Metropolis M

Resentment Unresolved Canonising Koen van den Broek

reviews 01.02.10 Christophe Van Eecke

Gent, Antwerpen
SMAK, KMSKA
22/01/10 - 16/05/10

Has Koen van den Broek's retrospective come too soon? His recent works on paper suggest he might be on the verge of a breakthrough...

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The Joke of the Great Nothing

opinion 07/01/10 Merijn Oudenampsen

After the proclamation of the end of history, now the future is in crisis as well. How do we escape this stalemate?

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MATERIAL WORLDS Michel François Develops Plans d’évasion

reviews 04.01.10 Christophe Van Eecke

Gent
S.M.A.K.
10/10/09 - 10/01/10

In a world run by economics and commerce the work of Michel François asks some hard and penetrating but mostly beautiful questions.

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Urgent! The New METROPOLIS M in 58 seconds

features 11.12.09

URGENT: 13 columns by Marlene Dumas, Claire Fontaine, Fritz Haeg, Nathaniel Mellors, Rein Wolfs, Lucy Stein, Merijn Oudenampsen, Régine Debatty, Nasrin Tabatabai, Slavs & Tatars, Nat Muller, Guus Beumer, Lado Darakhvelidze.

Also: Jeremiah Day about Walker Evans; the sculptures of Rachel Harrison; Goshka Macuga's Guernica; Art twenty years after the Wall; reviews from New York, Istanbul, Züric and new books by Sven Lütticken and Isabelle Graw.

NR 6 2009: AVAILABLE NOW!!

Lost and Delirious Notes on Don Levy’s Lost Classic Herostratus (1967)

reviews 09.12.09 Christophe Van Eecke

Fresh signals

News & links from Metropolis M & co.

ICA London warns staff it could close by May. Institute could fall victim to recession with costs needing a £1m trim. (DR)

Francesco Manacorda Artistic Director of Artissima

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Boltanski on Boltanski in Grand Palais (video). (DR)

Will US museums succeed in reinventing themselves? The recession is forcing North American institutions to reconsider every aspect of what they do. Expect a rise in populist shows. (DR)

New York art dealer Jeffrey Deitch appointed as director of Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (LA MOCA) (EvT)

USNews votes 'curator' as 1 of 50 best careers for 2010 (EvT)

METROPOLIS M wishes everyone a merry christmas and a happy new year! (EvT)

Patrick van Mil new Business Director of Stedelijk Museum
Currently Business Director of the International Film Festival (IFFR) in Rotterdam, Van Mil will join the Stedelijk Museum on 15 March 2010.
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Video-interview with designer of the year Maarten Baas. (DR)

Hear, hear: Curators Francesco Bonami and Gary Carrion-Murayari Announce Whitney Biennale Artists (on Video). (DR)

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Towards a unifying theory of BLOBs

What the *#$@ is a BLOB? Is one of the questions asked in the new METROPOLIS M Magazine in reference to the famous sculptures of Rachel Harrison. To tease the mind, a short inventory of BLOBness:

No place to start but the infamous horror movie from 1958: The BLOB: 'The Indestructable Creature Bloated With The Blood of Its Victims!' So beware. You can also try the 1988 remake if you like your movies with extra splatter and gore. Interested? Looking for a BLOB screening near you?

The BLOB also features in another article present in the new METROPOLIS M: Maix Mayer’s model170 (Kugelhaus) on show at Gemak Den Haag as part of the exhibition: DDR: Ostalgie & Paranoia. It is in fact a garden shed.

With the advent of computer aided design, architects have gone wild with blob architecture, commonly dubbed blobitecture, blobism or blobismus by architectural critics and historians overly fond of coining new movements. Several key examples: Cook and Fournier’s Kunsthaus Graz, Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao, Herzog & The Meuron’s Allianz Arena in Munich and Norman Foster’s Sage Gateshead. Even the Dutch city of Eindhoven is currently reinventing itself through blobitecture.

The BLOB is a superhero as well, allbeit one that went bad... He starred Marvel Comic’s X-Men series, making it as far as the X-Men Wolverine movie. The Marvelous people probably took their cue from the book ‘The Blob eats everything’ by R.L. Stine. Pure Fantastic Fiction of the first (or at least third) order.

Being or becoming a blob can be achieved in the following ways:

Play one of many Blob computer games, the blobsalad simulation or read the big book of Blob Feelings to explore your subconscious blob (yes, it is stunningly tacky).

For people left wanting more: Get your own blob here or here, or get to know more about programming one (A Binary Large Object).

But in essence the blob is like the UFO, it is an unknown quantity...

Find out what it's really about in the new METROPOLIS M

... and correcting an omission (The Digital Giraffe, thanks for the heads up!): digital artist Corinne Whitaker has been creating organic 3D forms she calls Blobs, for over
12 years.