Archive Page 2
Home is where the art is…
Graffitti on the walls of 475 Kent Ave. Williamsburg, sprayed on during evacuation. Photo via BruceLabounty802 on flickr (see here for the entire set.)
It’s called gentrification. You take a bad neighborhood with low property values and good location. You set up a squat with a public kitchen run by anarchists. You rent out the surrounding factories, warehouses, and tenements as housing and production space for artists and rock bands. Soon, the area becomes a bourgeois bohemian hotspot with nice authentic cafes full of art students and music groupies. The startup precariat moves in with its MacPros, and all the cafes suddenly have WiFi. One or two cafes burn down. Bookshops go broke, and finally, the art spaces are replaced by boutiques, and everyone’s having babies.
Filed under: Reports | Leave a Comment
Tags: New York, urbanism
Radek Retrospective (Part II)
Radek Community. Against Everyone. Action, 1999. Photo via Kovolev.com at flickr
A week ago, the Radek Community announced its dissolution. Little has changed in Moscow since then. Most people just smiled and said something like “Didn’t those guys break up a while ago already?” Basically, they saw the announcement as another non-event in a normalized administrative media routine. Why make a fetish of it?
Maybe it’s true: little has changed in Moscow since last week. But Moscow has changed immensely since 1997. Forced consensus and atomization have won out over political agonism and collective confusion. The period of primitive accumulation is over; everything seems legitimate and governable by market exchanges and administrative routines. People are forgetting the codes of the 1990s. The very model of politics has changed, as has its aesthetic reflection. Right?
But what happened? Where did it all go?
Filed under: Features | Leave a Comment
Tags: actionism, Osmolovsky, performance, Radek
Radek Retrospective (Part I)
Photo via http://sil-kin.livejournal.com/93975.html
Since last night, it is official. The Radek Community no longer exists. The Radeks were once the “children of Moscow Actionism”: in the late 1990s, they made (or helped to make) a number of key performances in public space. They participated in the building of a barricade in the center of Moscow in 1998, and took part in a brief occupation of the Lenin-Mausoleum in 1999. In the early 2000s, they developed a set of very interesting community-art practices, whose archive was reassembled and shown at many exhibitions, including Manifesta 4 and the Prague Biennial. They seemed to epitomize what was quickly becoming known as activist community art. But then, the Radeks grew up. And now, the brand is being discontinued, and probably for good. There will be no reunions, the Radek Community promises, offering up a new documentary film as evidence.
Filed under: Features | Leave a Comment
Tags: actionism, performance, Radek
Technology fetishism from afar
I don’t really like technology fetishism. It makes me a little nauseous when the flat aesthetic of screen design steps out into an art space, proving once again that the fetishization of use value creates nothing but useless attractions. Somehow for me art is more about all kinds of things that the internet can’t do. Importing experimental, essentially useless interfaces into exhibition-space seems like a strange gesture. If I want to surf, I’ll surf at home.
To me, exhibitions with expensive interactive computer art look like adult themeparks, ideal for the post-industrial landscape. Take, for example, the ZKM (Center for Culture and Media) at Karlsruhe, Europe’s largest media and net.art school, which has a very generous exhibition space in former munitions factory. Currently, they are showing “YOU_ser: The Century of the Consumer,” which features works (among others) by Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel (YOUbiläums Browser), Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss (Netzspannung.org), PIPS:lab (Luma2solator), Catalina Ossa and Enrique Rivera (MULTINODE_METAGAME), and Armin Linke (Phenotypes / Limited Forms). The exhibition runs until the 6th January 2009. Vernissage.tv has made an extensive series of videos on the show, one of which you can find here.
After watching the video, you might want to ask yourself: why is it so interesting to watch people walking around an art space silently surfing? It’s not art yet, though, I would say. In fact, it only gets interesting when you watch the “YOU_sers” and notice their silence. They are all over 30, and they all look just bored. Because they are surfing, just like you…
Filed under: News | Leave a Comment
Tags: ZKM
I spent the time after New Years reading the German Ideology, texts on institutional critique.
But I was also answering some questions the artist Szasza y Pal from Budapest set to Dima Vilensky and me after we held a two day seminar at Transit in November.
The text got much too long, so I’m posting the full version in case it’s never published in full elsewhere.
Continue reading ‘Dialogue about Chto delat, politics, and aesthetics’
Filed under: Conversations | Leave a Comment
Tags: Chto delat
Industry Blues
On December 4th, as Osmolovsky was receiving the Kandinsky Prize, artist Nikolai Oleinikov (who is part of the group Chto delat, as am I) opened a small one-room solo exhibition of recent work at “Tipografia,” a studio semi-squat in the center of Moscow. After slipping around on half-melted ice in a backyard for over an hour, I visited the show.
The reason I had trouble finding the place is that I’ve never been to “Tipografia” before. You need special bourgeois bohemian knowledge to find it. As the name tells you, it’s on the premises of a former printing press, complete with guards and old payphones, now sublet to artists by the owner, who apparently wants to sell, but has not been able to do so yet.
The surrounding area of Kitai Gorod has already undergone massive gentrification over the last five years, its most prominent landmarks privatized and made inaccessible, like the old mansion and adjacent park where I fell in love with my wife across the street. “Tipografia,” however, is beneath the horizon of visibility, protected by its extensive backyard, lodged into uneven, resistant terrain….If there is any “off-scene” in Moscow at the moment, this is one of the places you can find it. Oleinikov’s little show of canvases and graphic pieces puts it on the map. Continue reading ‘Industry Blues’
Filed under: Reviews | Leave a Comment
Osmolovsky wins Kandinsky Award
Unexpected news: Anatoly Osmolovsky has won the Kandinsky Award, which is a little surprising given the overall tenor of the show. It is maybe the first time that big media in the West are writing about him. For an example, Bloomberg’s John Varoli.
Filed under: News | Leave a Comment
After the elections
Moscow poet and activist Kirill Medvedev describes his experience of last weeks elections. Translation: David Riff…
Filed under: Politics | Leave a Comment
Special issue of Chto delat
Chto delat has published a new issue called “Becoming a Mother.” Have a look here!
Filed under: News | Leave a Comment
Last night, the NCCA hosted an evening devoted to documenta 12. Surprisingly, the house was packed. I say surprisingly for two reasons.
First, because the NCCA is somewhat autistic and you never know who the “public” will be. You might find a fan club of the nonconformist classics, honorable defenders of late modernism with no interest in contemporary art. Or you could get into an involved discussion with internationally successful activist artists who find that they have almost no one to talk to in Moscow.
But last night, there were lots of new faces, and almost everyone stayed until the end…
Continue reading ‘discussion of documenta 12 at NCCA, Moscow’
Filed under: Reports | Leave a Comment
Tags: documenta, NCCA, panel discussions
