2010 No1
February / March
Around art, a knowledge industry has gathered itself, and is constantly occupied with promoting the value of its own information. The magazine in your hands is a participant. We whole-heartedly continue to interpret, until, in a manner of speaking, there are no riddles left. It is partly for this reason that an art magazine is sometimes seen as a companion piece to the art market: both make art manageable, as a thing and as an idea.
But there are also opposing forces. This issue describes a few of them. Here, art does not appear as a ready-to-digest biscuit, but as an insolvable puzzle, as in the exhibition For the blind man in the dark room looking for the black cat that isn't there, at de Appel in Amsterdam.
This is coincidentally also the issue in which we step back from the theme-based formula with which we have enthusiastically worked for ten years. We hope to indicate questions in art and other, more varied ways, not only in a Special, but in a single essay or several texts in following issues. By dealing with the big questions in art in a more flexible fashion, we hope to better bring the richness of the magazine (and the art) into the limelight. The risk that the magazine might be a little less 'manageable' is something we will just have to accept.
Potato Eaters Love Mondrian Too
12/02/10 Lucette ter Borg
Art and television have always been a painful combination in the Netherlands. Thanks to AVRO broadcasters and the Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture, television has a whole slew of art commentators, but a worthy successor to Pierre Jansen is not yet among them.
Sturtevant
Q & A
12/02/10 Vanessa Desclaux
At the special request of METROPOLIS M, Elaine Sturtevant (1930) answers a few questions about her exhibition in Paris.
The famous photography biennial of Bamako has grown into the most authoritative photography event for photography on the African continent. Bamako is becoming increasingly important in terms of how contemporary African photography is judged.
By Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez
01/02/10 Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez
Four months prior to this writing, in mid-July, I'd come home from a workshop in the Czech Republic. It had been a small gathering of artists, critics, curators, and academics from Eastern Europe, Greece, Spain, Southeast Asia and Latin America for an event that took place alongside the launching of a book called The Transformation Atlas (published by the Prague-based not-for-profit organization 'tranzit').
He is a rising star that the exhibition circuit can no longer do without. Constant Dullaart, fresh from the Rijksakademie, can always be found showing his work somewhere. He is a critic of the medium, highly active on the Internet, and is an equally talented critic of himself and of his vocation of contemporary visual artist.
COLUMNS
