Find here some pictures from last Venice Biennale 2009

See some Christian Boltanski’s pictures in Monumenta 2010. I liked this odd exhibition but like always… so far, so close. January 1st, 2010, my soon to be family in law had breakfast with Christian Boltanski and Annette Messager. These are artists that I will love to meet … but no luck. I’ll tell you the story. My future parents in law run a beautiful bed & breakfast (La Maison du Cordon) in a small town in Burgundy (Aignay-le-Duc) where a very important french artist lives (Bertand Lavier) … so far this reads like an art fairy tale and you will tell me it is not possible… but yes, they came to spend new year’s eve with Lavier and so they slept in my parents in law’s B&B. I think next New Year’s eve I will spend it in Burgundy … just in case.

Lucian Freud, Reflection, Oil on Canvas, 1985

Lucian Freud exhibition at Centre Pompidou is solid… see it here via vernissagetv

[podcast format="video"]http://blip.tv/file/get/Henrichy0205blip-LucianFreudRetrospectiveAtCentrePompidouParis648.mp4[/podcast]

Pablo Gonzalez-Trejo, Connected, 79 x 220 inches, 200 x 560 cm, 2009, Charcoal and Graphite on Canvas

Join me for a defacing performance November 4th at 7:30 pm at Le 104CENTQUATRE as part of my ongoing Defacing Art Project.

Exhibition runs from November 4th to the 8th, 2009. Vernissage opening starts at 6:00 pm

Le 104CENTQUATRE
104 rue d’Aubervilliers / 5 rue Curial 75019 Paris
M : Stalingrad (ligne 2) , Crimée ou Riquet (ligne 7)
Vélib’: bornes rue d’Aubervilliers, rue Curial, rue Riquet

Pablo Gonzalez-Trejo, Marilyn Monroe, 77 x 51 inches, 195 x 130 cm, 2009, Charcoal and Graphite on Canvas

Pablo Gonzalez-Trejo, JFK, 77 x 51 inches, 195 x 130 cm, 2009, Charcoal and Graphite on Canvas

Pablo Gonzalez-Trejo, Bay of Pigs, 79 x 118 inches, 200 x 300 cm, 2009, Charcoal and Graphite on Canvas

Pablo Gonzalez-Trejo, Che and Fidel, 79 x 118 inches, 200 x 300 cm, 2008, Charcoal and Acrylic on Canvas, after

Please join us for an art exhibition performance on July 10th as part of the Defacing Art Project by Pablo Gonzalez-Trejo. Visitors will be invited to deface the artworks so to become iconoclasts making a new departure for the artworks.

Place: Freedom Tower – MDC Gallery
Opening Reception: Thursday, July 10th, 2009 at 6:30pm
Exhibition Runs until: Tuesday, August 30th, 2009
Address: 600 Biscayne Blvd, Miami, FL
Phone: 1 305 237 7186
Email: galleries@mdc.edu

Also read articles about the Defacing Art Project here:
(Fr) Defacing ou les strates de la mémoire
(Sp) Desdibujando identidades en el espacio y tiempo: proyecto Defacing
(En) The strength lies in surrendering: Defacing

Jonathan Monk, Deflated Sculpture no. II, 2009, Stainless steel

Jonathan Monk’s artwork at Casey Kaplan Gallery seems/is like a defaced Jeff koons… more here

Warhol TV

As an undisclosed Warhol fan, fan, fan, I was extremely happy to see Warhol TV and all his media experiments with all these cool artist (except Courtney Love)

La Force de L'Art 2009 Paris

Check out some of the pictures on this visit to La Force de L’art 02, 2009 at Le Grand Palais of Paris.

POSTMODERNISM IS DEAD

A new modernity is emerging, reconfigured to an age of globalisation – understood in its economic, political and cultural aspects: an altermodern culture

Increased communication, travel and migration are affecting the way we live

Our daily lives consist of journeys in a chaotic and teeming universe

Multiculturalism and identity is being overtaken by creolisation: Artists are now starting from a globalised state of culture

This new universalism is based on translations, subtitling and generalised dubbing

Today’s art explores the bonds that text and image, time and space, weave between themselves

Artists are responding to a new globalised perception. They traverse a cultural landscape saturated with signs and create new pathways between multiple formats of expression and communication.

The Tate Triennial 2009 at Tate Britain presents a collective discussion around this premise that postmodernism is coming to an end, and we are experiencing the emergence of a global altermodernity.

Nicolas Bourriaud
Altermodern – Tate Triennial 2009
at Tate Britain
4 February – 26 April 2009

Here is a small clip from the exhibition Portraits d’amies at the opening reception on September 11th 2008.

