Monthly Archive: April 1999

‘Cryptogram’ and ‘Demedusator’: Zoltán Szegedy-Maszák

The objective of this essay is to introduce the leading Hungarian media artist, Zoltán Szegedy-Maszák, through his latest two web projects dealing with cryptography (Cryptogram) and virtual reality (Demedusator). Zoltán Szegedy-Maszák is an associate professor at the Intermedia Department at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest where he teaches interactive computer art. He is also a researcher for the Center for Culture and Communication.

In Hungary, there are more and more visual artists dealing with the new media, even though there are not many institutions where they could either educate themselves or present their media … Read more

Ilya Kabakov: Drawings

Sprengel-Museum, Kurt-Schwitters-Platz, Hannover, Germany. 14 March – 16 May 1999. Catalogue DM 25,–.

This is not an ordinary Kabakov exhibition. Since his emigration from Russia in 1988, Ilya Kabakov has been known mainly for his “total” installations, in which he creates little parallel universes that possess their own artistic logic, or rather, stage the context in which the objects on display make sense. In this and other contexts, Kabakov has produced a large number of drawings. The Hannover exhibition, however, is dedicated not to drawings that would be part of some particular context, but to the “autonomous” drawings that Kabakov … Read more

Beata Wehr (Online Gallery)

GALLERY | BIO | ARTIST’S STATEMENT | SOLO EXHIBITIONS | GROUP EXHIBITIONS | PUBLIC COLLECTIONS

Born in Warsaw, Poland
Lives and works in Tucson, Arizona.
5155 N. Avenida Primera
Tucson, AZ 85704 – 5801
(520) 408 2275
http://www.artmajeur.com/beatawehr/

 

Artist’s Statement

In my mixed media books I focus on issues related to my experience as a Pole living in the U.S. I came here 13 years ago with no intention to stay, but I am still here. Since my connection with Poland is very strong, I feel I am in between the two cultures. In my work, I address the … Read more

This is Not a Book: Komar and Melamid’s ‘Painting by Numbers: Komar and Melamid’s Scientific Guide to Art’

Komar, Vitaly. Painting by Numbers: Komar and Melamid’s Scientific Guide to Art. New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1997

There should be a warning on the cover of Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid’s Painting by Numbers: The Scientific Guide to Art: “This is not a book.” From the opening page, offering “America’s Most Wanted” painting (“dishwasher-size,” as preferred by 67% of the representative sample), the reader becomes a participant in a radical happening, 1990s-style, with polls, endowments, global travel, and practical jokes. Komar and Melamid, two émigré artists who launched their American career some twenty years ago with the project … Read more

The Thing from Inner Space

Jacques Lacan defines art itself with regard to the Thing: in his Seminar on the Ethics of Psychoanalysis, he claims that art as such is always organized around the central Void of the impossible-real Thing – a statement which, perhaps, should be read as a variation on Rilke’s old thesis that “Beauty is the last veil that covers the Horrible”. (See Chapter XVIII of Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, London: Routledge 1992.) Lacan gives some hints about how this surrounding of the Void functions in the visual arts and in architecture; what we shall do … Read more