N° 3 2007
June/July
The big boys have joined forces. Robert Storr, Kasper König and Roger M. Buergel are marching in step as they promote this summer's mega-exhibitions. The campaign is called the Grand Tour, and it is intended to entice art-minded tourists to visit the 52nd Venice Biennial, Art Basel, documenta 12 and skulptur projekte münster 07, respectively.
The name of their marketing campaign is borrowed from the expeditions, which often took months on end, along Europe’s important historic locations, the grand tours undertaken ever since the 1500s by aristocrats intent on educating themselves in their European cultural heritage. Today, through the Internet, we discover that the term is primarily used by young people to refer to their sexual initiations. We can wish everyone a nice hot summer!
These major exhibitions coincide only once a decade, but a great deal has changed since the last time they did, in 1997. Then, Venice, Kassel and Münster had us all to themselves. This year, in September alone, additional biennial exhibitions will be held in Athens, Istanbul and Lyon.
Major international exhibitions have become a true cultural industry. Each week, somewhere in the world, a new biennial opens its doors. That raises the question of whether this inflationary process can affect the quality of the European events. Is it worth our while to embark on this year’s Grand Tour? Are these exhibitions still as extraordinary as they once were, or will the great impression they make on us last for exactly those seven days until the next biennial opens?
01/07/07 Krist Gruijthuijsen
The American Martha Colburn has made more than forty animation films, 'moving paintings', in which she creates an obscure world of iconographic mythologies, perversities and subversive realities. Recently she left the Netherlands to move back to her native country, where her work quickly gained political connotations. She transforms Indians into soldiers and Bin Laden into a witch, in a playful criticism of political iconography and its indoctrinating facade.
Crypto Logo Jihad
Black Metal and the Aesthetics of Evil
01/07/07 Daniël van der Velden
Death metal shrouds itself in the darkest of blacks. Deeply unintelligible guttural sounds, illegible logos – it is as though the bands are doing everything they can not to be understood. Yet death metal’s flirtation with absolute darkness in no way hampers its increasing acceptance in the realm of visibility, the visual arts. At this rate, the head bangers can look forward to a perfectly legible future in spotless white cubes.
Passionate Crises
Documenta 12 Manual
01/07/07 Domeniek Ruyters
Ai Wei Wei is bringing 1001 Chinese to Kassel, Artur Zmijewski is asking a deaf couple to sing Bach, the Brazilian Ricardo Basbaum has sent a serving tray around the world, and the molecular cook Ferran Adrià will be treating the public to space age delicacies. More than that, artistic director Roger M. Buergel and curator Ruth Noack will not reveal about the participants in the forthcoming Documenta. To their eyes the exhibition is no mere list of hits, but a medium for ideas.
An Historical Burden
Sculptur Projecte Münster
01/07/07 Ingrid Commandeur
This year, Skulptur Projekte Münster will take place for the fourth time, continuing the 1977, 1987 and 1997 editions of this sculpture projects event. Although many artists from the earlier exhibitions are returning, curator par excellence Kasper König does not want to offer a sequel to what has gone before. He may wish to look forward, but the exhibition mostly looks back.
Aernout Mik (b. Groningen, 1962) is returning to Venice to represent the Netherlands for the second time at the world's most important biennial for the visual arts. He is showing three new video works at the Gerrit Rietveld Pavilion, which he is using shipping containers to remodel into something reminiscent of disintegrating detention centre.
Opening
