ARTMargins

Contemporary art across the evolving global peripheries

Author: ARTMargins

ARTMargins Online: New Media & Film

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 by Andreas Fertig (Berlin/Greifswald) ·

Lightening up the World: Documentary Mixes Soviet Propaganda, Reality Soap and Music TV.

Coal Dust (Ugol’naya Pyl’). Directed by Maria Miro (aka Maria Miroshnichenko). VGIK, Ostrov Studio, 2006. Video: 20 min, 35mm.



The twenty-minute documentary Coal Dust (Ugol’naya Pyl’) was shot by a young VGIK team in the Chelyabinsk area (located in the east of Ural Mountains) in 2005. After the shooting was completed in 2006, the director Maria Miro (Miroshnichenko) was honored at the “Window to Europe” festival in Vyborg in 2007 for the best debut. In the same year her film also won the Moscow student film festival “St. Anna” (“Svyataya Anna”) in the non fiction film … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Book Reviews

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 by Philipp Kaiser (Los Angeles) ·

The Manifesta Decade (Book Review)

Barbara Vanderlinden and Elena Filipovic, (eds.): The Manifesta Decade: Debates on Contemporary Art Exhibitions and Biennials in Post-Wall Europe. MIT Press, 2006. 340 pp.

In every corner of the world, on a yearly, monthly, or by now almost weekly basis, new biennials are shooting up out of the ground like mushrooms. While the radius of their impact was at first limited to Europe and North America, the magnitude of global successor events should not be underestimated. In fact, it is precisely these events that simultaneously generate a local and international discursive climate. In the course of time it has … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Articles

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 by Łukasz Ronduda (Warsaw) ·

Flexibility Makes Our Existence Possible: The Contextual Art of Jan Świdziński

“Contextual Art as a pure sign, cleansed of stereotypes; a sign which is filled by the present reality.

“For the act of drinking a glass of water to become art, it has to be performed in the right place, at the right time, and in the right company.”
(Jan ?widzi?ski)

Jan ?widzi?ski – an artist initially associated with conceptualism – wrote down his theses about contextual art in 1974. At that time, Polish artists were increasingly visiting the West, participating in international exhibitions, projects, or symposiums. Some, like Roman Opa?ka, became spectacularly successful, firing up their compatriots’ imagination. Many renowned … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

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 by Yulia Tikhonova (New York) ·

Dmitry Gutov’s Used at Guelman Galery, Moscow

Guelman Gallery, Moscow, April 3 – 23, 2008.

Dmitry Gutov, a leading Russian artist and a long time member of the Moscow intelligentsia, did not have to go far when he went in search of objects to weld together sculptures exhibited at the Guelman Gallery this past April. All he needed was found dumped in his parents’ garage. While the old bicycles, vacuum cleaners, and radios might look like junk to us, to Gutov they are precious relics of a quickly receding time in Russia’s turbulent history. “These objects are dear to me”, says the artist. Welded onto grids of … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Interviews

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 by Linda Park (New York) ·

Future without Utopia: Curator Olga Kopenkina Discusses the Properly Past Exhibition

A conversation between critic Linda J. Park and curator Olga Kopenkina about the Properly Past exhibition at the BRIC Rotunda Gallery in New York City (March 18 – May 3rd, 2008).

The recent exhibition Properly Past, curated by Olga Kopenkina, brought together the work of five Brooklyn-based artists to the BRIC Rotunda Gallery in New York City. Kopenkina frames these artists’ works around ideas concerning the failure of modernity and highlights the “obsolete phenomena and forms that contain signs of a modernist utopian promise for a future” (from the curatorial statement). Altogether, the works in the exhibition offer observations and … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

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 by Yulia Tikhonova (New York) ·

Ivan Chuikov’s Theory of Reflection

Stella Art Foundation, Moscow, February 28- March 30th 2008

In the exhibition Theory of Reflection 1 (1978-92) and Analytical Tree (1994) on view during this spring at the Stella Gallery, the installations by Ivan Chuikov confront the viewer with an intriguing experience of visual play. Five identical installations of still-lifes are placed in front of free-standing round-headed frames that hold either a glass mirror or cardboard, or are left empty. The traditional nature morte doubles when reflected in a mirror, takes on Cubist forms when painted on cardboard , or vanishes completely when placed by the artist beyond the wooden … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

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 by Walter Seidl (Vienna) ·

Gülsen Bal and “Open Space” at the Zentrum für Kunstprojekte, Vienna

Open Space, Zentrum für Kunstprojekte, Lassingleithnerplatz 2 Schwedenplatz, A – 1020 Vienna, Austria.

