kafka said, “To believe in progress is not to believe that progress has already taken place. That would be no belief.”

By the twentieth century, progress had become modern man’s beloved opiate, his one true religion. The faith that nourished his restless soul lay not in the memory of yesterday, or in the relief of today, but in the ill-begotten promise of a new tomorrow.

Somebody must have been telling lies about Josef K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.

2008-07-22T10:43:00.006+02:00

Johann Dieter Wassmann, The Case of the City of London, 1894. 39.5 x 29.5 x 26 cm.

"The Eternal Return is a necessity that must be willed: only he who I am now can will the necessity of my return and all the events that have led to what I am..."

Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, 1997

“It is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept it as necessary.”

Franz Kafka, The Trial, 1925

Wassmann Foundation denies involvement in U.S. Senate subcommittee findings

2008-07-18T15:04:00.003+02:00

PRESS RELEASE

Washington, D.C., July 18, 2008 — Officials at the Wassmann Foundation, Washington, D.C. today have strongly denied reports that recent financial shortfalls at the foundation (ARTINFO background link) are in any way associated with the illegal transfer of funds to accounts in either Liechtenstein or Switzerland, which are the subject of this week’s hearings by the investigations subcommittee of the U. S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

In particular, lawyers for the foundation deny any financial ties to the Swiss bank UBS. While acknowledging that several officials of the foundation did attend functions sponsored by UBS at Art Basel Miami Beach on December 5, 2007 and December 7, 2007, at no point was any transfer of funds to either Liechtenstein or Switzerland discussed as has been suggested, nor was any transfer of funds subsequently made. Officials also deny having been involved in any third-party discussions implicating transfer of funds offshore.

No foundation officials have been called before the Senate subcommittee in this week’s hearings and nowhere in the Senate report Tax Haven Banks and U.S. Tax Compliance is the Wassmann Foundation implicated. As reported in today’s Miami Herald, UBS is now cooperating fully with U.S. authorities; UBS has not named the Wassmann Foundation as a client.

The Wassmann Foundation is currently working toward returning to a solid financial footing and remains fully committed to meeting its obligations for the establishment of MuseumZeitraum Leipzig in September 2009.

In November 2007, MuseumZeitraum and the Wassmann Foundation signed a watershed accord under which the foundation would repatriate over 100 of Johann Dieter Wassmann’s early modernist assemblage works to Leipzig, while providing financial assistance toward establishment of the museum. ARTINFO background link

The long-awaited institution will house the works of the pioneering German modernist Johann Dieter Wassmann (1841-1898), a native Leipziger. Two years in construction, the critically-acclaimed MuseumZeitraum facility has been carved out of the shell of a turn-of-the-century Jugendstil building in central Leipzig.

The Wassmann Foundation’s Kaufman Director, Jeffrey D. Wassmann, is unavailable for comment as he remains in Australia recovering from open-heart surgery in June. He is not expected to return to the United States for some months.

Let mirth prevail.

2008-07-17T13:29:00.007+02:00

Johann Dieter Wassmann, Chaste, Grace, Avarice, Mirth & Lust, 1897. 44 x 35 x 15 cm.

The respected curator Daniel Birnbaum trumpets his upcoming Torino Triennale with the afflactus that, “The 50 Moons of Saturn…will present works that transform melancholy into a state of mind inspired by generosity, rebellion and joy.”

To aid him on his journey, we have, in recent weeks, delved into this labyrinth of melancholy through the art of Johann Dieter Wassmann. Today, we pair one of Johann’s final works before his untimely death, CHASTE, GRACE, AVARICE, MIRTH & LUST, 1897, with a selection from Robert Burton’s THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY, 1621, to posit the surest cure for melancholy: mirth.

“‘Mirth,’ (saith Vives) ‘purgeth the blood, confirms health, causeth a fresh, pleasing, and fine colour,’ prorogues life, whets the wit, makes the body young, lively and fit for any manner of employment. The merrier the heart the longer the life; ‘A merry heart is the life of the flesh,’ Prov. xiv. 30. ‘Gladness prolongs his days,’ Ecclus. xxx. 22; and this is one of the three Salernitan doctors, Dr. Merryman, Dr. Diet, Dr. Quiet, which cure all diseases -- Mens hilaris, requies, moderata dieta. Gomesius, præfat. lib. 3. de sal. gen. is a great magnifier of honest mirth, by which (saith he) ‘we cure many passions of the mind in ourselves, and in our friends;’ which Galateus assigns for a cause why we love merry companions: and well they deserve it, being that as Magninus holds, a merry companion is better than any music, and as the saying is, comes jucundus in via pro vehiculo, as a wagon to him that is wearied on the way. Jucunda confabulatio, sales, joci, pleasant discourse, jests, conceits, merry tales, melliti verborum globuli, as Petronius, Pliny, Spondanus, Caelius, and many good authors plead, are that sole Nepenthes of Homer, Helena's bowl, Venus's girdle, so renowned of old to expel grief and care, to cause mirth and gladness of heart, if they be rightly understood, or seasonably applied…

“For these causes our physicians generally prescribe this as a principal engine to batter the walls of melancholy, a chief antidote, and a sufficient cure of itself. ‘By all means’ (saith Mesue) ‘procure mirth to these men in such things as are heard, seen, tasted, or smelled, or any way perceived, and let them have all enticements and fair promises, the sight of excellent beauties, attires, ornaments, delightsome passages to distract their minds from fear and sorrow, and such things on which they are so fixed and intent.’ ‘Let them use hunting, sports, plays, jests, merry company,’ as Rhasis prescribes, ‘which will not let the mind be molested, a cup of good drink now and then, hear music, and have such companions with whom they are especially delighted;’ ‘merry tales or toys, drinking, singing, dancing, and whatsoever else may procure mirth:’ and by no means, saith Guianerius, suffer them to be alone. Benedictus Victorius Faventinus, in his empirics, accounts it an especial remedy against melancholy, ‘to hear and see singing, dancing, maskers, mummers, to converse with such merry fellows and fair maids.’ ‘For the beauty of a woman cheereth the countenance,’ Ecclus. xxxvi. 22. Beauty alone is a sovereign remedy against fear, grief, and all melancholy fits; a charm, as Peter de la Seine and many other writers affirm, a banquet itself…”

Let the banquet begin...

50 Moons of Saturn
Curator: Daniel Birnbaum
Torino Triennale
6 November 2008 – 1 February 2009
http://www.torinotriennale.it/

50 moons of Saturn & a song of despair.

2008-07-16T08:28:00.006+02:00

The memory of you emerges from the night around me.
The river mingles its stubborn lament with the sea.

Deserted like the wharves at dawn.
It is the hour of departure, oh deserted one!

Cold flower heads are raining over my heart.
Oh pit of debris, fierce cave of the shipwrecked.

In you the wars and the flights accumulated.
From you the wings of the song birds rose.

You swallowed everything, like distance.
Like the sea, like time. In you everything sank!

It was the happy hour of assault and the kiss.
The hour of the spell that blazed like a lighthouse.

Pilot’s dread, fury of a blind diver,
turbulent drunkenness of love, in you everything sank!

In the childhood of mist my soul, winged and wounded.
Lost discoverer, in you everything sank!

You girdled sorrow, you clung to desire,
sadness stunned you, in you everything sank!

I made the wall of shadow draw back,
beyond desire and act, I walked on.

Oh flesh, my own flesh, woman whom I loved and lost,
I summon you in the moist hour, I raise my song to you.

Like a jar you housed the infinite tenderness,
and the infinite oblivion shattered you like a jar.

There was the black solitude of the islands,
and there, woman of love, your arms took me in.

There were thirst and hunger, and you were the fruit.
There were grief and the ruins, and you were the miracle.

Ah woman, I do not know how you could contain me
in the earth of your soul, in the cross of your arms!

How terrible and brief was my desire of you!
How difficult and drunken, how tensed and avid.

Cemetery of kisses, there is still fire in your tombs,
still the fruited boughs burn, pecked at by birds.

Oh the bitten mouth, oh the kissed limbs,
oh the hungering teeth, oh the entwined bodies.

Oh the mad coupling of hope and force
in which we merged and despaired.

And the tenderness, light as water and as flour.
And the word scarcely begun on the lips.

This was my destiny and in it was the voyage of my longing,
and in it my longing fell, in you everything sank!

Oh pit of debris, everything fell into you,
what sorrow did you not express, in what sorrow are you not drowned!

From billow to billow you still called and sang.
Standing like a sailor in the prow of a vessel.

You still flowered in songs, you still broke in currents.
Oh pit of debris, open and bitter well.

Pale blind diver, luckless slinger,
lost discoverer, in you everything sank!

It is the hour of departure, the hard cold hour
which the night fastens to all the timetables.

The rustling belt of the sea girdles the shore.
Cold stars heave up, black birds migrate.

Deserted like the wharves at dawn.
Only the tremulous shadow twists in my hands.

Oh farther than everything. Oh farther than everything.

It is the hour of departure. Oh abandoned one.

Pablo Neruda, A SONG OF DESPAIR, 1924
Translated by W. S. Merwin

50 Moons of Saturn
Curator: Daniel Birnbaum
Torino Triennale
6 November 2008 – 1 February 2009
http://www.torinotriennale.it/

Liberté, égalité, fraternité, ou la mort.

2008-07-15T09:45:00.003+02:00

Pictured: Johann Dieter Wassmann, MLLE. LIBERTÉ, 1896, from the 33-piece suite “Der Ring des Nibelungen.”

My apologies to our French readers whose national holiday I completely neglected yesterday. In honour and respect, may I present Johann Dieter Wassmann’s take on Mlle. Liberté.

L’Hôtel des Spheres

2008-07-14T17:45:00.010+02:00

Johann Dieter Wassmann, L’HÔTEL DES SPHERES, 1896.

At this point in the proceedings, I thought it apropos to make a slight digression from our current discussion of Daniel Birnbaum’s 50 Moons of Saturn (for reasons that will become apparent post-haste), looking for a moment at one of Johann Dieter Wassmann’s most charming and enigmatic works, L’Hôtel des Spheres.

Completed in 1896, the work’s origins can be traced to a place and time some 20 years earlier – 1876 – the year Johann commenced his teaching post at the University of Leipzig. Among his students was a Moravian named Edmund Husserl, who from the start impressed this young lecturer with his grasp of the notion of the subjectivity of experience. Husserl was studying astronomy in Leipzig, while also attending classes in mathematics, physics and philosophy, thus sharing many of Johann’s interests. Two years later, Husserl moved on to the University of Berlin, studying with Karl Weierstrass. Johann would not hear of him again until 1891, with the publication of Husserl’s THE PHILOSOPHY OF ARITHMETIC, the first step on his meteoric rise as the father of 20th century phenomenology. Here Husserl provided an account of number as a categorial or formal feature of the objective world, with arithmetic as a symbolic technique for mastering the infinite field of numbers for knowledge. Or more specifically, it provided explanation of how formalized systems of symbols work in providing access to our world. Husserl put forward that “number is a multiplicity of unities,” with multiplicity defined as the “collective connection” of, for example, “something and something and something etc.”

L’Hôtel des Spheres was Johann’s playful homage to his former student’s early achievement. Here the “collective connection” becomes the containment of individual units – individual spheres – within a single unity, which Johann coyly describes in French as “l’hôtel”. What were once non-descript toy balls transform with age to return in a state of suspended “otherness” when housed with like, but different kind.

Some hundred years later – 1998 – we witness the publication of Daniel Birnbaum’s widely-read doctoral dissertation, THE HOSPITALITY OF PRESENCE, a study of the concept of otherness in Husserl’s writing. Several years on still, at a symposium in Amsterdam, Prof. Dr. Birnbaum gave a lecture he called Time and Trauma, in which he explained, “When I worked on Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, I was particularly interested in the concepts of alterity and otherness.”

What goes around, comes around and around and around and around.

