Monthly Archive: June 2002

Manifesta 4

Frankensteiner Hof, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Portikus, Städelsches Kulturinstitut Frankfurt – May 25 until August 25, 2002

Expectations for this year’s ‘Manifesta 4’ in Frankfurt were high. The previous instalments of this nomadic ‘European Biennial of Contemporary Art’ outside the traditional European art centres, in Rotterdam, Luxembourg and Ljubliana had raised the stakes. Manifesta had become a brand that presented daring and exciting new work by young artists from all over Europe, without dependency and subordination to the art markets – close to contemporary theoretical discourse and on the pulse of the time.

The three curators, Iara Boubnova (Sofia), Nuria Enguita Mayo … Read more

Hey You, Hey Europe

Frankensteiner Hof, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Portikus, Städelsches Kulturinstitut Frankfurt – May 25 until August 25, 2002

Manifesta 4. Frankfurt/Main (various locations).

Since its foundation in 1996 Manifesta has been loosely dedicated to defining a “new Europe,” to responding to the new artistic developments in the whole European territory and offering a general idea of both the overall situation and the most outstanding issues and questions of European art, culture, and society.

Nevertheless, only the last installment in Ljubljana (2000), after Rotterdam (1996) and Luxembourg (1998), provided an opportunity for the show to inhabit a city that might actually exemplify such a … Read more

Metonymical Mov(i)es

Lev Manovich: The Language of New Media. MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts / London, England 2001. $34.95, 7×9, 354 pages, ISBN 0-262-13374-1

Upon reading Lautréamonts Chants de Maldoror (1869) surrealist king pin André Breton took over the author’s famous words “beautiful as the unexpected meeting, on a dissection table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella”, thus coining the Surrealist aesthetic of jarring juxtapositions.

Almost as beautiful as Breton’s observation was another unexpected meeting taking place some years later, namely, the use of punched 35mm movie film in order to control computer programs in the world’s first working digital computer … Read more