With the inauguration of “Open Space” by Gülsen Bal at the beginning of 2008, Vienna’s art scene saw an important enrichment of exhibition space after a number of crisis-ridden institutional changes in 2007. The merger of Generali and Bawag Foundation into one exhibition space saw the end of a decade-long exhibition program concerned with a stringent focus on conceptual practices. The latter abruptly came to a halt due to the decisions made by the groups’ CEOs, which demonstrated how global capital dominates artistic representation and its social … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Articles

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 by Adrian Spirescu (Bucharest) ·

How to Convert a Palace into a Museum of Contemporary Art

The first discussions about the museum began in 2002. I was confronted with a dilemma: either to conceive a regular exhibition space, or a national art museum. I wondered what kind of theoretical attitude one should take when approaching such a project. The Romanian Contemporary Art Museum would have included rooms for music, dance, and photography in a building that used to be the emblem of the period prior to the 90s, a symbol of the communist system.

I had to choose between either furnishing, renovating, and restoring the building S4, a part belonging to the Palace of Parliament; or … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Interviews

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 by Allan Siegel (New York/Budapest) ·

Interview With Eszter Lázár

Eszter Lázár studied art history and cultural anthropology at ELTE (Eötvös Lóránd University, Budapest) and has been working as a curator at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts, where she is a leading member of the exhibition committee. She also works at the Karton Gallery in Budapest. Her writings have been featured in: Balkon, exindex, Muérto, Magyar Lettre Internationale, and various exhibition catalogues. ELTE has two major exhibition spaces, and since her arrival as curator, the exhibition profile of these spaces has changed considerably; rather than staying on the margins of curating practices, Eszter Lázár has injected a new vitality, … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

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 by Ileana Pintilie (Timişoara) ·

The States of Mind of Romanian Visual Arts: The Personal Exhibition of Lia & Dan Perjovschi

Nasher Museum, Duke University, August 2007 – January 2008.

The title of the first retrospective exhibition of Lia and Dan Perjovschi at Duke University’s Nasher Museum suggests the effervescence of the Romanian “beginnings” in the 90s.(The States of Mind was the first big collective exhibition organized without communist censorship by the Art Museum of Timisoara, in 1991, following the initiative and concept of a group of young artists, among whom we can mention Sorin Vreme; Ileana Pintilie, museum curator, was in charge of the exhibition logistics.)  Considered two of the most significant artists of experimental art in Eastern … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Articles

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 by Augustin Ioan (Bucharest) ·

Bucharest’s National Museum of Contemporary Art in the Big House

The House of the Republic, now the Palace of Parliament, was built in the 1980s and remains a work in progress today. During the last years of the Communist regime, it was meant to host all the administrative apparatus in one enormous building, allegedly the second largest in the world, at least at the time, after the Pentagon. But the Ultimate Edifice of Romania was part of a much larger process of reshaping the capital city of Bucharest. Due to the enormous size of the building, the upper floors are still unfinished and will remain empty until the Ultimate Edifice … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Book Reviews

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 by Éva Forgács (Pasadena) ·

New Art and New Questions from the “New Europe” (Book Review)

ARRIVALS > ART FROM THE NEW EUROPE. Suzanne Cotter, Andrew Nairne and Victoria Pomery (eds.) Oxford: Modern Art Oxford, Turner Contemporary, 2007.

