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Postcards from the Edge

This year's event took place at the beautiful sky-lit rooms of the James Cohan gallery, NY. The show presented over 1000 original, postcard-sized works on paper by established and emerging artists benefitting the Visual AIDS Archive Project.

A selection is still available to satisfy your Christmas shopping needs! (see below)

All Postcards from the Edge proceeds - 100% of all sales - support the programs of Visual AIDS. Founded in 1988, Visual AIDS utilizes the visual arts to promote AIDS awareness and, through the Frank Moore Archive Project, historicizes the contributions of artist with HIV and the estates or artists lost to AIDS.

It has been noted that if you should participate in only one benefit a year as an artist, this should be the one.
I can only agree. Few people organizing benefits using art can match the sensibility, professionality and generosity of the Postcards from the Edge crew. We took part with two postcards and sponsored a plate to the raffle, it was very nice to be involved, even if it was from afar.

Artist/art writer Judy Rey, who also took part, has a good blog post at Ungraven Images on her experience with Postcards from the Edge.

Still Available:
Selected original works from the show can still be acquired for $75 each, buy four get one free. Details can be found at the charity's web site.

To get your postcards, contact Visual AIDS info at visualaids dot org / 212-627-9855. Artwork will be mailed out from a special selection, you can specify some preferences. Postcards are still random and there are no returns or exchanges. Postcards are mailed out after payment is received.
You can pay by credit card by calling 212-627-9855 or mail checks to: Visual AIDS, 526 West 26th Street #510, New York, NY 10001

So if you need some holiday gifts, and want to support the arts while helping an important cause - then a beautiful postcard-sized artwork is the perfect holiday solution!

Preview Berlin, Emerging Art Fair

Impressions from the Preview Art Fair, relocated to a hangar at the bombastic Flughafen Tempelhof, designed and built (though not completed) in the late 1930's by Nazi architect and sculptor Ernst Sagebiel.

The image is a detail of the 2006 "Bureaucratic Sonata", by Mexican artist Raul Ortega Ayala, at the London-based Rokeby gallery.

"The materials used to create the work for this series include post-it notes, window blinds, office chairs and lamps. Each work is driven by Ortega Ayala's impressions of the corporate world having immersed himself in the environment for a substantial period of time."

Resisting the temptation to ridicule office life, Raul Ortega Ayala instead turns everyday office objects into surreal installations and pieces. At the fair, he presented a paper relief out of post-it notes on the bottom of a metallic reflecting airway transportation box, viewable through little windows only. The result is a Kusama-like piece with very painterly qualities.

View an interview with the gallery owner at Vernissage TV.

Lot's of architectural-model art at this fair as well..

U.K. artist Matthew Houlding at Büro für Kunst (Dresden) had his usual captivating architectural extravaganzas on display.

And of course there were Plattenbauten galore, what else. No Fernsehturme though.

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Geo: 52.482165 13.389699

Views from the Berliner Kunstsalon Art Fair

Some views from a much improved Berliner Kunstsalon.

Artist-owned commercial gallery Stedefreund adopts the concept many Leipzig artists successfully apply in Berlin, setting up a collective space, managed by an emerging art-historian.

They presented themselves in a beautifully styled installation, that included a nice phallic Medalla-style bubble sculpture.
(Is it really Rita Suessmuth checking out the price list?)

Walden Kunstausstellungen presented Street-art sculptures (a new trend?).

Nicely scruffy and witty pieces by Evol & Pisa73 (CT'INK) variating the "Plattenbau" theme - an ever hip subject to graphic artists from Berlin.

See also the nice pics at Ekosystem of Evol's beautiful corridor at the Flamingo Beach Lotel, offering affordable Street-art styled rooms in Berlin-Neukoelln.

Plate by Sebastian Neeb, art student at the Weissensee Art School, Berlin. The artist had some nice creepy paintings on view as well.

Installation by Kreuzberg art collective Scotty Enterprises with art by Frederik Poppe and Ute Litzkow.

A sinister vision of a future Berlin-Mitte, as a militarized terror-fearing city, done in the style of a paranoid architectural model-maker.