50 Moons of Saturn
Curator: Daniel Birnbaum
Torino Triennale
6 November 2008 – 1 February 2009
http://www.torinotriennale.it/

50 moons of Saturn & the orbit of melancholia

2008-07-13T13:30:00.007+02:00

We continue from our previous post…

“Some men have peculiar symptoms, according to their temperament and crisis, which they had from the stars and those celestial influences, variety of wits and dispositions, as Anthony Zara contends… plurimum irritant influentiæ cœlestes, unde cientur animi ægritudines et morbi corporum. One saith, diverse diseases of the body and mind proceed from their influences, as I have already proved out of Ptolemy, Puntanus, Lemnius, Cardan, and others, as they are principal significators of manners, diseases, mutually irradiated, or lords of the geniture, &c. Ptolomeus in his centiloquy, Hermes, or whosoever else the author of that tract, attributes all these symptoms, which are in melancholy men, to celestial influences; which opinion, Mercurialis… rejects; but, as I say, Jovianus Pontanus and others stiffly defend.

“That some are solitary, dull, heavy, churlish; some again blithe, buxom, light, and merry, they ascribe wholly to the stars. As if Saturn be predominant in his nativity, and cause melancholy in his temperature, then he shall be very austere, sullen, churlish, black of colour, profound in his cogitations, full of cares, miseries, and discontents, sad and fearful, always silent, solitary, still delighting in husbandry, in woods, orchards, gardens, rivers, ponds, pools, dark walks and close: Cogitationes sunt velle ædificare, velle arbores plantare, agros colere, &c. To catch birds, fishes, &c., still contriving and musing of such matters.”

Robert Burton, THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY, 1621

50 Moons of Saturn
Curator: Daniel Birnbaum
Torino Triennale
6 November 2008 – 1 February 2009
http://www.torinotriennale.it/

50 Moons of Saturn as observed this night by the distinguished Robert Burton and drawn from The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621

2008-07-09T07:10:00.004+02:00

“Melancholy, the subject of our present discourse, is either in disposition or in habit. In disposition, is that transitory Melancholy which goes and comes upon every small occasion of sorrow, need, sickness, trouble, fear, grief, passion, or perturbation of the mind, any manner of care, discontent, or thought, which causes anguish, dulness, heaviness and vexation of spirit, any ways opposite to pleasure, mirth, joy, delight, causing frowardness in us, or a dislike. In which equivocal and improper sense, we call him melancholy, that is dull, sad, sour, lumpish, ill-disposed, solitary, any way moved, or displeased. And from these melancholy dispositions no man living is free, no Stoick, none so wise, none so happy, none so patient, so generous, so godly, so divine, that can vindicate himself; so well-composed, but more or less, some time or other, he feels the smart of it. Melancholy in this sense is the character of Mortality. . . . This Melancholy of which we are to treat, is a habit, a serious ailment, a settled humour, as Aurelianus and others call it, not errant, but fixed: and as it was long increasing, so, now being (pleasant or painful) grown to a habit, it will hardly be removed…

“NATURAL causes are either primary and universal, or secondary and more particular. Primary causes are the heavens, planets, stars, &c., by their influence (as our astrologers hold) producing this and such like effects. I will not here stand to discuss obiter, whether stars be causes, or signs; or to apologise for judicial astrology. If either Sextus Empiricus, Picus Mirandula, Sextus ab Heminga, Pererius, Erastus, Chambers, &c., have so far prevailed with any man, that he will attribute no virtue at all to the heavens, or to sun, or moon, more than he doth to their signs at an innkeeper's post, or tradesman's shop, or generally condemn all such astrological aphorisms approved by experience: I refer him to Bellantius, Pirovanus, Marascallerus, Goclenius, Sir Christopher Heidon, &c. If thou shalt ask me what I think, I must answer, nam et doctis hisce erroribus versatus sum (for I am conversant with these learned errors), they do incline, but not compel; no necessity at all: agunt non cogunt: and so gently incline, that a wise man may resist them; sapiens dominabitur astris: they rule us, but God rules them. All this (methinks) Joh. de Indagine hath comprised in brief, Quæris a me quantum in nobis operantur astra? &c. ‘Wilt thou know how far the stars work upon us? I say they do but incline, and that so gently, that if we will be ruled by reason, they have no power over us; but if we follow our own nature, and be led by sense, they do as much in us as in brute beasts, and we are no better.’ So that, I hope, I may justly conclude with Cajetan, Cœlum est vehiculum divinæ virtutis, &c., that the heaven is God's instrument, by mediation of which he governs and disposeth these elementary bodies; or a great book, whose letters are the stars (as one calls it), wherein are written many strange things for such as can read, ‘or an excellent harp, made by an eminent workman, on which, he that can but play, will make most admirable music.’ But to the purpose.

“Paracelsus is of opinion, ‘that a physician without the knowledge of stars can neither understand the cause or cure of any disease, either of this or gout, not so much as toothache; except he see the peculiar geniture and scheme of the party affected.’ And for this proper malady, he will have the principal and primary cause of it proceed from the heaven, ascribing more to stars than humours, ‘and that the constellation alone many times produceth melancholy, all other causes set apart.’ He gives instance in lunatic persons, that are deprived of their wits by the moon's motion; and in another place refers all to the ascendant, and will have the true and chief cause of it to be sought from the stars. Neither is it his opinion only, but of many Galenists and philosophers, though they do not so peremptorily maintain as much. ‘This variety of melancholy symptoms proceeds from the stars,’ saith Melancthon: the most generous melancholy, as that of Augustus, comes from the conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter in Libra: the bad, as that of Catiline's, from the meeting of Saturn and the moon in Scorpio. Jovianus Pontanus, in his tenth book, and thirteenth chapter de rebus cœlestibus, discourseth to this purpose at large, Ex atrabile varii generantur morbi, &c., ‘many diseases proceed from black choler, as it shall be hot or cold; and though it be cold in its own nature, yet it is apt to be heated, as water may be made to boil, and burn as bad as fire; or made cold as ice: and thence proceed such variety of symptoms, some mad, some solitary, some laugh, some rage,’ &c. The cause of all which intemperance he will have chiefly and primarily proceed from the heavens, ‘from the position of Mars, Saturn, and Mercury.’ His aphorisms be these, ‘Mercury in any geniture, if he shall be found in Virgo, or Pisces his opposite sign, and that in the horoscope, irradiated by those quartile aspects of Saturn or Mars, the child shall be mad or melancholy.’ Again, ‘He that shall have Saturn and Mars, the one culminating, the other in the fourth house, when he shall be born, shall be melancholy, of which he shall be cured in time: if Mercury behold them.’ ‘If the moon be in conjunction or opposition at the birth time with the sun, Saturn or Mars, or in a quartile aspect with them (e malo cœli loco, Leovitius adds), many diseases are signified, especially the head and brain is like to be misaffected with pernicious humours, to be melancholy, lunatic, or mad…

“The time of this melancholy is, when the significators of any geniture are directed according to art, as the horned moon, hylech, &c. to the hostile beams or terms of Saturn and Mars especially, or any fixed star of their nature, or if Saturn by his revolution, or transitus, shall offend any of those radical promissors in the geniture.”

Robert Burton, THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY, 1621

50 Moons of Saturn
Curator: Daniel Birnbaum
Torino Triennale
6 November 2008 – 18 January 2009
http://www.torinotriennale.it/

50 moons of Saturn & the Third Law of Planetary Motion

2008-07-08T08:08:00.003+02:00

Johann Dieter Wassmann, HARMONISCH, 1895.

“The heavenly motions are nothing but a continuous song for several voices, to be perceived by the intellect, not by the ear; a music which, through discordant tensions, through syncopations and cadences as it were, progresses towards certain predesigned six-voiced cadences, and thereby set landmarks in the immeasurable flow of time.”

Johannes Kepler, HARMONICES MUNDI (THE HARMONIES OF THE WORLD), 1619

In her renowned essay "A Carpenter's Tale," the art historian Maime Stombock makes the point that it was Johann Dieter Wassmann’s friendship with the physicist Max Planck, and their mutual interest in the epistemology of music, that directed their initial thoughts on a unified theory of space and time:

"The late night dialogues Johann records between himself and Planck more often than not centered around music. But then, he was a Leipziger: Wagner, Mendelssohn, Strauss, Liszt, Schumann, Brahms, Grieg, Mahler, they all spent crucial years in the city (as well as in Weimar) during the course of Johann’s life, allowing him to come in contact with each, as well as to see all but Wagner and Schumann either conduct or perform. It would be impossible to overstate the importance of music in his work, despite there being only a handful of direct musical references in his boxes.

"For Johann, music and only music could create such an idealization of space as to transcend time, while still existing within it as an undivided whole. Music is at once truth and form, knowledge and sensation. Music defies absolute space and time by not only transcending the boundaries, but by suggesting the very boundlessness of the universe itself.

"Another to have passed through Leipzig—in this case on his way to Vienna—was Sigmund Freud. In Freud, Johann found his journey had come full circle. Where Johann had begun by challenging his students to question the veracity of truth through his enigmatic displays on human physiology, he ended by proffering that truth is neither supreme nor absolute; our universe may be governed by laws, he suggests, but truth resides just outside our reach, amidst the deepest dark corners of a world we have only just begun to unravel: that of the human mind."

50 Moons of Saturn
Curator: Daniel Birnbaum
Torino Triennale
6 November 2008 – 18 January 2009
http://www.torinotriennale.it/

50 moons of Saturn. Four moons of Galileo. Eppure si muove.

2008-07-07T08:19:00.007+02:00

Pictured: Johann Dieter Wassmann, THE MOONS OF GALILEO, 1896, from the 33-piece suite “Der Ring des Nibelungen.”

"I should disclose and publish to the world the occasion of discovering and observing four Planets, never seen from the beginning of the world up to our own times, their positions, and the observations made during the last two months about their movements and their changes of magnitude; and I summon all astronomers to apply themselves to examine and determine their periodic times, which it has not been permitted me to achieve up to this day . . . On the 7th day of January in the present year, 1610, in the first hour of the following night, when I was viewing the constellations of the heavens through a telescope, the planet Jupiter presented itself to my view, and as I had prepared for myself a very excellent instrument, I noticed a circumstance which I had never been able to notice before, namely that three little stars, small but very bright, were near the planet; and although I believed them to belong to a number of the fixed stars, yet they made me somewhat wonder, because they seemed to be arranged exactly in a straight line, parallel to the ecliptic, and to be brighter than the rest of the stars, equal to them in magnitude . . .When on January 8th, led by some fatality, I turned again to look at the same part of the heavens, I found a very different state of things, for there were three little stars all west of Jupiter, and nearer together than on the previous night.

"I therefore concluded, and decided unhesitatingly, that there are three stars in the heavens moving about Jupiter, as Venus and Mercury around the Sun; which was at length established as clear as daylight by numerous other subsequent observations. These observations also established that there are not only three, but four, erratic sidereal bodies performing their revolutions around Jupiter."

Galileo Galilei, SIDEREUS NUNCIUS, March 1610.

This week I’ve been looking at Johann Dieter Wassmann’s little-known 33-piece suite “Der Ring des Nibelungen,” 1896, as it relates to Daniel Birnbaum’s upcoming Torino Triennale exhibition, 50 Moons of Saturn. Each work in this remarkable ensemble takes the form of a pine box, shaped as an isosceles trapezoid, with the glass front constituting the smaller of the two parallel planes. When assembled in three groups, 11 boxes are positioned to form a circle, with the fronts facing inward, toward one another, rather than outward toward the viewer.

The last of these three groups shows Johann’s strong fascination with an increasingly reductive notion of pure space, space nearing the void of deep space itself. In each of these boxes the sole structural element is one or more planetary forms, but rather than being highly descriptive, these elements are depicted as nothing more than aged brown balls, leaving the focus of our attention on the void itself. The inner surface of these boxes is lined with heavily stained text, in the case of the work above text from a 19th century French-German dictionary. THE MOONS OF GALILEO is sufficiently descriptive to allow us to identify the individual moons – from top to bottom, Ganymede, Europa, Callisto and Io – but grouped alone, without Jupiter, they are purposely lost at sea.

