dOCUMENTA(13): constructively intelligent chaos! (part 2)

First day at dOCUMENTA(13) has been spent in visits to exhibition spaces in Fridericianum and Karlsaue. Second day has started off by visit to documenta-Halle. Built in 1992 by Jan Hoet and with its large walls and spacious halls, it has been a known challenge to most exhibition curators ever since. This year the critics were very positive about the visual fit of artworks in the exhibition space.

For example, we all loved four paintings of Julie Mehretu, an Ethiopian-born artist, famous for her large-scale architectural abstract paintings, where she and her team layer the drawings on several transparent media and combine them together to create a metaphoric story.

Julie Mehretu, “Mogamma (Part 1)”, 2012

An interesting story was waiting for us in another room: Yan Lei had painted intuitively 360 paintings for 360 days of Chinese calendar and all of these mass-media images were found in internet. Some of them were hanging on walls and from ceiling and some of them were racked in storage. During the 100 days of dOCUMENTA, the paintings are serially brought to a nearby car plant and painted over by a monochrome paint and then brought back to the exhibition space. In this way, Yan Lei creates a feeling of ‘finiteness’ in time, but also preserving them by sealing the paintings under the car paint itself.

Yan Lei, “Limited Art Project”, 2011-2012

Nalini Malani used an irregularly shaped storage room to show her video and light installation that reflects on human nature, evil in people and how and why it develops.

Nalini Malani, “Search of Vanished Blood”, 2012

We continued to Neue Gallerie, where we had chance to see an interesting 3D collage by Geoffrey Farmer, showing LIFE magazine cut-outs from 1935-1985. It represents a visual history reflecting American self-identity in past era. Its title is an homage to Walt Whitman famous poem.

Geoffrey Farmer, “Leaves of Grass”, 2012

One can truly appreciate the content and all energy and thoughts of dOCUMENTA only by paying a visit. I have ended mine by Kulturbahnhof and I am aware that many were left in the city of Kassel that I still need to see. Kulturbahnhof, a deserted building of a railway station, impressed me by the open and inviting space, truly amazing in its rawness – perfect place to exhibit contemporary art! William Kentridge was my last stop there: his 5-channel projection and a breathing machine was telling you a story of time, in a high-pitched voice, video and accompanying music. A show that could go on and on and that you could not stop watching – just like dOCUMENTA.

William Kentridge, “The Refusal of Time”, 2012

 

dOCUMENTA(13) will end 16.09.2012.

Move

You think that you’ve seen them all, but every time your focus gets caught by another piece. I guess that it depends on the mood of the day and your own spirit.

This time I was fascinated mostly by sculptures and female bodies. Here are some highlights of today.

Camille Claudel (1864 - 1493): La Valse (1891/1905)

 

Auguste Rodin (1840 - 1917): Crouching Woman (around 1880/82)

 

Francois Rupert Carabin (1872 - 1932): The Dancer Loie Fuller (1896/97)

 

Paul Gaugin (1848 - 1903): The Birth - Te Tamari No Atua (1896)

 

Gabriel von Max (1840 - 1915): The Ecstatic Virgin Anna Katharina Emmerich (1885)

The works are part standard exhibition of Neue Pinakothek in Munich.
© Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen

 

Camille Claudel (1864 – 1493): La Valse (1891/1905)
Auguste Rodin (1840 – 1917): Crouching Woman (around 1880/82)
Francois Rupert Carabin (1872 – 1932): The Dancer Loie Fuller (1896/97)
Paul Gaugin (1848 – 1903): The Birth – Te Tamari No Atua (1896)
Gabriel von Max (1840 – 1915): The Ecstatic Virgin Anna Katharina Emmerich (1885)

Where women are dying I am wide awake

After a rather tiring week and an explosive friday evening, I was longing for a saturday at home. The week was somehow eventful, but I overdid it. I kept thinking: “Well, I should go there and meet those nice people”, but sometimes you need also some time off to recharge your batteries. Therefore, when I’ve got my reminder on Saturday for an event organized by Kunstclub13, I was not really overjoyed. However, I went because I knew somehow that it cannot go bad.