Artist: Michael J. Birn, Lustgarten Berlin © 2007, Modell H0, Mixed media, 400 x 400 cm. Presented by atrans gallery.

"Since July 2006 the A trans Pavilion located in a courtyard of the Hackeschen Höfe at the heart of Berlin is presenting innovative strategies designed to intervene into urban spaces while providing new perceptions of them. The architect and curator Isolde Nagel directs a program aimed at individuals who value artistic and architectural vision with a focus on social issues," the art fair website wrote.

Berliner Kunstsalon
9.28 - 10. 2
Badstrasse 41a
13357 Berlin Wedding
Geo: 52.552485 13.374024
P: +44 (0) 207 2472684
Fri - Tue 14:00am - 22:00pm

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Disasterware by Charles Krafft at Stolen Space Gallery, London

Villa Delirium: a wonderful book providing an overview of the subversive ceramic "Disasterware" made by Charles Krafft.

Apart from commemorative plates depicting disasters, it documents, in the artist's words, "life-size ceramic weaponry so gorgeous and patently functionless that it will bedazzle and confound everyone who sees it."

The provocative pieces are shocking and darkly funny. Krafft, at 60 "the oldest promising young artist in the Pacific Northwest", has his roots in the 60's counter culture and the 80's industrial scene. Thanks to the wildly sarcastic sprit permeating his art, it's only natural that young guys should like it special.

Ironically, globalization has us all living in a "Villa Delirium" instead of a Global Village: a resurgence of regionalism, tribalism and religion, and a willingness to go to extremes for them.

Many art pieces from this book were copied in Delft Blauw porcelain after rifles borrowed from Ljubljana arms dealers in 1995, and painted in the inglaze technique a circle of old blue-haired ladies had taught Krafft.

"While his jocular explorations of human catastrophe may make those who share his dusky sense of humor chortle, they also force the viewer to look at mankind's cruelest, most absurd behavior in a way that penetrates the numbness induced by media overload", Salon wrote.

Charles Krafft is not afraid to get his hands dirty doing commissions. Under the motto "ASHES TO ASHES, DUST TO DELFT", the artist offers to make commemorative pieces out of your human remains: Human bone China This is Krafft at his most Industrial. After all, the Ovens are to Industrial culture what kittens are to Victorianism.. Charles Krafft updates those familiar Industrial preoccupations with dehumanization and death, adding humor and ambiguity.



The latest exhibition by Charles Krafft at the London Stolen Space gallery is an appropriate follow-up to the brilliant political graphic art show by Pedro Inoue. Called 'Artists Rifles Requiem', it proves why unacademic art can be so great and surprising. "Stolen space" is an original metaphor for Street-art, it also well illustrates the sectarianism and exclusiveness of the art world towards artists from an unacademic or subcultural background.

Nice to see the artist supporting this undergroundish artist-run gallery, instead of some fancy upscale one. Krafft has produced some amazing Delft pieces for this show, including porcelain hand grenades, AK 47s and Tommy guns.

Read more:

• "Been There; Smashed That" very good piece at Salon.
• Long interview with Moira Vincentelli for the Aberystwyth Arts Centre.
• Ceramics Today article
• Unpop Krafft in the Industrial art & music context.

• Interview at Style 43 with the initiators of Stolen Space gallery.

Visit:
Stolen Space Gallery
Dray Walk, The Old Truman Brewery
91 Brick Lane
London E1 6QL
United Kingdom
P: +44 (0) 207 2472684
Open: Wed - Sun 11:00am - 7:00pm
Geo: 51.521652 -0.072268

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Wallywoods: Berlin's Art factory

Alex Tornado calls his music Psychoschlager, neuer deutscher Schlager (NDS), Psycho-Elektroschlager, Elektroliedermacherpop, Ultra Neue Deutsche Welle (UNDW), or Lyro-Pop, I'd suggest 'Glamfolk'.

Irm Hermann never misses a gig!

Impressions from the new Wallywoods location in Berlin Weissensee.

The travelling art space/atelier/home of British artist Paul Woods has landed in a derelict GDR "Kulturhaus" located deep into an unfashionable and slightly scary Eastern part of town.

Woods resides over a pool of some 150 maladjusted unrecognized local talents, his taste for performers is superb.