This beautifully designed book contains the records of ten exhibitions organized over a period of two years by Modern Art Oxford, an established public gallery, and Turner Contemporary, a new cultural institution at Margate. Works by artists from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, as well as Malta and Cyprus, have been selected for exhibition as part of the exploration of the post-Wall “New Europe” segment of the European Union. With the appearance … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

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 by Susan Snodgrass ·

Foto: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918-1945

Foto: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918-1945, Milwaukee Art Museum, February 9-May 4, 2008.

The importance of Foto: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918-1945 extends beyond mere historical documentation. Fundamental to the exhibition’s premise is the essential role of photography in defining modernism within this region, both in art and in the culture as a whole.

The exhibition and accompanying catalogue—wonderfully curated and thoughtfully written by Matthew Witkovsky, assistant curator of photographs at the National Gallery of Art, Washington (the show’s organizer)—impart key, if not unprecedented, scholarship to an art historical narrative that often overlooks the contributions of Central European artists and … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

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 by Amy Chmielewski (Boston) ·

Alina Szapocznikow’s Protean Body

Alina Szapocznikow, Alina Szapocznikow, Broadway 1602, New York, November 18, 2007 – January 12, 2008

The recent resurgence of interest in women artists and feminist art, as demonstrated not least of all by the successes of “Wack!” in Los Angeles and “Global Feminisms” at the Brooklyn Museum, has encouraged critics and art historians to extend their investigations of women artists beyond the Western-oriented feminist canon of the 1970s. One of the most fascinating individuals to come to the attention of international viewers is, in fact, not a newcomer at all, at least not in her native Poland. Although Alina … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Book Reviews

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 by Jana Klenhova (Prague) ·

Soviet Power and the Media

Hans Günther and Sabine Hänsgen (eds.): Sovietskaia vlast i media. Sankt Peterburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 2006. 620 pp.

Sovietskaia vlast i media (Soviet Power and Media), a collection of articles edited by Hans Günther and Sabine Hänsgen, was published by Akademicheskii proekt in St. Petersburg in 2006. The publication was an outcome of an international conference of the same name, held within the framework of a research project on “The Political as a Space of Communication in History,” at Bielefeld University. The conference, as well as the subsequent publication, aimed at tracing the transformations of “the political” in … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Articles

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 by Sebastian Kaiser (Berlin) ·

Balaklava Odyssey

 Balaklava is situated in the extreme south of the Crimean peninsula; its roots stretch to very ancient times. Only ten years ago this bay was closed for tourists and civilians, due to one of the most secret installations of the Soviet Union: a hangar for submarines and a storage space for nuclear armaments. Only due to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the liquidation of the Black Sea Fleet was Balaklava opened. Today it exists as a huge unexplored territory and historical lab.

During the siege of Sevastopol, the Black Sea Fleet team hid submarines in Balaklava. The city, … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

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 by Sean Alward (Vancouver) ·

Neo Rauch: Neue Rollen, Paintings 1993 to the Present Day

Neo Rauch: Neue Rollen, Paintings 1993 to the Present Day
Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague, October 5-May 8, 2007

Neo Rauch has exhibited widely in recent years and much of the discourse around his paintings hinges on his identity as a product of the DDR, or former communist East Germany. His bizarre pictorial constructions seem to invite a consideration of legacy: of failed socialism and of painting itself. What did/does it all mean? The Kunstmuseum in Wolfsburg Germany has provided an opportunity to reflect on this question by organizing the largest survey of his work to date and sending it on tour … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Book Reviews

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 by Yulia Tikhonova (New York) ·

Heterotopias: Terrains vagues at the 1st Biennale of Thessaloniki, Greece

Heterotopias: Terrains Vagues at the 1st Biennale of Thessaloniki, Greece

“Are you guys here for the Costakis collection?” This question was addressed to a group of the Russian artists gathered for the opening events of the First Biennale of Thessaloniki, Greece, which ran from May until September of 2007. Coming from the countries of the ex-Soviet Union, these largely unknown young artists were invited to participate in the Biennale by Maria Tsantsanoglou, artistic director and curator of the event. Her curatorial selection entitled Heterotopias: Beholders of Other Places presented an assortment of 33 Greek, Russian and other artists from diverse … Read more

ARTMargins Online: New Media & Film

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 by Peter McCarthy (Sydney) ·

The Truth Is Two Faced: Godard at the Margins of Bad Faith

Our Music (Notre musique). Directed by Jean-Luc Godard. Avventura Films, 2004.