This metaphor of complete and possibly abject isolation – the isolation not of the void, but of the individual within the void – came to dominate much of Johann’s output in the remaining 18 months of his life.

50 Moons of Saturn
Curator: Daniel Birnbaum
Torino Triennale
6 November 2008 – 18 January 2009
http://www.torinotriennale.it/

50 moons of Saturn... and we only got one

2008-07-06T07:23:00.008+02:00

Pictured: Johann Dieter Wassmann, THE ETERNAL MOON, 1896, from the 33-piece suite “Der Ring des Nibelungen.”

“This slow spider dragging itself towards the light of the moon and that same moonlight, and you and I whispering at the gateway, whispering of eternal things, haven’t we already coincided in the past? And won’t we happen again on the long road, on this long tremulous road, won’t we recur eternally?”

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1883

50 Moons of Saturn
Curator: Daniel Birnbaum
Torino Triennale
6 November 2008 – 18 January 2009
http://www.torinotriennale.it/

50 Moons of Saturn

2008-07-05T17:25:00.007+02:00

Pictured: Johann Dieter Wassmann, THE RINGS OF SATURN, 1896, from the 33-piece suite “Der Ring des Nibelungen.”

In the coming weeks and months I thought I’d grant readers a slight reprieve from what I realise has been a string of dreary posts chronicling the recent woes of MuseumZeitraum and instead cheer you up with a series of discussions exploring the melancholic world set forth in Daniel Birnbaum’s upcoming exhibition 50 Moons of Saturn for the Torino Triennale, 6 November 2008 – 18 January 2009. This second edition of the Torino Triennale, heretofore known as T2, is inspired by the slow turning world of the planet sublime.

In choosing the sixth planet from the sun, we are told Mr. Birnbaum is “…creating a new geography in the contemporary art world… a constellation of artists who work under the sign of ambivalence.”

The exhibition actually features two headlining planets, along with its 50 lesser moons; the heavyweights being the Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, presented at the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art and the Chinese-American artist Paul Chan at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo centre for contemporary art in Turin.

The first ten of the 50 moons were announced last month, including Ulla von Brandenburg, Matthew Brannon, Gerard Byrne, Simon Dybbroe Möller, Annika Von Hausswolff, Lara Favaretto, Haegue Yang, Koo Jeong-a, Wilhelm Sasnal and Donald Urquhart. We await news of who gets to be Enceladus, Mimas, Rhea, Iapetus, Phoebe and of course the big daddy of them all, Titan.

More to come as the summer progresses…

Director's recovery proceeding well

2008-06-23T08:12:00.004+02:00

The Wassmann Foundation, Washington, D.C., reports director Jeff Wassmann (pictured at right on a recent trip to Paris) is recovering well from open heart surgery in Australia earlier this month and is expected to return state-side in October. Meanwhile, his staff is busy finalizing last minute details for the repatriation of Johann Dieter Wassmann's remaining boxed assemblage works to Leipzig later this summer.

I've only just returned from Washington myself and I must thank everyone at the foundation for their enthusiastic support of MuseumZeitraum. Without their relentless efforts under increasingly difficult financial circumstances, Johann Dieter Wassmann's pioneering early modernist legacy would risk once again sliding into obscurity. We look forward with great enthusiasm to the arrival of these works in Leipzig as we prepare a hero's welcome for the museum's September 2009 opening.

Museum opening stymied by U.S. funding crisis

2008-05-26T04:08:00.002+02:00

MuseumZeitraum Leipzig Director Sophie Vogt today announced the museum would not meet its July 2008 opening deadline after the apparent collapse of the museum’s principle benefactor, the Wassmann Foundation, Washington, D.C. The long-awaited museum will house the works of the pioneering German modernist Johann Dieter Wassmann (1841-1898), a native Leipziger. Two years in construction, the critically-acclaimed MuseumZeitraum facility has been carved out of the shell of a turn-of-the-century Jugendstil building in central Leipzig.

Wassmann Foundation staff blame the institution’s financial failure on the sub-prime mortgage crisis and resultant capital collapse in the United States, but have not been any more forthcoming as to the details of the shortfall.

According to staff in Washington, the Wassmann Foundation’s Kaufman Director, Jeffrey D. Wassmann, recently suffered heart failure while on a visit to Australia and is scheduled to undergo open-heart surgery at Melbourne’s Epworth Hospital early next week. He is not expected to return to the United States for some months.

In November 2007, MuseumZeitraum and the Wassmann Foundation signed a watershed accord under which the foundation would return over 100 of Johann Dieter Wassmann’s early modernist assemblage works to Leipzig. To date, fewer than half of those works have been repatriated to Germany. ARTINFO background link

At a joint news conference at the foundation’s Washington, D.C. headquarters, Mr. Wassmann said at the time that the agreement "corrects the misunderstandings and errors committed in the past." It will "pave the road to new legal and ethical norms for the future," he added.

The pact, the first of its kind between an American foundation and a German museum, was hailed as a model for settling repatriation disputes involving other Western arts institutions.

"Germany has won, the Wassmann Foundation hasn't lost, and what has benefited is culture," MuseumZeitraum’s director, Sophie Vogt, said at the signing ceremony.

MuseumZeitraum Leipzig is now pursuing funding alternatives while it restructures current debt. The museum board has set September 2009 as its new goal for completion of the project.

Roxanna Brown, art historian, 1946 - 2008.

2008-05-18T17:17:00.007+02:00

Family, Friends, and Colleagues of Dr. Roxanna Brown:

When a great and good person is taken from us, the shock calls upon us to freeze the daily whirl of activities and face an irreparable loss in our lives.

Your sister, your mother, your daughter, Roxanna Maude Brown was such a person. She touched so many lives over the course of her own. A growing chorus of admiration and affection attests to the broad reach of her life and work.

Roxanna’s journey took her from the role of journalist, the conscience of a nation, documenting from the ground the unfolding tragedy of Vietnam, to her discovery of what would be her life’s work buried literally beneath her feet: the ceramics of Southeast Asia. More than once her pursuit of ceramics study through the countryside of Southeast Asia aroused the suspicion of the forces locked in mortal combat swirling around her. Amidst the horror of war, it must have been hard for them to see the innocence of her search for kilns and shards.

Roxanna became a leading figure in the study of Southeast Asian ceramics, and the culture of which they were a part. Her keen eye and vast empirical knowledge allowed her to shape theories of historical development in Southeast Asia that challenged accepted paradigms. That she was able to pursue her work and achieve what she did without the force of institutional structure supporting her was remarkable. When she ascended to the Directorship of the Southeast Asia Ceramics Museum, she seemed at last fitted with the platform from which to make manifest for the benefit of the public her lifetime of study. The museum is a testament to her sensibility and the rigor of her scholarship. We hope it remains true to her ideals.

Many have spoken of her achievements as a scholar, her unique place in her chosen field of study. For those of us who were blessed to know her personally, her friendship was equally to be cherished. All of us have our own stories of Roxanna, our testimonials as friends and colleagues. Her irrepressible, infectious enthusiasm for Southeast Asian ceramics spread a charmed field of energy about all who came in contact with her. She moved with equal grace through mansions and the most modest of dwellings. She asked for little and shared much. Her gentle generosity and unjudgemental acceptance of difference and frailty in a field all too often marred by intolerance and avarice made her a loved as well as respected figure.

But, compounding this tragedy, this is not a moment of grief at the loss of a loved one slipping away from us after a full, rich life, surrounded by friends and family, whose last moments are made as safe and soft as material comforts can permit. This is a moment of mischance. This is a moment of horror. This is a moment of grief not only for the friend we have lost, but anguish for the suffering, the unjust, unnecessary, suffering of her last days and nights on earth. A vulnerable, trusting, undemanding soul thrust alone into the netherworld of the institutional at its most cold and brutal. It is unspeakable. Many of us have discussed how best to pursue the questions that arise concerning the circumstances of her most tragic and untimely death. We wish to be sensitive to your feelings and desires as we move forward. We feel there are many who need to answer for what has happened. We do not seek to return vengeance for victimization, but we seek illumination, and justice.

It is not only the cruelty of Roxanna’s incarceration we seek to redress, but the slur cast upon her name by the accusations that prompted her arrest. For a scholar of such integrity, who tirelessly sought to raise the level of ethical practice in the trade in ceramics, it is a cruel irony that her reputation has been thus tainted. We cannot bring back Roxanna, but we can try our best to clear her of any shadow of wrongdoing, and restore her good name for the future.

For all of us who knew her as a scholar and as a person, we will remember her always as she was–dedicated, generous, gentle, warm. Roxanna will be greatly missed.

In sorrow,

Caverlee Cary
Nhung Tuyet Tran
Pattaratorn Chirapravati
Hiram Woodward
Craig Reynolds
Melody Rodari
Alicia Carlos
Charles Keyes
Joyce Clark
Judith Henchy
Susan Kepner
Rebecca Hall
Louise Cort
Michele Thompson
Robert Brown
Emmy Bunker
Shawn McHale
Edward Miller
Boreth Ly
Bonnie Brereton
Charles Wheeler
Carol Stratton
Charnvit Kasetsiri
Leedom Lefferts
BJ Terwiel
Louis Gabaude
Thak Chaloemtiarana
Stanley O’Connor
Barbara Gaerlan
Nguyen-Vo Thu-Huong
Richard Page
Eric Charles Thompson
Anne R Hansen
Philippe Peycam
Charles Keith
Christina Firpo
Nicola Tannenbaum
Larry Ashmun
Nora Taylor
William Lavely
Donald Mccallum
Nguyen Ngoc BICH
Bin Wong
Nick Menzies
Michael Ross
Philip Taylor
Darryl Johnson
Laurie Sears
Paul Kratowska
Quynh Kieu
Chan Kieu
Laichen Sun
Richard A. Ruth
Trude Bennett
Christine McDaniel
Justin McDaniel
Cari Coe
Jim Cobbe
Scott Laderman
John Stevenson
Karen Adams
Ben Kerkvliet
David Rehfuss
Hue-Tam Ho Tai
Sarah Grant
Geoff Wade
Volker Grabowsky
Kelly Meister
Nathan McGovern
Liam C Kelley
Anthony Zola
Ronachai Krisadaolarn
Vasudha Narayanan
Julia White
Vasilijs Mihailovs
Susan Lee
Nancy Tingley
Tana Li
Suteera Nittayananta
Douglas Padgett
Erik Davis
John Amos Marston
Haydon Cherry
Matthew Wheeler
Donald Swearer
Sommai Premchit
Ngô Thanh Nhàn
Robert & Carol Retka
Robert Acker
Melissa Pashigian
Bonnie Baskin
Philip Alperson
Tran Phuong Ky
Dao Hung
Nancy Wiener
John Guy
Ron Otsuka
Doris Wiener
Joseph Gerena
Kathleen Gillogly
David Lovell
Todd Perreira
Deborah Wong
Rene Lysloff
Hendrick Maier
David Biggs
Christina Schwenkel
Lan Duong
Tamara Ho
Muhammad Ali
Mariam Lam
Sally Ann Ness
Cecily Cook
Deborah Tooker
Catherine Raymond
Bokyung Kim
Dawn Rooney
Nha Trang Pensinger
William L. Pensinger
John N. Miksic
Goh Geok Yian

A final resting place

2008-01-08T06:12:00.000+01:00

The New Year began on a solemn note with the re-interment on Johann Dieter Wassmann's remains in a purpose-built crypt below the main galleries here at MuseumZeitraum Leipzig. The artist's remains had previously rested at Südriedhof, south of the city. The service took place on January 6, 2008 and was attended by a small number of relatives, artists, city officials and museum staff. It was on January 6, 1898 that Johann slipped and fell under a tram, an accident that would claim his life two months later.

Just before Christmas the first shipment of Johann's works arrived in Leipzig as part of our repatriation agreement with the Wassmann Foundation, Washington, D.C., allowing them to be arranged on the walls as a tribute to his life and ongoing legacy.