My favorite piece from the show: "Lady Macbeth" by Marie-Cécile Lutta (Switzerland).

The exhibition seemed decidedly "unfertig", unlighted and chaotic, yet the whole exhibition worked like one big brilliant art installation: Haight Asbury meets squatter Outsider Art, Berlin 1980.

You never knew if the whole set up was all very self-conscious or very naive.

Unambiguously fine was the musical programme though: especially the Ugly Americans played some great distorted punk-jazz.

This is my first mobile phone clip; I'd like to dedicate it to Andrew Keen. Sorry 'bout the sound Andrew, that's really how it sounded!

Geo: 52.550966 13.461883

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NY "Project to Surface" Exhibition turns Painting into Architecture

The New York Project to Surface exhibition unites some interesting 2D artists,
exploring the sculptural 3D possibilities of their work.

Curated by Richard Chang and Alexandra Chang of New York artists/curators collective Dream So Much, Project to Surface is a cooperation in which designer/architect Ben Krone (of Shop Architects) helps to turn the work of a varied group of artists into architectural pieces, using prototyping and other techniques.

The artists are experienced conceptual painter David Diao, street-artist Kaws, painter/art historian Leah Raintree who makes amazing flower drawings, and Japanese/NY painters Matzu-MTP and Kenji Hirata.

The results are presented from June 28 - August 28 at m127 Gallery, in the new building by Shop Architects in Manhattan, just north of Madison Square Park.

Some gorgeous structures have been made so far, especially noteworthy are Kenji Hirata's designs. The Project to Surface web site is supplying a steady flow of impressive material at the moment.

The project is reminiscent of the string of "graffiti-related architecture" projects published by Dutch architecture team Maurer since 1998.

The Maurers tried to overcome the hostility between graffiti and architecture, stressing what they had in common. No, they didn't mean the megalomania and egotism, or the fact that still almost all of both is done by boys, but rather noted how 3dimensional much graffiti is.

The notion of sampling was put forward as something of a common factor also.
Similar to many visual artists of the early nineties, the Maurers seemed to want to make their field of work a
bit more hip by introducing concepts taken from subcultural scenes and electronic music.

Sadly, not much of the exiting designs made in collaboration with graffiti artists Zedz and Delta have been built yet, the Delta-Maurer-Zedz team was assigned by Rotterdam gallery MAMA to develop a
pavilion for "Rotterdam 2001- Cultural Capital of Europe", but it doesn't seem to have been realized.

Maybe influenced by the software it is made with, many of these 3D concepts start at the bottom, building the structure like a house. A few years ago we also experimented with 3D for our paintings, staring from the wall however. We split up a wall painting into several layers in space, some partly transparent, so that people could walk through it, entering the painting's centre and become part of its imagery, looking out.

Geo: 40.745641 -73.984499

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Kenji Hirata's Hip Traditionalism

Painter Kenji Hirata's paintings are delicate, stylized, colorful, with graphical 60s-like shapes that are wonderfully unpainterly.

He's known for his work with the "Barnstormers", the loosely-knit, over-publicized, street art/post-graffiti group that eschews the expected "urban" clichés of graffiti by going rural. They had the brilliant idea of documenting their painting sessions in stop motion.

The Barnstormers were involved in the HIV awareness campaign Spread the Know, where they covered a whole neighborhood with their imagery. (Kenji's style can be spotted in the murals and even the web page design.)

Here's an excerpt from the Barnstormers' video, the Gestalten shop has it.

Kenji's work seems inspired by techno graphics and psychedelica, but also alludes to Duchamp's last oil on canvass work "Tu m'".

Hard edged and clean, full of the flow of rhythm and music, he avoids the widespread notion that painting should be painterly, while giving us an uplifting and poetic color experience that's folksy and evocative somehow, Tibetan maybe, or South-American.

Critics (like Holland Cotter in the IHT) are still arguing that anything psychedelic in art can only be "kitsch inspired by kitsch", but Kenji proves that this prejudice has probably more to do with the artworld's uncomfortableness with subcultures. (Unless voyeuristically displayed of course.)