Jean-Luc Godard has played martyr and matador throughout most of his career, casting himself ostentatiously in his own films, even when he’s not in them. His self-reflexivity is signal; true to his own dictum, he usually finds some way of putting himself in the picture and his Our Music (Notre musique) from 2004 is no exception. Setting both himself and an array of committed and/or transnational figures (of letters, politics, architecture) in the reconstitutive space of Bosnia, namely Sarajevo and Mostar, Godard plays out his … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Book Reviews

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 by Magda Radu (Bucharest, Romania) ·

Dada East

Tom Sandqvist. Dada East: The Romanians of Cabaret Voltaire. MIT Press, 2006.

Tom Sandqvist’s book, Dada East: the Romanians of Cabaret Voltaire, is an example of the growing Western interest in the Central and Eastern European avant-garde. This interest has at least two precedents worthy of notice: Steven Mansbach’s book, Modern Art in Eastern Europe: From the Baltic to the Balkans ca. 1890-1939Stephen Mansbach, Modern Art in Eastern Europe: From the Baltic to the Balkans ca. 1890-1939, (Cambridge University Press, 1997).  and an important exhibition organized by Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Central European Avant-gardes: 1910-1930… Read more

ARTMargins Online: Articles

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 by Eugene Gorny (Lyuboni) ·

The Russian Internet: Between Kitchen-Table Talks and the Public Sphere

Internet metaphors are drawn from the pool of available cultural forms and, therefore, they reflect cross-cultural differences. Thus, the metaphor of “surfing the Internet,” which was widely used for some time (before search engines made this activity outdated), had distinctly American roots and referred to the widespread sport and entertainment activity virtually unknown to most Russians. In Russia, with its colder climate, different type of coastline, and different cultural habits, the closest analogy for surfing would be “sledging,”Eugene Gorny, “Amphiblestronic Fragments,” Netslova.ru, (1999). http://www.netslova.ru/gorny/selected/amphiblestron_e.html. but this metaphor has never been used. However, other metaphors which reflect the … Read more

ARTMargins Online: New Media & Film

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 by Dragan Kujundzic (Gainesville) ·

The Nonbiodegradable

At the beginning of the The Ister, the camera makes a long take of the setting sun and the riverbed of the Danube. As the ship on which the camera is perched is overtaken by another, faster one, the ship gently sways in the wake of the other, and the gaze, captured by the camera, sways with it.

Thus, the beginning of the film sets up a divided frame of the division within that will carry throughout the filming: the interrupted single take shot, the thematic and rhetoric fluidity of the gaze that is cast on the flow of … Read more

ARTMargins Online: New Media & Film

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 by Scott Nygren (Gainesville) ·

From Scardanelli to Orfée

1. Heidegger explained that his 1942 lectures on Hölderlin’s The Ister were not an analysis or an explication of the poem, but a series of comments that surrounded it. The film called The Ister constructs its project in parallel with this model, as a montage of comments surrounding Heidegger’s lectures. Accordingly, this essay will also proceed as a series of comments or contexts that circulate around the film.

2. Ross and Barrison’s videofilm, The Ister, represents one of the possible futures of cinema, and by synechdoche, the proliferating possibilities of the medium. The DV frontier means that moving images … Read more

ARTMargins Online: New Media & Film

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 by Galili Shahar (Gainesville) ·

Against the Stream: Remarks on the Film “The Ister”

The film The Ister (2004) by David Barison and Daniel Ross defines itself as a “remark” on Martin Heidegger’s lectures on Friedrich Hölderlin’s poem Der Ister (1942). What is the meaning of this remark? What is “a remark”? And how can a documentary film provide a remark on a philosophical text that defines itself as beyond philosophy? What then, is a remark on Heidegger? According to Heidegger’s own understanding, the remark is a supplement. The remark accompanies the original text, it goes along with it. It is a way of writing that calls for moments of attention(Heidegger, Hölderlin’s The … Read more

ARTMargins Online: New Media & Film

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 by Dragan Kujundzic (Gainesville) ·

The Danube: Hölderlin, Heidegger, ‘the jews,’ and the Destiny of Europe

The Ister. (Dir. David Barrison and Daniel Ross. Based on Martin Heidegger’s 1942 Hölderlin lectures. 189 minutes. Black Box Sound and Image, 2004, 2005. 