One last look

2007-11-03T09:19:00.000+01:00

The announcement on Thursday that an agreement has been reached with the Wassmann Foundation that will see the works of Johann Dieter Wassmann repatriated to Germany has been met with overwhelming joy here in Leipzig (see official statement below). Before the works leave the United States, however, here's one last look at these beloved pieces in situ, as they have appeared for the last quarter century at the Wassmann Foundation's Washington, D.C. headquarters. Our tour is graciously led by Kaufmann Director Jeffrey D. Wassmann.

Museum reaches landmark repatriation accord

2007-11-01T01:19:00.000+01:00

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Washington, D.C., November 1, 2007 — Announcing a "new page of cooperation," MuseumZeitraum Leipzig and the Wassmann Foundation today signed a watershed accord under which the foundation will return over 100 nineteenth century assemblage works by the early modernist Johann Dieter Wassmann (1841-1898). For the past decade the artist’s Leipzig descendants have argued these works were removed in 1912 from storage in Weimar without their knowledge, consent or agreement.

In exchange for yielding the works to the Saxon museum — including the prized 33-work Der Ring des Nibelungen (Ring Cycle) 1895-1897 — the foundation will retain the artist’s large trove of photographic works and continue to oversee conservation. The foundation will also provide financial assistance for completion of a new home for the museum opening in July 2008.

At a joint news conference at the foundation’s Washington, D.C. headquarters, Kaufman Director Jeffrey D. Wassmann said the agreement "corrects the misunderstandings and errors committed in the past."

It will "pave the road to new legal and ethical norms for the future," he added. At the same time, Mr. Wassmann said, the accord "opens a new phase of collaboration which does not deprive the many visitors to our foundation of the opportunity to experience Johann’s legacy."

The pact, the first of its kind between an American foundation and a German museum, is being hailed as a model for settling repatriation disputes involving other Western arts institutions.

"Germany has won, the Wassmann Foundation hasn't lost, and what has benefited is culture," MuseumZeitraum’s director, Sophie Vogt, said at the signing ceremony.

Under the terms of the accord, the Wassmann Foundation will return a total of 115 works to Germany, among them Arteriae Pelvis, Abdomimis, et Pectoris, 1883, The Case of the City of London 1894, 16969, 1896, Vorworts! 1897, and the much-loved Nietzsche 306P 1897.

The works were shipped from Weimar to the Port of Baltimore in 1912 by the artist’s son-in-law, Edward Liszt, where they were taken into the care of Johann’s nephews, Friedrich, Dieter and Henry Wassmann. The works remained in storage, first in Washington, D.C. and later in Harrisburg, PA until 1969, when the foundation was established in the will of Gladys Wassmann. Since that time, the estate has been solely governed by the Wassmann Foundation, a role that will now be jointly shared by the two institutions.

Family members in Leipzig had long believed the works were destroyed in World War II, only becoming aware of their continued existence in the early 1990s after the reunification of Germany.

Of the works that will remain in Washington, Mr. Wassmann said, "The photographs of Johann Dieter Wassmann provide the missing link between the meticulous, but still largely prescriptive street imagery of mid-19th century photographer Charles Marville, and the lyrical melancholy of Eugene Atget in the early 20th century. As a predecessor to his fellow countrymen Heinrich Zille and August Sander, Johann discreetly anticipated what vast potential the photographic arts held for the modernist era."

Ms. Vogt commented that, “The restitution of the works represents the healing of a wound. We are grateful to the Wassmann Foundation for safekeeping and conserving these works, but it is now time for them to come home.”

"This is another step forward," she said of the agreement. "But Leipzig must also hold up its own end by seeing that the doors of MuseumZeitraum open wide in July 2008 to Johann’s many passionate admirers on both sides of the Atlantic.”

MuseumZeitraum Leipzig

2007-10-30T06:21:00.000+01:00

After travels and travails more varied than I'd care to mention, the MuseumZeitraum Leipzig blog returns this week with news, views and all the rest from Leipzig and beyond. Stayed tuned... we're back!

Is modernity our antiquity?

2007-07-18T01:54:00.000+02:00

Dada and Surrealism were still years away when Johann Dieter Wassmann struck out with this monumental, if misunderstood, work, “Of the Stealing of Women” 1896. Never before published or exhibited, the work merges an early 18th century English case-law text, open to a page describing the (limited) rights of women from being, yes, that’s right, stolen, with a medical engraving of mid-19th century bandaging practices, all linked by a harmony of violin pegs and tailpiece. In his notes on the work, Johann enthusiastically describes the piece in terms that we now might read as empowerment and liberation, closing with an enigmatic quote from his beloved muse, Goethe: ‘Man sieht nur, was man weiss.’ One sees only what one knows. Some critics have hesitated at themes they (mis)read as bondage and repression, with one Australian curator going so far as to have the work removed from the exhibition BLEEDING NAPOLEON at the 2003 Melbourne International Arts Festival.

Personally, I believe the work can be read as a nod to the rising sentiment across Europe in support of women's suffrage. Three years earlier, in 1893, New Zealand was the first country to introduce universal suffrage, generating headlines world-wide. The use of an English case-law book would suggest some reference to the British empire here. The image of a woman bandaged suggests a play on the word suffrage. Violin pegs are, of course, necessary to tune the instrument, implying an adjustment or refinement of the social politic to enhance the role of women in 19th century society.

Whatever its inner meaning, the work stands as a significant precursor to the explosive power Dada and Surrealism would have on the course of 20th century modernism.

Is modernity our antiquity? What is bare life?

2007-07-08T16:57:00.001+02:00

Johann Dieter Wassmann, Nietzsche 306P, 1897. 370 x 280 x 100 mm.

In recent posts I've been examining the first of three leitmotifs posed by the Documenta 12 team, "Is modernity our antiquity?" If I may, I'd like to skip ahead to the second question for a moment, "What is bare life?" as further means of addressing the first.

In 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche suffered a mental breakdown, often attributed to his contraction of syphilis, resulting in his admission to various clinics before he was moved to Naumburg, where his mother looked after him until her death in 1897. At this point his sister Elisabeth shifted him to Weimar, where she continued his care, as well as promoting his legacy and allowing the occasional audience with guests until his death in 1900.

It was in Weimar that Johann Dieter Wassmann briefly visited Nietzsche, but finding only a shell of a man he returned home to produce this work, depicting simply and eloquently the empty collar of the man, an organ stop with the name 'Nietzsche' printed on it, and an opium-stained bone apothecary spoon; a life stripped bare. These objects are placed against a dappled blue wall, reflecting Nietzsche's penchant for blue-lensed spectacles.

Johann's ability to take the contemporary moment of his visit with Nietzsche and so confidently convert it into the iconography of modernism speaks legions about the raw vitality of the modern movement at the dawn of the 20th century. In no time, however, modernity fell victim to the second law of thermodynamics, with entropy holding sway, but it was not until the close of the century that we realised the paradigm had simply collapsed en route.

Today it is essentially modernity stripped bare that we address as artists and curators, an ongoing post-mortem of abject failure. So in this sense is modernity our antiquity? The answer is not so clear.

Documenta 12 takes a beating.

2007-06-27T03:51:00.000+02:00

After being savaged by the English-language press earlier in the month, Documenta 12 has now been ravaged by the elements, with Ai Weiwei's Template collapsing in high winds last week. In more recent days, the Plastic Palace has failed to keep Kassel's heavy rains out with roof vents found to be faulty and refusing to close (although we are happy to report there have been no fatalities of either art or art lovers, excluding Template, that is). On low land near the river, the Aue Pavilion is fast becoming the Eau Pavilion, so bring your Wellington boots if you're planning to visit anytime soon. With 90 days to go, let's hope the rest holds together for late arrivals.

Is modernity our antiquity? Well, the ruins of Documenta 12 would certainly suggest as much.

The Zeitraum gardens

2007-06-26T10:05:00.000+02:00

Work continues at MuseumZeitraum Leipzig toward our mission of opening to the public next summer. This week the foundations went in for our garden terrace. The terrace is a tribute to one of Johann's best known works, his photograph of the Freundschaftstempel in Potsdam, 1896 (below).

Frederick the Great had this small, elegant temple built in 1768 in memory of his sister, Wilhemine of Bayreuth by Gontard, according to his own sketches and plans. It was modelled on the Temple of Apollo in the Amalthea garden at Neuruppin, court architect Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff's first work.

Is modernity our antiquity? Hmmm... the lines blur!
JOHANN DIETER WASSMANN, Freundschaftstempel, Potsdam, 1896. Albumen silver print, 18 x 23 cm, WF 743020.

Is modernity our antiquity?

2007-06-17T04:42:00.000+02:00

Earlier this evening I was delighted to bump into curator Abigail von Bibera at Documenta 12's Museum Fridericianum. Over drinks she made the observation that the creative process behind Hazoume Romould's African 'masks'(see below) struck her as remarkably similar to the thinking that must have gone into Johann Dieter Wassmann's Prince Otto von Bismarck, 1896, pictured here. Good spot Abigail. Which again raises the question, is modernity our antiquity? Or as I discussed in an earlier blog, is it just our Hotel California?

First Look: Hazoume Romuald @ Documenta 12

2007-06-16T17:39:00.000+02:00

Is modernity our antiquity? Hazoume Romuald proffers an answer.

The morning after the night before.

2007-06-16T07:14:00.000+02:00

With revelers still wandering the streets of Kassel from the opening party last night, Documenta 12 is just a few hours away from officially opening to the public. Here's a photo op from earlier in the week of the artists selected for this year's event. I've uploaded a fairly large file, so click on it to enlarge if you want to better see who's who. While I managed a sneak preview of several venues yesterday, Walter Robinson has written quite a comprehensive piece for ArtNet so click through for his first impressions and I'll fill you in with more in the coming days.

Is modernity our antiquity? The answer is nigh.

2007-06-14T16:08:00.000+02:00

Documenta 12 doesn't officially open till the weekend, but a number of works have been erected in public spaces here in Kassel and they're already drawing interest from locals and early arrivals. This afternoon I ran out to have a look at Shipwreck and Workers (version 3) (pictured) by Allan Sekula at the Herkules (mentioned in my last post). The work comprises a progression of large photograghs, several of which can be seen here to right of the Wasserspiel. Sekula hails from Erie, PA and was also heavily featured in Documenta 11.

Unfortunately, the rain that plagued the opening days of the Venice Biennale seems to have followed the art mob north and moments ago began bucketing down in droves as I waited for my tram back into town from Schloss Wilhelmshöhe. With more of the same forecast throughout the weekend, let's hope King Roger's Plastic Palace isn't made of cotton candy.

Blackberry permitting, I'll duly keep you posted. Tschüss.

1 down, 2 to go.

2007-06-12T04:32:00.000+02:00

As the art hoards head north from Venice to Basel this week, the citizens of Kassel are enjoying one last moment of calm before the onslaught begins on their own city, with the opening of Documenta 12 this weekend.

Several readers have asked advice on what else there is to do in Kassel beyond Documenta, with the standard reply being, "Nothing," but I beg to differ. Kassel's museums offer a cabinet of curiosities well worth pursuing when you need a break from the newest and latest at Documenta. While The German Wallpaper Museum may not be to everyone's liking, the home of the Brothers Grimm is a short walk from main Documenta venues, offering a welcome respite. Across the street from the Grimms is the Neue Gallery, featuring perhaps Joseph Beuys best known work, The Pack, 1969 (above), as well as many landmark German paintings from the late 20th century.

Even closer to Documenta is the rather fabulous Museum of Natural History in the Ottoneum. You'll pass it daily walking from the Museum Fridericianum to L'Orangerie, but few of Document's 650,000 viewers will ever step into this marvelous little museum of wonders.

Also worth a diversion is Schloss Wilhelmshöhe on the edge of town, which houses the Old Masters Gallery. Choose a Wednesday or Sunday and you'll experience one of the great marvels of eighteenth century mechanical engineering, as you watch the Wasserspiel cascade down the mountain in it's half hour trek from the Herkules statue on the summit, finishing in a 52 meter jet of water in the gardens of the Schloss.

Unlike Venice and Basel, opening night in Kassel is a public event, with a grand party for the entire city kicking off Friday night.