His movie made together with DJ Klock (RIP) is a small scale and more personal continuation of the Barnstormers videos. It is part of a collaboration with DJ Klock that lasted for several years until Klock's untimely death.

Starting as stop motion movies of collaborative paintings, the Barnstormers paintings were sometimes made out of sand and rope, only to be brushed away for the next session. In "Theme" the canvas is not a huge barn floor but a kitchen table, and the material used is felt.

Circular and loop-like in both the music and imagery, it's tempting to see it as a Buddhist piece of art, a visual spiral of birth, destruction and rebirth. The earlier Barnstormers videos already had that element: the best ones used earth and rope instead of paint to make fleeting drawings that were swept away when completed, they seemed inspired by Tibetan sand painting.

Classic Buddhist themes like the fleetingness of things and the play of the elements play an important role in Kenji's art. He literally incorporates the elements in his paintings, the earth in his paintings is literally painted with earth.

Like his contemporaries Sal and his friend Matzu-MTP, he gives traditional Japanese themes a futuristic twist.

While artists with a European or North American background often are being ironical, smirking and jaded about anything painting could achieve, these painters are not afraid to explore basic themes that others would deem naive, with stunning results.

Kenji is active in NY and Tokyo, but also has displayed his work in Hamburg and Berlin through the dedication to Japanese artists of CAI Gallery.

The latest project, soon to be premiered, Project to Surface is a cooperation that turns the work of David Diao Kaws, Leah Raintree, Matzu-MTP, Ben Krone and Kenji's into architectural sculptural pieces, using prototyping and other techniques.

Photo/Video: copyright Kenji Hirata/Barnstormers 2007

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Annette Munk at Alte Feuerwache

Annette Munk's serial documentation photography (made in cooperation with Romana Hagyo) documents life in the impoverished modernity of communal living areas of cities like Erfurt, Krakau, Vienna or Tabor. This part of her work can be seen as part of the tradition of Bernd and Hilla Becher or the Dutch "Exactitudes" project.

In a humorous way most of Munk's work is concerned with such traditional female occupations like cleaning, cooking, washing and bringing out the garbage. It documents the different ways such things are collectively organized in both East and West Germany in extensive studies of public wash drying places and garbage areas. Another photo series - layed out as a memory card set - ponders the possibilities of individuality in "Plattenbau" apartment entrances.

In the spacious exhibition these photo series were contrasted with another part of Annette Munk's oevre: stylized looking textile sculptures, surreal in concept, but Pop-art in execution.

Alluding to art by Meret Oppenheim (in dreaminess), Claes Oldenburg (in proportion play) or Beuys (in surreal use of homy materials and objects), they are enlargements of the insignia of "typically" male or female occupations.

Playfully referring to clichés of gender and sexuality, Munk's pieces are full of positive/negative shapes, holes or protrusions: giant pieces of electrical apparel, heads of cosmetic flacons made out of felt, or obscene chicken dishes lovingly made out of psychedelically patterned blankets.

A bit disorienting at first glance, the show grew more clear and hilarious for visitors step by step.

Photo: copyright Annette Munk 2007 All rights reserved by the artist

Geo: 52.515572 13.430845

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Bernard Foell's Stencil Painting at Prima Center Berlin

"Tanz in die Wirklichkeit" is the title of the new exhibition by painter Bernard Foell at Prima Center, an artist/curator-run gallery in the (relatively) poor Wedding neighborhood in the north of Berlin.

Berlin Super 80's

Foell's career as a visual artist spans well over 25 years. Autodidact but resourceful and well-informed like few of his peers in bohemian Berlin, Foell was active as actor and director in West Berlin's anarchic super 8 film movement in the early 80's, "a creative Berlin which to this day exerts its influence on German pop culture and beyond". Many artists of this time worked with any medium available, declaring themselves "Geniale Dilletanten" (ingenious dilettantes).

Well known artist of today like Ades Zabel or Wolfgang Mueller originate from this time and place. This scene's love of trash and disregard for high and low is still apparent from Bernard Foell's paintings.