The University of Florida, Gainesville (March 20, 2007), organized by Dragan Kujunfzic).

Participants

Dragan Kujundzic (University of Florida, organizer); Galili Shahar (University of Florida); Scott Nygren (University of Florida)

Introduction

“At the height of World War Two, the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century delivered a series of lectures on a poem about the Danube river, by one of Germany’s greatest poets.

The philosopher was Martin Heidegger, who in 1927 achieved worldwide fame with … Read more

ARTMargins Online: New Media & Film

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 by Natascha Drubek-Meyer (Prague/Munich) ·

Where Gravity Doesn’t Apply: An interview with Igor Ivanov about his film Upside Down (Macedonia, 2007)

Hideous corners of the city, scenes without a trace of sophistication, depressing enclosed spaces – this is the setting chosen for the desperate life drama of young Jan Ludvik. Its individual chapters are recalled as retrospectives by Jan himself as he travels in a train hurtling through the darkening landscape, in the company of a random female passenger whose miserable exterior renders her the embodiment of the bleakest of destinies. Jan was a gifted student and, by some strange quirk of fate, also a talented circus artist, but the world in which he lives drives him only to self-destructive actions. … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Interviews

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 by Sven Spieker ·

Interview with Olia Lialina

Olia Lialina was born in 1971 in Moscow. She finished Moscow State University in 1993 as a journalist and film critic. In the mid 90s she was one of the organizers of Moscow experimental film club CINE FANTOM. She is one of the net.art pioneers and writes on New Media, Digital Folklore and Vernacular Web. Since 1999 she has been a Professor of Merz Akademie (New Media Pathway) in Stuttgart.

SVEN SPIEKER: How relevant is the term net.art to you today? It has often been pointed out that the term started as a software error. In many ways, this seems … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Articles

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 by Artur Żmijewski (Warsaw) ·

The Applied Social Arts

Does contemporary art have any visible social impact? Can the effects of an artist’s work be seen and verified? Does art have any political significance – besides serving as a whipping boy for various populists? Is it possible to engage in a discussion with art – and is it worth doing so? Most of all, why are questions of this kind viewed as a blow against the very essence of art?

Art had long struggled to gain autonomy, to free itself from politics, religion, authority, and everything else that sought to use art for its own ends. Independence was to … Read more

20th / ARTMargins Online: Articles

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 by Ileana Pintilie (Timisoara) ·

The Public and the Private Body in Contemporary Romanian Art

Never has the obsession with the body been more alive than in the contemporary period, with its tendency to turn narcissistically inwards. In psychoanalysis, the term “narcissism” describes the behavior of people who treat their own bodies as a “sexual object.”Rosolato, G., “Recension du corps, in Pontalis ”, J.-B., “Lieux du corps”, Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse, no. 3 printemps 1971, Gallimard, Paris.   According to observations from the same field of research, “the narcissistic behavior of identification” acknowledges both “awareness of the body” and “awareness of the self” as distinct symbolic forms, which are nevertheless in permanent correlation.

Unfettered … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Articles

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 by Evgenii Bershtein and Jesse Hadden (Portland, OR) ·

The Sorokin Affair Five Years Later On Cultural Policy in Today’s Russia

Five years ago, a campaign and criminal case against the writer Vladimir Sorokin attracted considerable public and media attention in Russia. In this essay, we begin by reviewing the events of the Sorokin affair and then attempt to understand it in the context of the Putin regime’s discursive practices.

One day in mid-January 2002 a large group of clean-cut young people gathered in the center of Moscow. They came out to protest what they claimed to be the obscene and unwholesome character of certain recent works of Russian literature. At the rally, they announced the beginning of a massive campaign … Read more