Is modernity our antiquity? Finally, we'll learn the truth according to Roger & Ruth this weekend. See you there.

Zeitraum Rising

2007-05-21T10:01:00.000+02:00

I've just realised I haven't given you an update on MusesumZeitraum's progress in some time. Too busy debating the great issues. Here's a shot of Klaus Richter in the Leipzig foundry where our fabulous new staircase is being fabricated. When installed, this sculptural wonder will lead up from the ground floor galleries to the photographic rooms.

Is modernity our antiquity? Not at MuseumZeitraum, where modernity remains the order of the day.

When men were men and Beuys was Beuys. Documenta 12 enjoys the shade of D7.

2007-05-16T05:32:00.000+02:00

With the opening of Documenta 12 just a month away, I ventured out west to Kassel last week to visit King Roger and Queen Ruth and gaze upon their majestic new Plastic Palace on the grounds of L’Orangerie. If you don’t mind the distant roar of generators and compressors keeping the air conditioning flowing, and you ignore the implications for Documenta 12’s carbon footprint, it’s a spectacular sight, even without the art installed.

It is not possible in my experience, however, to visit Kassel without feeling the overwhelming presence of an installation that returns to life this time every year, that of Joseph Beuys 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks). Planting of the trees began at Documenta 7 in 1982 and continued for five years with support from the Dia Foundation, with the last of the 7000 planted at D8.

25 years on, the oaks are reaching a more graceful maturity than most of us. And hopefully, with the buds open and the leaves growing to fullness this month, Prince Joseph’s grand gesture will be busy converting King Roger’s carbon dioxide output back into fresh clean oxygen.

One of my favourite gifts for artist friends is to pass along a handful of acorns from these sacred oaks after a trip to Kassel. I’ve even been known to hop off the train to spend an hour collecting acorns before jumping on the next train when my travels take me through Kassel. This year I loaded up a shoe-box full from around the University and have been busy wrapping them up and posting them out. The notion of the artist’s seed spreading across the globe even after death is terribly modernist, I know, but all credit to Prince Joseph for such a far-sighted effort.

Is modernity our antiquity? In this case, sadly yes. What is bare life? Prince Joseph’s seed – the acorn – I believe. Was tun? Plant trees, King Roger, to repent for your sins!

"Controversy is normal with us"

2007-04-25T17:43:00.000+02:00

Documenta 12 artistic director Roger M. Buergel offers members of the press a guided tour of exhibition venues earlier today in Kassel.

Buergel made clear he has won the argument with architect Jean Philippe Vassal that I've been reporting on in recent days and the Plastic Palace will be fully air conditioned. Roger pointedly told the press, "The architecture has to subordinate itself to the art." As to such high-brow concerns as his leitmotif, Is modernity our antiquity? we'll get back to that after the gossip dies downs.

Documenta 12: better pack your Hawaiian Tropic

2007-04-24T16:46:00.000+02:00

Last week I gave you a first look at the new Plastic Pavilion rising before Kassel’s Orangerie for Documenta 12 this summer. This week I can confirm rumours circulating around the city that artistic director Roger Buergel isn’t altogether happy with the pavilion's architects, Jean-Philippe Vassal and Anne Lacaton.

Die Süddeutsche Zeitung is running an interview with the French team today in which they take the position that the structures should live and breathe Kassel's natural climate. Roger's not so sure.

"The problem is not the form of the pavilion," explains Vassal. "It's the system. One should feel the atmosphere of fresh air in the [Karlsaue] park, close to the river. In the summer, the Karlsaue should become a resting place that is as natural as possible and understood as part of the exterior. The climate should be felt inside, too, in a way that's different from the traditional museum. . . A greenhouse should not be sealed off."

Buergel, on the other hand is panicking that hanging art works -- many on loan from institutional collections -- in a hot and sweaty greenhouse all summer may not make him the most popular director among conservation staff. Word has it there are already threats of works being pulled from the show.

The architects argue the system meets Buergel's concept of an India-inspired "palm grove" where guests can congregate and discuss art and society, while Buergel is insisting his metaphor is being taken a little too far.

"The most important factor for the museum climate is the sweat of each individual visitor," Vassal says. "There, a purely artificial atmosphere becomes a problem. If Buergel has an image in mind of people sitting under trees in India, then he should think about what kind of architecture comes closest to this image."

Is modernity our antiquity, Roger asks? It will be soon enough if he starts shipping home Ruschas and Richters left faded, blistered and cracking from a summer in the sun.

Was tun? A way forward.

2007-04-23T17:57:00.000+02:00

Over the past two months I've been deliberating Documenta 12's leitmotif, Is modernity our antiquity? I've argued that both modernity and antiquity are little more than linear, if substantial, events in the West's ongoing Terror of History. This terror has now engulfed all the world's reaches, but there are those still defiant in their determination not to sink into the cultural morass that is the West's making. I offered the example of Aboriginal Australia, one culture whose preoccupation with place has allowed them to maintain a certain remove from this Terror of History and from the all-consuming linearity of time.

A performance staged last month at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, offers perhaps the most compelling way forward, one involving neither modernity, nor antiquity, but an acceptance of the Aboriginal world-view transcendent of time, fixated rather on the universality of space. Here several of Australia's leading jazz musicians perform traditional manikay (song) with songmen from the Ngukurr community, along the Roper River in south-east Arnhem Land. In singing the songs of their ancestors, songs whose origins anthropologists date back some 40,000 years, these songmen and their jazz cohorts join together to renew the very birth of our human existence, a humbling and thought-provoking thing to experience, even if only on YouTube.

Documenta 12 wonders, is modernity our antiquity? Yes, and we have Andy and GoogleNation to thank.

2007-04-18T05:29:00.001+02:00

Regular readers will notice several changes in our blog over the past week, with the inclusion in our right-hand column of a live news diary covering breaking events in the art world, and rotating videos relating to both Leipzig and the art scene at large. These are brought to you courtesy of Google and YouTube. The news pre-set is for stories on documenta 12, but you can click on any of the other listed keywords, including biennale, louvre and museumzeitraum to find out what's happening in these worlds.

In the lead-up to Documenta this summer, we've been discussing Roger and Ruth's leitmotifs, is modernity our antiquity?, what is bare life? and was tun?

One of my contentions has been that the breakdown of modernity has come about through the collapse of its power structures, mostly recently and most significantly through the rise of the internet. Constantly evolving technologies such as these services all contribute to an increase in the reach and voice of the individual at the expense the traditional gatekeepers of the canon, creating a certain paradox: in a mass global society, the power and importance of the individual grows, rather than diminishes. For individuals in what were formerly the planets outer reaches, the web has democratised access to the structures and machinations of power to an extent previously unimagined. Little more than 20 years after the art world 'discovered' there was an 'outside' and 'periphery', they've suddenly found it's gone. With the playing field flattened in our postcolonial/internet age, there is only the centre to be fought over and for the artist, the ensuing chaos to decipher. Where once the internet merely informed the political process, it now has the immense capability of wholly transforming it.

Documenta 12 rises before the Orangerie

2007-04-12T09:33:00.000+02:00

With all our talk of Documenta 12's leitmotifs in recent weeks - Is modernity our antiquity? What is bare life? Was tun? - it's easy to forget there's real work being done to ready Kassel for the grand opening, just two months away. Here's a first look at the temporary galleries, or Plastic Palace as it's being called, on the beautiful grounds of the Orangerie.

Documenta 12 asks, “Is modernity our antiquity?” MZL wonders, maybe it’s rocket science after all.

2007-04-11T14:50:00.000+02:00

Three years after the publication of Albert Einstein’s seminal Special Theory of Relativity (1905), his mentor and one-time teacher, Hermann Minkowski, gave a lecture in Cologne elaborating on his former student’s findings, beginning with the proclamation that,

Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.

What Minkowski couldn’t predict was how painfully long it would take for our Newtonian belief in fixed time to actually fade into mere shadows. As the twentieth century unfolded, fixed time only became more entrenched, largely because it proved so useful a tool in promoting our singular march toward Progress.

As I’ve discussed in previous posts, there are cultures for whom space and time never suffered the humiliation of separation, Aboriginal Australia chief among them. Here the Dreaming maintains a union of the two, where there is only place to consider.

Einstein would seem to concur, once stating, “The distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, even if a stubborn one.” To remove Einstein’s theory from the theoretical and prove it, of course, meant doing things like sending a twenty-year-old identical twin off in a rocket at very nearly the speed of light for two years (in his time), and have him return to find his brother a very old man living comfortably in Tucson, Arizona with the rest of the feeble old scientists who had shot him off into the ether seventy years earlier (in their time) in the first place.

The truth that rested in his theory of relativity also provided the unwanted proof of what an oily calm modern man had been sailing headlong into, somewhere en route ordaining the rest of the world should run adrift with him.

Despite the lingering influence of those such as Heidegger — with his modified Newtonian view of the present — it should have been apparent that in a world of space-time, the past, the present and the future all do exist quite simultaneously.

What modern man failed to realise Einstein was saying, was that time and space aren’t fixed or readily determinable; they are, in fact, infinitely variable. And while they do exist in a relative sense, there is nothing absolute in their nature. They are instead interwoven, making one quite inseparable from the other. So time exists for me in the space I occupy, and time exists for you in the space you occupy, but there are no grounds for the worn-out belief that time exists commonly and universally for the both of us.

That which modern man has known and thought of as time for so long is certainly no less real than the printing press or the motor car, but nor is it any less a product of his own invention.

Returning to Roger and Ruth’s question, “Is modernity our antiquity?” then, in terms of the world-view they perpetuate they could just as well be one in same. The failed linearity of time is inherent and intrinsic to both.

An Easter greetings.

2007-04-06T01:40:00.000+02:00

Johann Dieter Wassmann, Catedral Metropolitana, Mexico City, 1897. Albumen silver print, 23 x 18 cm, WF901020.

Is modernity our antiquity? What is bare life? Was tun? Worthy questions for this Easter season. More on these leitmotifs posed by the Documenta 12 team next week.

In the meantime, what a nutty world we live in when British soldiers leave their Iranian captors on BA business class, in new suits, with handsome show-bags in hand? Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in rabbit ears and a bushy tail. A pr coup or not, it was worth the chuckle heard round the world.

A warm Easter greetings to all.

Was Tun? A video reply from Yusuf Islam.

2007-04-01T05:58:00.000+02:00

In recent weeks I've been deliberating the Documenta 12 team's first leitmotif "Is modernity our antiquity?" As regular readers will know, I've taken the position that the Terror of History, as the late University of Chicago Professor Mircea Eliade coined it, leaves the question somewhat in tatters. While the team has also raised the more insightful question, "Which modernity and whose antiquity?", this line of questioning still marginalises those cultures wholly and voluntarily outside the Western paradigm.

On this rather beautiful spring morning here in Leipzig, I have decided to address the question today by simply shutting down my Powerbook and going for a walk. I leave you with something you'll likely enjoy much more than my usual pontification: a prayer for peace. Here Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens) performs Heaven / Where True Love Goes at the Nobel Peace Prize Concert in Oslo, Norway, 11 December 2006.

Documenta 12 asks, "Is modernity our antiquity?" MZL wonders, or is it all just so much 'History'?

2007-03-29T14:42:00.000+02:00

On March 11, 1992 Anselm Kiefer gave a lecture in Adelaide that is still widely discussed in Australian intellectual circles. In it, he expressed intrigue that Aboriginals should have such a deep-seated relationship with their art. He envied Aboriginal artists for what he saw as their ability to inhabit their work as deeply as they inhabited their land. He mourned Western art as a curtain descending into its own cultural morass, a no man’s land, a terra nullius of the soul. (He further asserted that the current state of decline in Western art commenced with the fall of Byzantium.)

Despite its quirky tales, its idiosyncratic logic and its non-empirical structures, he argued the Aboriginal Dreaming may offer a far more valid user’s guide to the universe than any Western paradigm.