Foell is also active as curator, for instance of a series of Club-art shows at the Haus am Luetzowplatz and is one of several organizers of "18 x 24" (cm) art shows in town. After starting out with large psychedelic collage works and mash-ups of Italian comics, he has been painting exclusively using stencils. On many of his paintings, the thick, used stencils themselves have been incorporated into the surface.

Dance into Reality

A lot of art today tries to prove its concern with social issues by being as documentary as possible, serving up reality in undigested vulgar documents posing as art. Recent visitors at the "Sex Work" exhibition in the NGBK for instance might have imagined themselves in a social workers fair. The role of the imagination seems to have become suspect, or is deemed naive. Seen in this context, Bernard Foel might be making a kind of Outsider Art, albeit a very aware one.

"Tanz in die Wirklichkeit", "Dance into Reality", the show's title, might point to the playful way Foell handles his subjects. Social concerns and allusions do abound in these new works, but they are filtered of banality, fractured and juxtaposed in thought-provoking ways through Foell's elaborate process of creation. The long painting process involves painstaking work on delicate paper stencils, which are used and re-used in many layers, making the colors look worn and rusty; the finished painting often look like some timeless, archeological found object.

The exhibition is on view until April 26 2007 at the Berlin branch of the Prima Center, run by Macedonian artist and curator Jovan Balov.

Prima Center Berlin, Biesentaler Strasse 24, 13359 Berlin
Geo: 52.557472 13.385724

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Visual AIDS Web Art Galleries

Visual Aids is a N.Y. based organization dedicated to education and awareness of HIV/AIDS.

It attracts attention to the impact of HIV/AIDS on culture and the arts, and offers practical support to HIV positive artists, through exhibitions/projects, events, grants, and archival work.

Such well-known projects as Day With(out) Art and Postcards From the Edge have been initiated by Visual AIDS.

The Archive Project

Visual AIDS' "Frank Moore Archive Project" is the largest slide registry of works by artists with HIV/AIDS. Although it is today just as much a pool of works by artists living with AIDS, the big cultural hiatus AIDS left after the time of its greatest onslaught can be sensed keenly by viewing the archive. It documents many careers cut short, and illustrates one reason why the anarchic mood of 80's art lasted such a short while.

In modern art the judgment of quality has for most people become almost impossible. It is ironic for modern art that usually the only way for it to be valued and remembered, is because someone invested a lot of money in it.

The artists whose work is present in the archives had/have often not reached that stage of their career (and indeed many artists never do) and therefore the recourses of the VA artist estates archives are crucial for memory, research and future evaluation.

HIV artists registered with the archive can benefit from a whole range of professional services and grants.

Web Galleries

Visual Aids regularly invites well-known curators to create monthly digital exhibitions from the archives, and to write an introductory essay to accompany their selection. Standards are high, and the work brought to light often so amazing, that it's a pity the exhibitions are only digital, and not the blueprint of real shows.

On the Stage

April's web gallery On the Stage on performance art by Tomoko Ashikawa, curator/director at About Glamour Gallery, Brooklyn and the artists file coordinator at Artists Space, NY, herself a former performance artist, has just been published. A thoughtful choice if you think of the lack of visibility and documentation that are a given part of performance art. For Tomoko Ashikawa the human body is the ultimate artist tool, "expressing both beauty and fragility".
Featured artists are Hunter Reynolds, John Eric Broaddus, Richard Sawdon Smith, Timothy Lonergan, Stephen Varble and Yolanda.

Standard performance art imagery of naked people doing inexplicable things whose symbolism is only clear to themselves is presented of course, but Tomoko also presents some examples of artists working with costumes in stunning, baroque ways, like John Eric Broaddus and Hunter Reynolds, whose "Patina du Prey's Memorial Dress", an AIDS memorial dress (1993-2007), printed with the names of tens of thousands who died of AIDS is on view at
Artist's Space until May 12. Visitors can add names to be incorporated into the project.

Artist space writes of Hunter Reynolds:

"He was a an early member of ACT UP, and in 1989 co-founded Art Positive, an affinity group of ACT-UP to fight homophobia and censorship in the arts. For over twenty years, Reynolds has been using photography, performances, and installations to express his experience as an HIV-positive gay man living in the age of AIDS. Reynolds' works address issues of gender identity, political, social, and sexual histories, mourning and loss, survival, hope and healing."