[podcast format="video"]http://www.pablogt.com/podcasts/LaurentdeRaucourt.m4v[/podcast]
Video by Françoise Ellong & David Wolfer

Trauma, colour video with sound (30 minutes), 2000, Courtesy Maureen Paley

Our UK friend Tom Cullen invited us to the opening reception Confessions: Portraits, Videos by Gillian Wearing at the Rodin Museum and we loved it. For this event, the artist created Secrets and Lies, a new version of the 1994 work entitled Confess all on video. Don’t Worry You Will Be in Disguise. Intrigued ? Call Gillian…. Secrets and Lies will be presented to the public for the first time during the exhibition. We also appreciated to casually walk the Museum without stepping on Japanese tourists. I had tried twice to go to this museum and each time I did something else because there was a very, very, very long line to get in.

Tate Triennial 2009, Photo by suziesparkle

Posted on Le Monde on 04/09/09
by Emmanuelle Lequeux

Le Français Nicolas Bourriaud aime les concepts et ce n’est pas ce qu’il fait de plus mal. Cet ancien directeur du Palais de Tokyo, le principal centre d’art en France, a profité de son exil londonien pour développer son nouveau credo dans le cadre d’une exposition à la Tate Britain.

Dans les années 1990, il a forgé l’idée d’”esthétique relationnelle” : voir les oeuvres pour les liens sociaux qu’elles tissent et produisent entre elles et non comme des objets d’art autonomes. Dans les années 2000, il a défini les plasticiens comme des “sémionautes” : navigateurs sur un océan de signes.

Sa nouvelle recherche est joliment intitulée “Altermodernisme”. Pour Bourriaud, les vingt-cinq dernières années du XXe siècle “furent un long épisode mélancolique. Les oeuvres d’art se sont définies comme un après : après le mythe du progrès, l’utopie révolutionnaire, la défaite du colonialisme, les luttes d’émancipations politiques, sociales et sexuelles”. Il faut revenir au présent. Le terme altermodernisme suggère “une multitude d’alternatives à une voie unique. L’alterglobalisation définit la pluralité des oppositions locales à la standardisation économique, et donc la lutte pour la diversité”.

Reste à illustrer ce propos avec des oeuvres d’artistes, tous “nomades culturels”. Un énorme champignon atomique érigé dans de la vaisselle en Inox par l’Indien Subodh Gupta dit le chambardement nécessaire à l’émergence de cette pensée nouvelle. La suite est plus confuse, et la pensée de Bourriaud s’avère difficile à suivre. Même si on y ressent que le déplacement, dans le temps et l’espace, vaut leitmotiv.

Citons les frappantes peintures inspirées à Franz Ackerman par ses voyages mondialisés, ou le sublime environnement de cristal liquide de Gustav Metzger, octogénaire qui fait chanter les murs en moirures et moisissures. Ou enfin Katie Paterson qui nous met en relation téléphonique avec un glacier en pleine fonte…

“Altermodern” : Tate Triennal 2009, Tate Britain, Millbank, Londres. Jusqu’au 26 avril.

Voids, a retrospective

Voids is a retrospective of empty exhibitions with nine empty rooms, a radical show that is both empty and full of value to celebrate 50 years of the art of the void since Yves Klein in 1958. Read more about it here

“The idea of exhibiting emptiness is a recurring notion in the history of art over the past fifty or so years, almost to the point of becoming a cliché in the practice of contemporary art. Since the exhibition by Yves Klein – “The Specialization of Sensibility in the Raw Material State of Stabilized Pictorial Sensibility” in Paris in 1958, totally empty exhibitions have been the statement of different conceptions of vacuums.

While for Yves Klein it was a way to point out the sensitive state, by contrast it represents the peak of conceptual and minimal art for Robert Barry with “Some places to which we can come, and for a while ‘be free to think about what we are going to do’ (Marcuse)” (1970). It may also result from the desire to fudge the understanding of exhibition spaces, as in the work “The Air-Conditioning Show” from Art & Language (1966-1967), or to empty an institution to modify our experience, as in the work by Stanley Brouwn. It also reflects the will to create the experience of the qualities of an exhibition venue, as with Robert Irwin and his exhibition at the ACE Gallery in 1970, or with Maria Nordman at her exhibition in Krefeld in 1984. Emptiness also represents a form of radicalness, like that created by Laurie Parsons in 1990 at the Lorence-Monk gallery, which announced his renouncement of all artistic practice. For Bethan Huws and his work “Haus Esters Piece” (1993), emptiness means being able to celebrate the museum’s architecture, signifying that art is already there on site and there is no need to add works of art. Emptiness assumes almost a sense of economic demand for Maria Eichhorn who, in leaving her exhibition empty at the Kunsthalle Bern in 2001, helped to devote the budget to the building’s renovation. With “More Silent than Ever” (2006), Roman Ondák, for his part, had the onlooker believing that there is more than what is just left there to be seen.

Commissaires / organisateurs:
Laurent Le Bon, John Armleder, Mathieu Copeland, Gustav Metzger, Mai-Thu Perret, Clive Phillpot”