In bringing up the Dreaming in relation to antiquity and modernity alike, there are those who may feel I sound like a wayward musician wandering off-key mid-song -- stumbling with the present tense when it would seem more appropriate to speak of the Dreaming in the past, as Aboriginal antiquity -- but I have just cause for abiding in the hear-and-now. For one thing, these beliefs still dominate Aboriginal life, so to refer to them otherwise would be untowardly dismissive. But the more telling reason is that elders themselves are very specific in the syntax they use to describe their Dreamings -- always speaking in either the present or something close to the progressive present perfect tense when telling these stories. This progressive present perfect tense is the tense used for action that began in the past and continues into the present (e.g. I have been working on the railroad, all the live-long day; which is to say I was earlier and I continue to be working on the railroad).

It was as Aboriginal groups developed their own versions of Creole English in the 19th century that these thought processes became most apparent. Aboriginals stuck to the verb tenses that made sense to them, including the present, the past in referring to the recent past, the progressive present perfect in referring to the distant past, and similar progressive future tenses in referring to events linking the past and present to the future. But as Aboriginals moved to cities and towns, and mission schools made greater inroads in teaching the Queen’s English, this unusual use of tense diminished, with many Aboriginal speakers reverting to the common past tense when describing Dreaming events.

Those continuing to employ this curious use of tense aren’t stubborn illiterates, as some educators would have us believe. What they are doing is holding on to a core value in the Aboriginal world-view, which itself reaches back to Dreaming events, or to be more precise, their world-view reaches through to Dreaming events. Reaching back implies a reverse movement in time and history; reaching through expresses movement in space. And it is this very space -- the space of the Dreaming -- that they are cleverly describing in the present perfect.

But who’s listening? Only a smattering of Westerners, such as Kiefer, have picked up on the possibility that a whole new wealth of philosophical puzzles and paradigms might rest in this linguistic clue -- a possibility the ancient Greeks had toyed with, and Western physicists inched toward from a different tack for the better part of the twentieth century.

The clue that lay unnoticed for so long in the present perfect is that the conceptual notions of time and history, past and present, have simply never entered into Aboriginal culture; that is, they never entered into Aboriginal culture until the arrival of Europeans. The anthropologist William Stanner remarked, “I have never been able to discover an Aboriginal word for time as an abstract comment... And the sense of history is wholly alien here.”

All clans naturally have a sense of the immediate past, or the past within one’s lifetime -- the known past -- but once a death occurs the soul is seen as returning to the land, not to be forgotten, but to rejoin the ancestors in an ongoing cycle of renewal. Talk of human lineage beyond living generations and the most recent to have passed away is rare, and even when referring to the recently departed there are elaborate taboos on how they can be discussed, if at all.

As mentioned in a previous post, in the West, it’s the very existence of a linear sequence -- creation/past/present/future -- that for years has shaped and supported our notions of time, history, antiquity, modernity, progress and by inference, space. But among the Aboriginal people of Australia, the creation and the present aren’t linked in any linear sense by history; quite the contrary, they are defined in a purely spatial sense by the simple, direct and irrefutable existence of place.

And because the Dreaming defines place rather than history, the ancestors are just as much alive today as they were yesterday or they will be tomorrow, living as they do, in the realm of something close to what we in the West see as eternity. So by returning to one’s place in death, spatiality also imparts salvation, along with a measure of immortality, to the Aboriginal believer.

Among non-Aboriginals, the Dreaming has come to represent many things to many people. One who took a keen interest and whose influence was far-reaching was Mircea Eliade. Eliade was well respected for his views on a wide array of theological issues, but his conceit that primitive creation stories, Dreamings included, were an effort to escape the parameters of time -- by means of retaining a continuous link to the mythical era of the ancestors -- shows the mark of his bias. As Eliade saw it, “spirituality introduced freedom into the cosmos. It allows the possibility of transcending the boundaries.”

Where Eliade had run afoul was in believing that the preponderance of place ascribed to by these cultures represented some sort of subconscious substitution, or ongoing rebellion, against the historical notion of time. How could they have? These people knew nothing about the historical notion of time. That was the West’s later doing (and our current undoing). So if time and history had never entered into their realm, where and how could they have come to replace or reject them? These boundaries requiring transcendence Eliade spoke of are constructs of Western culture, not universal boundaries and certainly not the Aboriginal’s.

The question "Is modernity our antiquity?" is expanded in the first issue of the documenta 12 Magazine to ask, “Which modernity and whose antiquity?” but even this repositioning is problematic, for in the Aboriginal case it still suggests the Dreaming as an antiquity, imposing as it does linearity where there was none previously. If we take modernity as the arrival the European, does it offer the Aboriginal anything more than an invitation to join in on the Terror of History?

By extension, we must ask ourselves if modernity has been anything more than a wolf in sheep’s clothing for the rest of us as well? Are not antiquity and modernity both simply the tormented march of History on its ill-begotten pursuit of Armageddon, and by implication salvation, as we await the Day of Judgment? God forbid.

Documenta 12 asks, "Is modernity our antiquity?" MZL wonders, or is it our Hotel California?

2007-03-20T13:00:00.000+01:00

In deliberating the first of three leitmotifs posed by the Documenta team, "Is modernity our antiquity?", I've left little doubt in recent posts my feeling that modernity has come to its rightful end, just as antiquity did well before it, but the broader and more relevant question remains, have we actually escaped modernity or has it become our inescapable Hotel California? (At least not hearing the Eagles sing it again is escapable. I've chosen here a version by the Gypsy Kings while you ponder the question for 5 minutes, 47 seconds.)

Antiquity may be the basis of much that we in the West do and believe in, but it is not a universal paradigm, to the extent that modernity is. Every culture not only experiences a varying degree of impact from Western antiquity, but posseses its own distinct antiquity to reference as well. On the other hand, dead or alive, modernity remains as ubiquitous and unrelenting a force as ever across all the world's cultural boundaries (discussed in my previous posts), however late it might have arrived to some.

What is bare life? Was ist das bloße Leben?

2007-03-17T12:17:00.000+01:00

Documenta 12 asks, "Is modernity our antiquity?" Pogo replies:

2007-03-15T03:36:00.000+01:00

Some years ago, I made my way to the island group of Vanuatu, formerly the New Hebrides, informally the Cannibal Isles and best known as the wartime setting that inspired the musical South Pacific. After a few days in the capital, Port Vila, I headed to the airport for a flight south to the island of Tanna. My taxi driver was from Pentecost Island to the north, which I only knew as the birthplace of bungee jumping. He asked where I was headed. “Tanna,” I said. He turned around and asked me if I’d ever seen the movie The Gods Must be Crazy. I told him I had and he said, “That like Tanna.”

Two days later, I found myself trekking half a day into the central highlands on Tanna, making my way through the dense bush to a kastom village named Yakel. The villagers had only seen their first white face eight years earlier and were still butt naked save their penis sheaths and grass skirts. I should add, to get there, several weeks earlier I had made a sizable direct-deposit into the villagers Australian bank account. The chief of the village had made a thoughtful decision some years earlier that they would remain steadfast in their dedication to tradition. He knew of the outside world, feared for what it might do to the young people, but also realised some defense might be useful one day to stave off future encroachments, so he allowed limited tourist visits, squirreling away the money to build a hefty war chest should he ever have the need to battle the modern world on Western terms. A few months ago, I learned this wise old man is still chief and has just turned 100.

My guide that day, a young man from Yaohnanen, a village along the way, hadn’t seen many whites either, but he’d met one a few weeks earlier who stayed a while and took a lot of notes.

“Yu savvy Paul Theroux?” he asked in Bislama over the fire that evening. We were on our second round of kava—a strong analgesic blended from the roots of a pepper shrub and served in split coconut shells—and the conversation was lurching in all directions.

“No savvy,” I slurred. “But I’ve heard of him.”

“Yu savvy Prince Philip?” he next asked. He had met him too.

Skipping ahead to the year 2007 A.D., it is finally safe to say that there is nowhere on earth that the effects of modernity haven’t been felt. Few, however, have had the good fortune, as these Melanesian tribesman have, to make a conscious decision as to whether or not they should join in and even fewer have simply said, “No thanks,” and gone back to their tribal ways.

The terror of History, as Mircea Eliade has called it, is now a part of the human experience the world over, and with it goes the linearity of time. As Ulysses S. Grant grumbled, “History is just one damn thing after another.” In the West, it was the very existence of this linear sequence — creation/past/present/future — that for too long shaped and supported our notions of time, history, and by inference, space.

It was this very separation of space from time that most concerned Johann Dieter Wassmann at the close of the nineteenth century. His vision for the modern world was one in which space and time were again re-united in a universal space-time, not unlike the one Albert Einstein proposed in his special theory of relativity, published seven years after Johann’s death.

To no one’s surprise, however, this was not the course history would take. The twentieth century bowed out with anxiety as its swan song. The century that had had its great hopes dashed so early on, ended ill at ease with all that had ensued and uncertain of what lay ahead.

To his credit, Eliade was one who saw it coming. He had once defined modern man by his ability to “consciously and voluntarily create history,” having as he did, “faith in an infinite progress.” Eliade went on to point out that modern man’s most adept means of creating history (and his own anxiety), from the seventeenth century onwards, was through the technology of war. This precocious new science took advantage of realignments in labor markets, and improvements in agricultural technologies, to create power alliances that made the Crusades look like a holiday in the Holy Land.

The sustenance for his faith in an infinite progress modern man drew from his belief in the constancy of a rapidly unfolding future — a future-as-resource serving to fuel the military and economic dreams of the present. And only a conviction that the future was infinite could keep the prophesy self-fulfilling. Although, having said that, the prophesy was never wholly fulfilled, for as Kafka said, “To believe in progress is not to believe that progress has already taken place. That would be no belief.”

Progress had become by this point modern man’s beloved opiate, his one true religion. The faith that nourished his restless soul lay not in the memory of yesterday, or in the relief of today, but in the promise of a new tomorrow.

What has now brought the modern era to its close is the overriding angst we find in the emptiness of this promise. Our angst was born out to the full on September 11, 2001, when members of a radical Islamic sect slammed the terror of their own history headlong into the terror of Western history. The purveyors of these tandem histories — histories that had been watchfully interwoven into the fabric of modernity for some 500 years — henceforth believe that there will be only one victor and that this victor and no other will go on to consciously and voluntarily create the history of tomorrow.

But what hope is left for the history of tomorrow when its only promise is a long and intractable terror? With our angst utterly realised, modern man’s chief paradigm has fallen into precipitous jeopardy.

On the wall of a monastery in Toledo, Spain there is an inscription we can take heed, if not comfort, from. "Traveller, there are no ways, but we must go."

Is modernity our antiquity? A video reply.

2007-03-12T03:13:00.000+01:00

In tackling the question, "Is modernity our antiquity?" posed by the Documenta 12 team, I thought it might do, while we're still in the early stages of our discussion, to offer the podium to the Monty Python gang for a short reply with their immortal sketch Art Gallery.

Is modernity our antiquity? A prologue.

2007-03-08T06:51:00.000+01:00

In the first of a series, we invite writers to comment on the three leitmotifs posed by the Documenta 12 team. Here, Abigali von Bibra provides a short prologue to the question: Is modernity our antiquity? Abigail von Bibra teaches linguistics in Paris. She is writing a history of Prussian gender roles.

Every generation has its defining moments. The death of a leader. The collapse of commerce. The emergence of a nation from war. In due course, these events come to form a special kind of ground zero for the generations that follow. The chronicle of these and still lesser events falls together in what is at best a connect-the-dots manner, with one event crudely linked to the next. The picture that emerges is our skeletal image of history -- a working sketch held in general agreement upon which ‘definitive’ histories are then forged (yes, a double entendre). With these simple drawings in hand, the interpreters get down to business, over-painting their canvases in rich hues of red or yellow or white or black or whichever colour -- in whatever form and density -- the interpreter’s school of thought believes is relevant amid the cross-currents and undertows of the era. In this fashion, a portrait of history comes into being, with no two quite the same.