Revolutions per Minute

One of the best galleries at Visual AIDS, and of great interest to the context of this diary, did become the basis for a real exhibition.

It is the inspired and personal one on Club-art by Edwin Ramoran (director and curator of the Longwood Art Project, Bronx, NY), called Revolutions per Minute.

it vividly documents the excitement and production of artists influenced by club culture, or in some cases, artists presenting their art within clubs proper. (Even Andy Warhol made Club-art in some early and late points of his career.)

Unthinkable in today's art where sub-cultures are mostly portrayed from a voyeuristic or formalistic point of view? Maybe not: staying close to his theme, Ramoran's latest exhibition Do You Think I'm Disco explored the the influence of dance music culture on contemporary artists.

Tuesday, April 10, 2007 6:30 - 8:00pm: Visual AIDS & Artists Space present:
Diamonds and Pearls: Remembrances and Recent Thinking on the Memorial Dress With Hunter Reynolds, Lia Gangitano, Alexander Gray, and Simon Watson, moderated by Benjamin Weil and Amy Sadao

Related Club Art Diary entries: Male Honor and Disco Sucks Again.

Artist Space, 38 Greene St # 3, New York, NY 10013, (212) 226-3970
Geo: 40.721672 -74.002165

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Male Honor and Male Sex Objects on Recycled Porcelain Plates

View from the opening night of the "Disco Sucks Again" exhibition by Tulip Art Projects at Gallery "Kloetze und Schinken".

Opposing interpretations of male honor, and males as sex objects, are the theme of the show in "Kloetze und Schinken", situated in Berlin Neukoelln, a neighbourhood with many Middle Eastern immigrants and German chavs, where the right macho attitude is crucial for boys.

In a kind of reversal of these values, the exhibition portrays males in the submissive and "dehumanizing" poses usually reserved for females.

It would have been such a nice art idea to pursue for a female artist, but hey, that's why gay feminist art exists.

The often hilariously trashy aesthetics of pornography inspired much of the work.

While some like to view prostitution as just another social service, there's also a more moral view. The U.S. American feminist Phyllis Chesler for instance calls pornography "protected hate speech".

This installation pictures four memorial plates of the many Eastern European prostitutes who come to Berlin for an extended working holiday only to go back sick to countries that are very severe about HIV and where medicine is not widely available.

This plate was originally made for the first edition of the "Disco Sucks Again" exhibition that took place in Amsterdam. Part of a longer "Include Me Out" Series (after the Young Marble Giants song), it is about the way Dutch libertinism (including gay/lesbian/tran rights) conflicts with its multiculturalism. Chesler has also remarked on the "prison-like homosexuality" of many cultures of Middle Eastern origin, where (secret) homosexual acts are tolerated and common, while "out" gays and lesbians are persecuted.

This part of the show is a memorial installation for the boys hanged by Iran in 2005, the event has been well documented by Doug Ireland, sparking world wide protests.

The text around the edge of the plate reads "Kill Me or Make Me Beautiful", after the song on the event by Marc Almond. (Marc claims it is an Iranian saying.) The Iran government has killed an estimated 4000 gays, lesbians and transgendered people since 1979. Since last year Shia death squads in Iraq are murdering anybody who doesn't fit in their gender world view.

The Iran gov.'s liberal sex change policy ("to make one beautiful"?) might seem progressive, but it's more likely that any gender deviancy or in betweenness must be eradicated.

While modern media and advertising play with the role reversal of the male as sex object and woman as dominant - suggesting unisex values and an ironic view of sexuality - others practice violence against such liberated people.

This is not just a problem in backward regions of the world. Also in Europe, its atheism and hedonism incapable of instilling liberal moral values, modern immigrant females, gays and lesbians are left alone or under increased pressure.

The exhibition's title "Disco Sucks Again" is present on many of the works. It is an adaption of the old 80's slogan "Disco Sucks", used at that time - by those excluded - to criticize the disco era's decadence and permissiveness. Today, after the hedonism of the nineties, and with the rise of religious intolerance, it seems that "Disco Sucks Again".

Read/view more:

Larger and more versions of the images at Flickr.

