Category: ARTMargins Online: Articles

Landscape photography plays a crucial role in portraying the social and political order. As early as 1936, Walter Benjamin saw a critical potential of this genre. He compares photographs by Eugene Atget to pictures taken at crimes scenes: “A crime scene, too, is deserted; it is photographed for the purpose of establishing evidence. With Atget, photographic records begin to be evidence in the historical trial [Prozess]. This constitutes their hidden political significance.”Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Second Version [1936], in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 3, 1935-1938 (Harvard University Press, 2002), … Read more

TACTICS FOR THE HERE AND NOW: THE 5TH INTERNATIONAL BUCHAREST BIENNIAL FOR CONTEMPORARY ART, VARIOUS LOCATIONS, MAY 25 – JULY 22, 2012

How can an art biennale take a renewed critical stance towards its own immersion in the production of cognition, and in the effects of accelerated semiocapitalism, or the capitalization of linguistic labor (to which the critical discourse of contemporary art certainly belongs)?Franco Berardi Bifo, Precarious Rhapsody. Semiocapitalism and the Pathologies of the Post-Alpha Generation (Minor Compositions, London), 2009, pp. 44-49. Tackling the broad topic of the precariousness of contemporary living – or radical instability, loosely defined in … Read more

 OSTALGIA, THE NEW MUSEUM, NEW YORK, JULY 6 – OCTOBER 2, 2011

When choosing a radically new project or goal, people can modify their past, making it interesting and enjoyable.(Artis Svece, “Augu seka un pag?tnes estetiz?šana = Crop Rotation and the Aestheticization of … Read more

REARVIEW MIRROR: NEW ART FROM CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE, THE POWER PLANT, TORONTO, JULY 1, 2011 – SEPTEMBER 5, 2011; THE ART GALLERY OF ALBERTA, EDMONTON, JANUARY 28, 2012 – APRIL 29, 2012

Identificatory scenarios abound in Rearview Mirror: New Art from Central and Eastern Europe, which is co-produced by The Power Plant Art Gallery in Toronto and the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton. As the site of a subject’s first encounter with their own image as Other, the mirror appears in both literal and figurative guise in a number of the works on display here. And yet the … Read more

Preparing for my first time back in Romania after 7 years I was filled with a certain anxiety: those stray dogs I remembered wandering the streets in packs, the beggars on every street corner, the guilt one feels for being a “privileged foreigner” amidst all the poverty and misery.

And yet my one week stay, undertaken thanks to a grant from the Romanian Cultural Institute, was filled with surprises: on the surface at least everything looked like a county on the cusp of change. Bucharest was vibrant and alive with an amazing energy, and specifically the art scene was in … Read more

Throughout the past two years and in three consecutive exhibitions the Budapest Ludwig Museum has displayed parts of its collection, with an accent on recently acquired or rarely seen artworks. The show Kind of Change, which ran between March and May 2011, offered pieces purchased by or donated to the Ludwig between 2009-2011. The museum’s board selected works by Hungarian artists who have already entered the national canon of contemporary art, or who have made a name for themselves internationally, as well as works by a younger generation of East-Central European artists who are anticipated to become household names on … Read more

Introduction

A filmmaker, visual media artist, writer, teacher, curator and co-editor of ARTMargins, Allan Siegel has been involved in the experimental film movement and is one of the founding members of the documentary film collective Newsreel. He has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, has exhibited work in New York, Chicago, London, Montreal, Pécs and Budapest, and is currently a lecturer in the Intermedia Department at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts.

In Hungary, prior to the political changes of 1989 (and then still for a good number of years afterwards) the practical opportunities for … Read more

With integration in the globalized art world, the ever-elusive notion of contemporary East European art is today becoming increasingly intangible and diverse. These changed circumstances are reflected in the East European art scene which now includes artists that are not necessarily based in their native countries, but may still work with the legacy of shared histories and experiences; artists living in the region but working internationally without the burden of their own socio-political past; as well as non-native artists who work either in collectives or individually and who have settled in the capitals of the former Eastern Bloc, or simply … Read more

The Bucharest Biennale runs until July 25th at various venues in Bucharest, and with a series of parallel events in Stockholm (3 June to 24 September). For details go to www.bucharestbiennale.org.

I arrived at Bucharest’s retro-communist, chaotic airport the day when there were large demonstrations in the streets of Romania’s capital. Most of the demonstrators were over 60, and they were protesting against the cuts of their state-pensions.  It is a mystery where the money sent to Romania by the IMF has gone.  It’s not a mystery, however, to the locals on the Crânga?i tram: “Este putrezire,” they shrug, … Read more

MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ, THE ARTIST IS PRESENT, MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK, MARCH 13-MAY 31, 2010

If in the early stages of her career Marina Abramović’s work gained much of its magnetic allure from its spontaneity and ephemerality, in recent years the artist has shown a heightened interest in the problem of how performance art – whose essential medium is time – can be preserved. Recognizing the calamity, the artist recently established the Marina Abramović Institute for the Preservation of Performance Art in Hudson, N.Y., near where she has a home (the Institute is scheduled to open in 2012). The … Read more

Most people in the art world by now have some sort of intuitive understanding that postmodernism is being replaced by something new, but few have tried to define what that “newness” is in a binding way.  One of the few recent attempts of this kind was made by Nicolas Bourriaud while curating an exhibition called Altermodernism at the Tate Triennial in early 2009. Bourriaud suggests that the new post-postmodern art is the “positive experience of disorientation through an art-form exploring all dimensions of the present, tracing lines in all directions of time and space.” In his view, the artists involved … Read more

With the gas light blinking empty the taxi headed towards Sofia. The driver offered me another cigarette after I had extinguished one to get in the cab. “Are you German?” “No American.” I replied. He wagged his finger smiling saying “Monica Lewinsky! Bill Clinton!” I laughed and thought about how wonderful it would be if cultural memory had no recollection of the Bush years. The Balkan mountain range that cradles Sofia loomed ahead.

“Everything is happening for the first time here. It’s the second time which is the challenge,” said the Russian-born Iara Boubnova, co-founder of the Institute of Contemporary … Read more

These reflections were initially intended as a translation in short form of a text I published in 2006, in a special volume of the journal Topos.(The journal was launched in 2000 and is published by European Humanities University in Vilnius. See the archive of the journal: http://topos.ehu.lt/zine/index.htm.) The entire volume, entitled Choice and Elections, was dedicated to the phenomenon of political (non)participation in contemporary Belarus; or, more precisely, to the paradox of the political indifference of Belarusian citizens in the course of the presidential elections of 2006.

The guiding idea behind that issue of Topos… Read more

My reaction to the work of Bogoslav Kalaš when I first encountered it in the summer of 2009 at Ljubljana’s Galerija Gregor Podnar was mixed and unusual; I wanted to dislike it, but could not. The show focused on Kalaš’s nudes, dating from 1971 to the present, and, being a skeptic, I had to wonder whether the world really needed–then or now–more paintings of naked women draped over furniture. Yet the sheer strangeness of the artist’s practice was too strong a draw. The orchestrated dissonance of the images, which are as layered conceptually as they are physically, was a treat … Read more

My studies of the history of 20th century Lithuanian art were based on reproductions. The rest of my generation and some of the preceding ones had no choice in the matter either; for almost 20 years, the closure of the permanent exposition of 20th century works in Vilnius’ Town Hall made it impossible for younger generations to get acquainted with the country’s art classics directly. It was only on June 20, 2009 that the National Gallery of Art (NGA) reopened, in the building of the former Museum of Revolution in Vilnius, finally providing an opportunity to see the works that … Read more