The Battle of Leipzig is one such defining moment, not just for Napoleon and Europe, but as well for three generations of Saxon cabinet-makers whose lives spanned the 19th century. The latter of the three -- Johann Dieter Wassmann – would come to pioneer early German modernism, but it is The Battle of Leipzig that most clearly informs his craft. These art works are boxed curiosities, falling somewhere between wunderkammern and Joseph Cornell, but what Johann’s boxes house are the anxieties of an era in which changes in science, medicine, industry and political philosophy have moved beyond the salons of noblemen and academics, engulfing the very real lives of the peasantry and guild classes.

Through this collection of boxes -- a collection which was once exhibited under the title ‘Bleeding Napoleon’ -- a portrait emerges in which we see a man not overly rapt with all that was taking place around him. Circumstance and good fortune made him witness to the worst and best the century had to offer, but the works themselves reflect a more focused concern. From the busy playfulness of his early pieces, to the spare elegance of his final efforts, these ‘worlds in a small room,’ as one critic has called them, are tinged with regret for what Johann perceived as the senseless separation of space (read here as Nature) from time, an apprehension that is no less endemic to our own age.

The Battle of Leipzig is an ominous moment on which to build a narrative, but it is a widely shared narrative, so much so that numerous writers and historians through the years have posited this catastrophic battle as the birth of modernity itself.

Book-ended by Napoleon’s disastrous Russian campaign the previous winter, and his defeat at Waterloo two years later, the battle is sometimes brushed past as a mere footnote on the road to Napoleon’s defeat. It was a bit more than that: this three-day engagement in 1813 was the greatest and bloodiest single battle of the 19th century. Never before in the history of mankind and never again until the First World War did half a million troops come face to face on the battlefield. The build-up began in the early weeks of October, the French and Allied armies assembling along a sixteen mile front east and southeast of the city. On the 16th of the month the first shots were fired; 72 hours later, Napoleon and his few remaining troops were fleeing for Paris. During this bat of an eye, 94,000 combatant casualties were incurred and 30,000 French troops were taken prisoner -- half on the battlefield, the remainder plucked from the hospitals of Leipzig. In addition, untold civilian casualties were inflicted by the vagaries of artillery used so close to an urban population.

If there had been any doubt previously, there was little doubt by 19 October 1813 that the modern era was fully upon us.

Q: Is modernity our antiquity? A: Like dah, Roger.

2007-03-07T02:16:00.000+01:00

Pictured: recent restoration work at the Bauhaus, Dessau. Photo: Sophie Vogt.

In the first of their three leitmotifs, Documenta 12's co-directors Roger Buergel and Ruth Noack pose the question: Is modernity our antiquity? In a weighty TASCHEN mag just out titled Modernity? they ask magazine editors from around the world to pursue this question as it relates to their own cultural and historical circumstance.

To quote from the editorial to the first issue of the magazine: Which Modernity and whose Antiquity?, "The history of modernity can be told in many different ways. The authors featured in this issue therefore write about specific, local modernities, trace their dislocated or interrupted developments, explore counter- or parallel models of modernity in which undeveloped or unintended transitions and unexpected connections between spaces and practices come to light."

As an institution devoted to furthering our understanding of one of great pioneers of the early modernist movement -- Johann Dieter Wassmann -- we will be pursuing this question ourselves in coming weeks here on the MuseumZeitraum blog, while looking at the relevance of such questions in the context of our current post-colonial era.

Readers comments are willkomen!

Documenta 12... at your newstand now!

2007-03-05T13:58:00.000+01:00

Last week I attended the launch at Vienna's Secession of Documenta 12's first magazine, Modernity?, not to be confused with Modern Maturity in case your news agent just looks at you clueless. If he doesn't already have it right up there next to Architectural Digest, you may need to explain to him that as the platform for this year's D12, artistic director Roger M. Buergel (pictured centre) and his partner Ruth Noack are using the medium of the magazine to prefigure three questions -- or leitmotifs as they describe them -- that the exhibition itself will address this summer in Kassel:

Is modernity our antiquity?
(Ist die Moderne unsere Antike?)
What is bare life?
(Was ist das bloße Leben?)
What is to be done?
(Was tun?)

If he's still not impressed, you might add that ninety-one editors from around the world were asked to respond to these questions, with this handsome tome published by TASCHEN the result. The latter two questions will be explored in the next two issues, Life! and Education, which he should be ordering for display in April and May, respectively.

MuseumZeitraum Leipzig will also be weighing into the debate in the coming months, so do stayed tuned for that cherished, if a little out-of-kilter perspective you've all come to know and love.

This week in Wolfsburg

2007-03-03T06:22:00.000+01:00

"For me, painting means the continuation of dreaming by other means," Neo Rauch tells Jan Thorn-Prikker of the Goethe-Institut in an online interview just out. While some might think the New Leipzig School's 15 minutes are up -- or oughtta be -- Thorn-Prikker does a nice job of bringing us up-to-date on the occasion of Neo's show at the Wolfsburg Art Museum (current until 11 March). Image: Neo Rauch, Regal 2000, courtesy Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg.

The road to Ouagadougou

2007-02-27T13:09:00.000+01:00

Earlier this week, we said a fond farewell to Australian film-maker and director of the Melbourne International Film Festival, Richard Moore, who's hot on the festival circuit this month. Last week: Berlin; this week: Burkina Faso. To explain, the Pan-African Film and Television Festival, Fespaco, a biennial event that's been running since 1969, is held in Ouagadougou, the Burkina Faso capital.

As regular readers will know, Richard is also producing The Foundation, a documentary on the life and work of Johann Dieter Wassmann. Finance is still pending and we're not sure he'll find it in west Africa, but stranger things have happened. Our Washington, D.C. benefactor, Wassmann Foundation director Jeff Wassmann, sent us an email Sunday night after watching the Academy Awards, advising Richard to head a little further west. To his surprise, an old classmate at Northwestern, David T. Friendly, was up for an Oscar for Best Picture as producer of Little Miss Sunshine.

Joseph Beuys on MTV. Who knew?

2007-02-24T05:12:00.000+01:00

While I'd like to think the surprising popularity of our MuseumZeitraum Channel on YouTube was a result of our in-house content, our web-tracking would suggest our favourites page has something to do with it as well. Here you’ll find archival footage of Man Ray, Jean-Michel Basquiat, William Eggleston and Hans Richter, among others, as we continue to add rare oddities such as the immortal Art Gallery sketch from Monty Python’s Flying Circus and this most-amusing music video clip from Joseph Beuys, Sonne Statt Reagan.

Jörg Herold at The Armory Show

2007-02-23T11:56:00.000+01:00

If you’re in New York this weekend and lucky enough to be heading to the Armory Show, make certain you stop by Leipzig’s Galerie EIGEN + ART, where you’ll find the enigmatic paintings of Jörg Herold. While Neo Rauch is most often identified with the New Leipzig School, insiders will know Jörg has long been Leipzig’s answer to Joseph Beuys (although, to be accurate, he now paints in Berlin and Mecklenburg).

His current show at EIGEN + ART, "The Caucasian: Looking at the findings of Herr Blumenbach," has left the city entranced since it opened a month ago. While I’d love to show you an example of his work, Galerie Direktor Herr Gerd Harry Lybke is a little jumpy about copyright, so I’ll just give you a link and let you see for yourself. Make certain you click through to his exhibition catalogue down the bottom of the page, a slow-loading pdf with a nice overview of his work through the years. Much of the text is in English, and well-worth a quick read.

iMuseum for an iNation

2007-02-21T07:55:00.000+01:00

MuseumZeitraum Leipzig presents the 2-minute museum: iMuseum for an iNation. For more videos exploring the works of Johann Dieter Wassmann, please visit our newly-opened MuseumZeitraum channel on Youtube.

Thank you!

2007-02-19T11:56:00.000+01:00

A special thanks to the editors of the American art magazine Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge. Their peer-reviewed on-line journal Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures has given us top billing, describing our YouTube channel as, "(A) fascinating collection of early German modernist film from the MuseumZeitraum Leipzig."

"Tuya's Marriage" takes home the Golden Bear

2007-02-19T02:03:00.000+01:00

I'm now back in Leipzig after a lively, but exhausting 10 days in Berlin. The word came down before I left last night that director Wang Quan'an has won this year's Golden Bear at the 57th annual Berlinale. His film "Tuya's Marriage" follows the troubles of a young shepherdess in fast-changing rural China.

The movie stars Yu Nan (pictured with Quan'an) as Tuya, a herdswoman on the steppe of Inner Mongolia trying to resist pressure to leave her pastures and move to the city as China's industry expands.

She and her handicapped husband, Bater, decide to get divorced after she falls ill, and Tuya seeks a respectable new husband who can look after Bater and her two children. An old classmate appears to fill that role, and he persuades Tuya and the children to move to town. (Yes, I just pinched that from the press release -- too tired to make up something original -- but it was a charming film.)

"A very beautiful dream has become reality for me here," director Wang told the press after receiving the Golden Bear statuette on Saturday. He said he believed the award "will bring good fortune to Chinese cinema."

And the winner is...

2007-02-16T12:29:00.000+01:00

As the Berlinale draws to a close this weekend, all bets are off as to who might take home the coveted Golden Bear. The last films in Competition have proven to be several of the strongest, with plenty of surprises among them.

Korean director Park Chan-wook's off-the-wall romantic comedy I'm a Cyborg, But that's OK (Sai bo gu ji man gwen chan a) quickly emerged mid-festival as a quirky possibility. The film tells the story of the love affair between two inmates in a psychiatric hospital, one of whom thinks she's a robot (or cyborg).

Another late starter is Irina Palm, starring Marianne Faithful, a tragic comedy from Belgian director Sam Garbarski, about a middle-class London grandmother, Maggie (of course), who is forced take a job as a 'hostess' in the city's sex industry to help pay her sick grandson's medical bills.

Popular with audiences has been American actor-turned-director Robert De Niro's (above - sorry, the best I could do) The Good Shepherd, which tells a John Le Carre-style story about the early days of the US Central Intelligence Agency. Equally popular has been Vienna-born director Stefan Ruzowitzky's The Counterfeiters (Die Faelscher), which recounts the true story of a plot hatched by the Nazis to ruin the Allies economies by forcing Jewish prisoners to fake US and British bank notes.

Among the last films to open has been Desert Dream (Hyazgar) by Chinese-Korean director Zhang Lu, which is set in the hostile wasteland on the border between China and Mongolia. Another film set in Mongolia that may be the dark horse is the wonderful Tuya's Marriage (Tu ya de hun shi) by Chinese director Wang Quan'an.

At the end of the bill is legendary Czech director Jiri Menzel's I served the King of England, about a young man's rise through Czech society.

Every jury has a mind of it's own, so I wouldn't even hazard a guess with so many willful contenders in the running.

Who's MoMA watching?

2007-02-16T04:10:00.000+01:00

While you’re watching Doug Aitken’s latest work Sleepwalker projected onto the side of the Museum of Modern Art, ever wonder who MoMA's watching? Apparently, it’s MuseumZeitraum Leipzig. New Media curator Klaus Biesenbach (formerly of KW/Berlin) has just given our new work, Vorwärts!, a coveted listing on the Museum of Modern Art’s YouTube channel. Have a look at the trailer to Sleepwalker, then scroll down and click on my name, which will take you to our MuseumZeitraum channel. Many thanks, Klaus, and sorry we couldn’t catch up here at the Berlinale.

To market, to market…

2007-02-15T10:55:00.000+01:00

As if 373 films isn’t a few too many to take in over 10 days at the Berlinale, pity the poor punters a few block away at Martin Gropius Bau, where this year’s European Film Market is being held concurrently. With the rights to 702 films on the block, the euros are flowing fast as distributors and financiers scoop up next year’s hits and flops.

I slipped into the 19th century museum, designed by and named for the uncle of Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius, with Melbourne International Film Festival director Richard Moore. Moore, as regular readers will know, is currently producing The Foundation, a film focusing on the art and life of Johann Dieter Wassmann and the efforts of MuseumZeitraum Leipzig to repatriate his works from Washington.

This is truly the business end of film; fat-cats lurk in every corner negotiating with affable film-makers hoping to pay off their debts and find a screen to show their dreams on. Better you than me, Richard.