View the press release or the Ceramixed Plates catalogue for more writing and images.

Read the report on the first station of this art show last summer in Amsterdam.

Gay Orbit on "Iranian Youths hanged".

Danger at Every Turn, Peter Tatchell on Shia death squads in Iraq in the Guardian, March 30 2007.

Googlemapped
Geo: 52.495323 13.42289

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Doggie Art

Dogs are quite a theme in art at the moment. Today the Tierschau exhibition opened in the Richard Wallraf Museum in Cologne. This show marks Flemish painter Frans Snyders (1579 - 1657) as the first artist who portrayed dogs (and many other animals) as personalities worthy of empathy. The Enlightenment had introduced the idea of Animal Rights, and the need of science to catalog everything helped the genre along. The whole concept of animals as protagonists in comics wouldn't have been possible without painters like Snyders.

Of course today's kitch and commercial culture around animals would also not exist.. These phenomenon were addressed by artists taking part in the recent "Hundesalon" exhibition.

The "Hundesalon" aimed to be a art show about dog culture with as little images of actual dogs as possible. The "Pitboys" (pictured above), an "Exactitude" study by Versluis/Uyttenbroek of pitbull owners exemplies this concept perfectly.

Gallery "Kloetze und Schinken" might have alluded to their proletarian surroundings with this show, Berlin Neukoelln must have a very high dog density. The gray district's only claim to fame is the David Bowie song by the same name, but then, that song came from his most depressed album..

The large group show presented photography, paintings and objects by Ari Versluis/Ellie Uyttenbroek, Barbara Quandt,Tulip Enterprises, Marian Kolenda, Rosa Futuro, Inhalt und Sinn, Istprodukt, Karin Christiansen, Jenny Loebert, and many more.

 Apart from two Neo-Geo pastiche paintings ("Hundestatistik"), Tulip Enterprises contributed a Brancusi-inspired "Endless Doggie Column" light object, re-animating their recycling light objects series from a few seasons ago..

The popular theme in art and literature of "a dog as a man's best" friend is extended into "an artist's best muse" by New York artist Nelson Santos. His "Sparky Project" is an art collaboration between Nelson, Sparky (his dog) and various artists. 101 works portraits of Sparky (or Sparky and Nelson) are to be created all in all. The works will become the foundation of the Sparky Museum. Artists as well known as A.A.Bronson have reacted to their call, the results can be viewed at the Sparky Project.

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Defaced Flower Portraits

Defaced book pages from a facsimile edition of "Tulip Portraits", watercolors by Nicolas Robert, flower painter at the court of Louis XIV.

Let's start with a proper definition, children:

The Wikipedia says "to deface" means

"to mark or remove the part of an object (especially images, be they on the page, in illustrative art or as a sculpture) designed to hold the viewers attention. Example acts of defacement could include scoring a book cover with a blade, splashing paint over a painting in a gallery, smashing the nose of a sculpted bust. Iconoclasm led to the defacement of many religious artworks."

They alway put it so graphically, makes your fingers itch doesn't it!

Robert Rauschenberg did it in his calculating and rather small-time way with his tiny "Erased De Kooning Drawing" that he had officially bought to do so.

We hope to show our defaced masterpieces at the upcoming "Anonyme Zeichner V" group show at Bluetenweiss project space, Berlin, March 18 & 19.

They're variations of our "Ceramixed Plates", in which we re-paint decorated plates.

All are part of a larger series, and measure 17,5 x 12,5 cm.

Situated in hip Berin-Prenzlauer Berg, Blütenweiss Project Space specializes in drawings only. Apart from impressive presentations by the artists who run it, director Anke Becker organizes large monthly anonymous drawing group shows, where any work can be bought for only 100 Euro.

Nicolas Robert, whose work we deface in these pieces, was not just any painter, he was "peintre ordinaire du roi pour la miniature", and his works were called "flower portraits". (He produced 727 of them)

The University of Delaware writes in their well-informed overview of flower painters: "Robert started out as a painter of ornamental flower pictures but his work became more botanically oriented after he was hired by the Duke of Orleans to draw the rare and exotic plants and animals brought to the Duke's gardens. Scholars believe that the Scottish botanist Robert Morison, director of the gardens, encouraged Robert to take a more scientific approach to his subject."