The event involved a guided tour in streets of Munich downtown, which involved seeing art in the open air. We have started with the statues portraying famous characters in Bavarian history, such as Ludwig I, and later buildings and historical monuments that reflect events from WW2. ‘Interesting’, I thought, but my mood was not on that level to keep up next 2 hours on that level. However, then the tour got another turn and we started seeing and hearing more about some art pieces that I was passing by (or over) almost every day, not even recognizing them as such. An example of that is the upscale shopping mall Fünf Höfe, hiding (or displaying) the pieces from Olafur Eliasson, Remy Zaugg, Thomas Ruff and Tita Giese. (Please remind me some time later, if I forget, to write a post on Olafur Eliasson, as he really fascinates me with his works.) Needless to say that the building itself is very interesting as it has been architected by Herzog and de Meuron.

Source: fuenfhoefe.de

Highlight of the tour, though, was for me the reference on Jenny Holzer. This American conceptual artists focuses on large-scale public displays, bearing philosophical or advertisement messages. Her illuminated electronic quotes I had chance already to see in the Pinakotheke der Moderne and the headquarter of Munich Re, but it was only now that I got to know more about that. Here is one of her installations, which used to be also displayed in Whitney Museum of American Art.

Source: nytimes.com

Not only that, but I have also learned that the Literaturhaus in Munich is also strongly associated with Jenny Holzer. Through several works she has succeeded to honour and make a monument to the author Oskar Maria Graf (1894 – 1967). You can see the quotes from Graf on a digital installation in the entrance to the restaurant as well as the granite tables, which are placed outside the entrance, but also at the leans of the leather banks. What I find particularly humorous but elegant are the plates and paper sets, which are also imprinted with Oskar Maria Graf’s sentences, such as: “Mehr Erotik, bitte!” (cup) or “Es muß doch jetzt schon bald wahr sein, dass ich berühmt bin” / “It has to be soon true that I am famous” (cake plate). They were made from Villeroy & Boch specially for Literaturhaus.

Source: museen-in-muenchen.de

Jenny Holzer speaks often through her works against violence and oppression and may have a feminist note. I have also learnt that Jenny Holzer made a cover and designed fifteen pages for a special edition of Süddeutsche Magazin in 1993. She did a reference to violence committed against Bosnian women with words “Da wo Frauen sterben bin ich hellwach” / “Where women are dying I am wide awake”, printed on a off-white paper with a mixture of ink and blood, which shocked the public. Other message was: “Sie fiel auf den Boden meines Zimmers.  Sie wollte beim Sterben sauber sein aber sie war es nicht (…)” / “She felt on the floor of my room. She wanted to be clean while dying but she was not (…)”. Off course that this topic and reflection moved me and I kept thinking about it during afternoon and evening. Then I decided to honor this artist through my little contribution and this post. My intention was not to close this in a dark mode, but this is also art and this is also history and this is also a reality in other parts of the world. (And this is also something that I (sub) conciously avoid to think about.)

Source: kunstmuseum.backslash.ch

Perfect present for book lovers…

… but now in a slightly different format. I have discovered it in an article in ’train magazine’ from Deutsche Bahn and thought instantly to get it as a birthday present.

“All The World’s A Page” is a Berlin-based company, which prints world-famous books on a single poster. Now think of both parts of Goethe’s ‘Faust’ on a single 70 x 100 cm piece of paper (font size is approx. 2.55 pt). The posters are normally typed in black, with some numbers or details in another colour.

Here is how it looks like with an example of Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’:

… or Marx’s ‘Das Kapital’, which I have got for a person that just started a job in finance consulting (and during the financial crisis it seemed that we are in fact going back to postulates of Marx):

Other works are: ‘Der Abentheurliche Simplicissimus’ of H.J.C. von Grimmelshausen, Georg Büchner’s ‘Sämtliche Werke’, Herman Melville’ ‘Moby Dick’, ‘The King James Bible’ and Homer’s ‘Iliad’. As you can see, some works are printed in English and some in German, but the actual reading and language here are less in focus, I guess These written capital works get a whole new dimension here, as it is not their content and theories what count, but optics. For example, I find ’Origin of the Species’ quite interesting; it is very homogeneous with continuously spaced text but then the schematic diagram beautifully stands out. (The theory itself we may not want to discuss though…)

And what to do with it? I have just framed mine, put on the wall and it is an instant eye-catcher. Simple black frame or frameless covering would do, but hey – someone is maybe here more creative than me.

(This is not a commercial for the company: I just found the idea very innovative and I hope that I could inspire you to DIY perhaps!)

All photos taken from http://www.all-the-worlds-a-page.com/collections/all-products