For what it’s worth, one unlit-cigar-chomping English exec told us the big buzz is as follows: a culture clash romantic comedy by Julie Delpy, the latest project from Park Chan-wook, a new top secret documentary by Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me) that The Weinstein Company scooped up and David Mackenzie's Competition entry Hallam Foe.

Controversy rocks Berlinale (so what’s new?)

2007-02-15T02:03:00.000+01:00

Bille August’s film Goodbye Bafana, an early front-runner for the coveted Golden Bear (see below) has been rocked by controversy at this year's Berlinale, with accusations that James Gregory‘s autobiography on which the film was based were largely fabricated. Gregory’s story recounts a 20-year relationship between himself -- a former prison guard -- and his prisoner -- Nelson Mandela. The film has been warmly received by audiences here in Berlin.

Meanwhile in South Africa, Mandela's official biographer, Anthony Sampson, has accused Gregory of a gross distortion of the truth. According to Sampson, Gregory rarely spoke to Mandela in all those years and he’s claiming Gregory used information from a letter Mandela wrote to him to fabricate his friendship with the civil rights' leader.

With dark clouds rising, insiders say it’s doubtful the jury would risk their own reputation on August’s earnest effort.

Berlinale and the Golden Bear favourite

2007-02-13T01:30:00.000+01:00

The jury (pictured above) is still out on who might win the coveted Golden Bear at this year's Berlinale, but the early audience favourite would have to be two-time Oscar-winner Bille August's latest film, Goodbye Bafana. The international co-production tells the true story of James Gregory (Joseph Fiennes), the white prison guard whose life was forever altered when he met the prisoner Nelson Mandela, whom he would become responsible for guarding for well over twenty years. Dennis Haysbert plays the ANC activist and later Nobel Peace Prize winner. This past Sunday marked 17 years since Nelson Mandela was released from prison.

For a lengthy and appropriately gushing review, have a look at critic Erik Davis's piece, which opens, "Every once in a blue moon you stumble across a perfect movie -- one that gets it all right -- and flows slow (sic) smoothly from start to finish, you almost wish it could go on and on ... and on. This year, in Berlin, Goodbye Bafana is that film." (Does it sound like he's bidding for a spot on the poster? No matter. The film is that good.)

Magnum in Motion

2007-02-12T11:33:00.000+01:00

This year’s Berlinale has countless gems beyond the red carpet, from Generation, a section focusing on children’s film, to Culinary Cinema - Eat, Drink, See Movies. The star attraction for me, however has been Magnum in Motion, a selection of 33 films by and about the co-operative agency’s remarkable photojournalists. In attendance have been many of the greats, including René Burri (pictured), Raymond Depardon, Elliott Erwitt, Martine Franck, Jean Gaumy, Bruce Gilden, Philip Jones Griffiths, Thomas Hoepker, David Hurn, Susan Meiselas, Chris Steele-Perkins, Dennis Stock and Donovan Wylie.

And here’s the list of works on view over these two weeks. Read and weep:

Documentaries, short films and other formats:
A Peruvian Equation by Gilles Peress, USA, 1992
Beauty Knows No Pain by Elliott Erwitt, USA, 1971
Behind The Veil by Eve Arnold, UK, 1969
El Otro Lado/The Other Side by Alex Webb, USA, 1992
Getting Out by Eli Reed, USA, 1992
Jab Jab by Bruce Davidson, USA, 1992
La Boucane (The Smoking House) by Jean Gaumy, France, 1984
Le Retour (The Return) by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Lieutnant Richard Banks, USA, 1945
L’Espagne Vivra (Spain Will Live) by Henri Cartier-Bresson, France, 1938
Letting Go by Paul Fusco, USA, 1992
On The Rowanlea Trawler by Jean Gaumy, France, 1992
Pictures From A Revolution by Susan Meiselas, Alfred Guzetti and Richard Rogers, USA, 1991
Sous-Marin (Submarine) by Jean Gaumy, France, 2006
The Russian Prison by Gueorgui Pinkhassov, USA, 1992
The Train by Donovan Wylie, UK, 2001
Think Of England by Martin Parr, UK, 1999
Tod Im Maisfeld (Death In A Cornfield) by Thomas Hoepker, Germany, 1998
Two Faces Of China by René Burri, USA, 1968
Waiting For Madonna by Peter Marlow, USA, 1992
What Has Happened To The American Indians? by Martine Franck, France, 1970
Where Have You Been, Jimmy Dean? by Dennis Stock, France/USA, 1991

Lagerfeld Confidential premiers at Berlinale

2007-02-11T06:13:00.000+01:00

Last night I took in Rodolphe Marconi's Lagerfeld Confidential, which was a bit like sitting through 88 minutes of E! Like so many of the Berlinale events, however, the venue itself was worth the price of admission. The fabulous Kino International remains a show-piece of 'GDR modernism'; built in the early 1960s, it retains the great optimism and idealism of an era when East Berlin was the unofficial capitol of the Eastern Bloc. Strolling down Karl-Marx-Allee to the Kino today one can easily picture the throngs from across communist Europe coming to see what a bright future the collective state held for their own towns and villages.

Mindful of this past, it was a little hard to take seriously the story in front of me and the gravity with which it was told -- that of a Hamburg-born fashion designer growing up in a wealthy family in Lübeck, his dash to Paris at a young age to construct himself as a great French couturist, and his reluctance to ever look back long enough to come to terms with his own distinct 'Germanness'. As a portrait of a very private man this riches-to-ragtrade story is useful, but let's hope the advertorial documentary doesn't become the new black.

Berlinale - Tales from the front

2007-02-09T09:54:00.000+01:00

Pictured: Johann Dieter Wassmann, Leipzig, 1894. Photograph by Sigismund Jacobi.

This morning I caught up with Melbourne International Film Festival director Richard Moore at KW's Café Bravo on Augustraße, Mitte. With 300 films to secure for his own festival, he's a busy man. If that wasn't enough, he continues to work as a documentary film-maker. One of his current projects is The Foundation (click through to view the trailer on YouTube), the tale of Johann Dieter Wassmann's remarkable life and work. While funding remains an issue (when isn't it), I was pleased to learn he's pushing ahead, with development support from Film Victoria in his native Australia. Many thanks to all those at Film Victoria and our many readers and supporters who continue to believe Johann Dieter Wassmann's contribution to early German modernism is a story the world should hear.

I'm heading in shortly to see Petr Nikolaev's film It Gonna Get Worse. Hope that's not an omen.

La Vie En Rose

2007-02-08T23:10:00.000+01:00

The city was blanketed in snow today as the 57th Berlin International Film Festival got underway. Opening the festival was Olivier Dahan's La Vie En Rose, the story of the famed French chanteuse Edith Piaf, starring Marion Cotillard (above, right). Multiple screenings were held during the day to a generally positive response, although at 140 minutes it appeared to be beyond the attention span of several American critics. The red carpet has now been stored away to dry out and we're off to a Turkish restaurant south of the city, appropriately it's on Wassmannstraße.

Landscape and Memory

2007-02-08T14:41:00.000+01:00

As a native Berliner who doesn't always make it back for the Berlin Film Festival, I tend to forget there's often something bittersweet about seeing this city come alive -- as it has in recent days -- in the lead-up to the Berlinale, opening in a few hours time. Berlin is a city that demands of its visitors a memory of its past and a knowledge of the layers that lie beneath.

As the starlets exit their limousines on Marlene-Dietrich-Platz tonight to strut the red carpet, one wonders how many will know or care that the Wall once stood within sight; just beyond echoes still haunt the 'death strip' where so many of our fellow Berliners died attempting to escape to the West. And how many tonight in their designer gowns will consider that to the north of Potsdamer Platz just a few hundred meters lies the The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.

Once the films begin, however, the joy and pride of hosting this festival rapidly consumes our emotions. Arguably, no other artistic medium so successfully expresses this layering of history, as well as the urgency and essentialness of collective memory. With 373 films on the roster, festival director Dieter Kosslick awakens us with the world's memory for two weeks, recorded by many of the best practitioners from around the globe working today. For that we are proud and we can only say, willkommen.

MuseumZeitraum Leipzig

Gerhard Richter critical of 2011 German Pavilion

Bice Curiger Appointed Director of the 54th International Art Exhibition for 2011

ArtReview's 2009 Power 100

Goodbye Neo. Goodbye Leipzig.

Daniel Birnbaum on "Making Worlds/Fare Mondi"

Fare Mondi // Making Worlds // Bantin Duniyan // 制造世界 // Weltenmachen // Construire des Mondes // Fazer Mundos…

Easter in Leipzig

Fare Mondi // Making Worlds // Bantin Duniyan // 制造世界 // Weltenmachen // Construire des Mondes // Fazer Mundos…

Artists announced for Venice Biennale

Fare Mondi // Making Worlds // Bantin Duniyan // 制造世界 // Weltenmachen // Construire des Mondes // Fazer Mundos…

Palestine c/o Venice

Making Worlds, Building Bridges at the Venice Biennale

Whitney Announces Curators for 2010 Biennial

Newest Reviews

Newest Entries

Abu Dhabi to Stage Independent Exhibition at Venice Biennale

Frohe Weihnachten!

Making worlds of our own

Christov-Bakargiev appointed director of Documenta 13

No Expense Spared As Arab Nations Party Their Way to the Venice Biennale

Manhatta (1921)

Paris-Vienna-Düsseldorf (1892-1897)

I can see Saturn from my house.

Making Worlds: Speculations on the 53rd International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia 2009

Making Worlds // Fare Mondi // Bantin Duniyan // 制造世界 // Weltenmachen // Construire des Mondes // Fazer Mundos

La Biennale di Venezia

Next year's Venice Biennale to break with tradition

On the Origin and situation of the Germans

In memorium

The Dresden Boxes (1881-85)

The birth of the modern

At the foot of the Flatiron, 1903.

50 moons of Saturn and the force of Imagination

George Orwell: blogger.

AUGUST 25, 1900. NIETZSCHE IS DEAD.

50 Moons of Saturn: Is there life on Enceladus, Major Tom?

Venice called on to stage a "Biennale for Islamic Dissent"

Is modernity our antiquity? (revisited).

Zeitraum & the progressive present perfect.

Somebody must have been telling lies about Josef K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.

Wassmann Foundation denies involvement in U.S. Senate subcommittee findings

Let mirth prevail.

50 moons of Saturn & a song of despair.

Liberté, égalité, fraternité, ou la mort.

L’Hôtel des Spheres

50 moons of Saturn & the orbit of melancholia

50 Moons of Saturn as observed this night by the distinguished Robert Burton and drawn from The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621

50 moons of Saturn & the Third Law of Planetary Motion

50 moons of Saturn. Four moons of Galileo. Eppure si muove.

50 moons of Saturn... and we only got one

50 Moons of Saturn

Director's recovery proceeding well

Museum opening stymied by U.S. funding crisis

Roxanna Brown, art historian, 1946 - 2008.

A final resting place

One last look

Museum reaches landmark repatriation accord

MuseumZeitraum Leipzig

Is modernity our antiquity?

Is modernity our antiquity? What is bare life?

Documenta 12 takes a beating.

The Zeitraum gardens

Is modernity our antiquity?

First Look: Hazoume Romuald @ Documenta 12

The morning after the night before.

Is modernity our antiquity? The answer is nigh.

1 down, 2 to go.

Zeitraum Rising

When men were men and Beuys was Beuys. Documenta 12 enjoys the shade of D7.

"Controversy is normal with us"

Documenta 12: better pack your Hawaiian Tropic

Was tun? A way forward.

Documenta 12 wonders, is modernity our antiquity? Yes, and we have Andy and GoogleNation to thank.

Documenta 12 rises before the Orangerie

Documenta 12 asks, “Is modernity our antiquity?” MZL wonders, maybe it’s rocket science after all.

An Easter greetings.

Was Tun? A video reply from Yusuf Islam.

Documenta 12 asks, "Is modernity our antiquity?" MZL wonders, or is it all just so much 'History'?

Documenta 12 asks, "Is modernity our antiquity?" MZL wonders, or is it our Hotel California?