2010 No5
October / November
In the late nineties, art looked more to design than the other way round. Design showed art how to survive outside the fixed structures of the museum and the gallery, in real life, in the midst of society, in contact with ordinary people. These were the years when the boundaries between the various arts were demolished and ‘interdisciplinary’ was a winged concept. At the high point of this development, design critic Max Bruinsma wrote in this magazine that every artist was a designer.
Ten years later, we thought it appropriate to take stock again, keeping in mind opposite movements that art and design seem to have experienced since the beginning of this century. With the boom in the so-called limited editions in the last several years, it was not art that was looking to design but vice versa. Design was regularly presented as an autonomous (and costly) art object, sold in special galleries. In this issue, Louise Schouwenberg looks back at Bruinsma’s article in the light of this more recent development. She also looks ahead at the possible relation between art and design in the future. The interview with the Metahaven design studio offers a different perspective on the theme.
We continue the discussion begun in the previous issue on the future of the museum. The French choreographer Boris Charmatz, who not so long ago put on several special productions in the BAK in Utrecht and at the Holland Festival, talks about the establishment of his Musée de la Danse, in which dance and ideas on dance are combined in a natural way.
Finally, we present a portrait of Ulises Carríon (1941-1989), the Mexican artist and publisher who stood at the cradle of the controversial art bookstore ‘Other Books and So’ in Amsterdam. That store is the model for a whole new generation of publishing house/art bookstore/gallery.
The Contemporary Artist as Role Model in a Crisis of Competence
19/10/10 Pascal Gielen & Camiel van Winkel
In a universe of increasing incompetence, in which amateurism flourishes, the contemporary artist offers an interesting role model. Society can learn much from the ways in which the contemporary artist makes his ignorance effective.
Art and TV
13/10/10 Kathy Noble
Wenen
MUMOK, Museum Moderner Kunst
05/03/10 - 06/06/10
Two exhibitions about television, in Vienna and Barcelona, demonstrate art’s continuing fascination with this mass medium – and prove how difficult it is to make a good presentation of it.
Kunstverein in Crisis
13/12/10 Barbara Hess
The future of the Kunstverein is in jeopardy. These most experimental of Germany’s art centres are in danger of soon losing a good deal of their funding. A number of them recently gathered to discuss the situation in Cologne.
An Interview with Nathaniel Mellors
13/10/10 Francis McKee
Deconstructivism is not his thing. The Amsterdam-based British filmmaker Nathaniel Mellors considers it a standard method, one that contemporary art all too often and easily falls back on. Give him the universal, profound and witty satire of the writer Rabelais. In De Hallen Haarlem, he is showing his latest film, Ourhouse.
The American artist Lisa Oppenheim is fascinated by old photography, both in terms of its technique and import. She attempts to recapture the photographic images of yore in her work by considerably expanding the photographic moment, once considered so historical.
COLUMN