After Dutch Tulip Mania, "the cultural and increasingly political value of flowers (and flower-inspired art!) was not lost on royal panegyrists, who seized upon the new meanings of flowers in celebrating the glory of Louis XIV".

In Cultivated Power, Elisabeth Hide gives insight in "the roles of gender, rank, and material goods in the age of the baroque, and the extension of the cultural into the realm of the political". (Well, we should be so lucky with this art show.)
For that small time in history, for around 200 years, flowers lost their effeminate connotation. For centuries anything to do with flowers had been lowly, feminine, or effeminate, the flower girl had often been a prostitute as well. As soon as the new, exotic flower types became associated with kosmopolitanism, commerce, science, arts and the court, handling flowers became men's business. After the boom, things were reversed again..

bluetenweiss - Raum für Kunst
Prenzlauer Allee 224 / Ecke Knaackstrasse
D-10405 Berlin
Email: info at bluetenweiss-berlin.de
tram M2 Immanuelkirchstrasse
opening hours (during the exhibitions)
tue-sun 14 - 19 pm, and by arrangement
Geo: 52.534105 13.421256

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Beyond Cinema - But Without VJ's

Detail from "Outer and Inner Space" by Andy Warhol (a really uncommonly spriritual title for a Warhol piece!) at the Beyond Cinema exhibition at the Berlin Hamburger Bahnhof. Half hour twin 16mm projection of Edie Sedgewick babbling in front of a video monitor doubling her image.

This in fact quadruple kinetic portrait is described by critic Callie Angell in the essay Doubling the Screen as the first documented use of video by an artist. Warhol casually used techniques that were only taken up years later by video artists proper.

Going round the exhibition I was grateful Warhol didn't decide to ever present his movies on video however; among the many utterly trashy pixelated presentations of the "Beyond Cinema" exhibition only the magically flickering 16 mm projection of this piece comes across as poetic.

Along with a few other films presented at this show, "Outer and Inner Space" was singlehandedly turned into "an installation" by the curators, suggesting it to be an ambient work where beginning and end doesn't matter.

All of the recently renovated Warhol movies have been turned into installations now, making them digestable for new audiences suffering from short attention span maybe, but also avoiding the intended trademark Warhol boredom. Andy didn't only like to torture his actors, but his audience as well.

Art reception - especially of Pop-art - can indeed be a lot like zapping; a tiny taste and you get the full flavour, but I'm amazed how such an anal profession as curating disregards artist's intentions and historic presentation.

I was expecting to see some interesting work by the likes of Peter Rubin at least, if not from Rechenzentrum, but sadly Vj-art was totally absent. It is always said that Flick is such a playboy, so he must have been at venues where Vj-art was presented.

Just because vj's don't usually like to sell their work in exclusive limited editions doesn't mean it's not art, a curator of a show like this should have known better, even if a snobby, or culturally limited collector doesn't.

The show seems to have started out with the idea of presenting the projection art in the Flick collection as the last word on the theme, instead of going beyond the collector's limitations by staring with a good concept - and artist list - for a projection art show and then trying to get the best art from all around..

View a segment of "Outer and Inner Space" at the Medienkunstnetz.

Hamburger Bahnhof, Invalidenstrasse, 10557 Tiergarten, Berlin, Germany
Geo: 52.527940 13.371639

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Stilschau Event at the PHB Brewery

The PHB (Patzenhofer) brewery's architect, Arthur Rohmer is a rather forgotten figure in hedonist architecture, strange, as his other projects like the Kulturbrauerei and Koenigstadt Brauerei receive much attention for their recent renovations.

Arthur Rohmer liked his buildings bulky, faux proletarian-classicist and redbrownstony all over, with just a touch of flowery Italianite frieze. The inside of the PHB building has been gutted by the Berlin Technik Museum, but the main hall still proves that the workers were meant to work in an industrial palace. Rusty beer containers dominate certain halls, huge, but elegantly rising up through several floors until they reach heavily stuccoed ceilings.

This majestic setting has already been used for an art presentation exploring the fleeting boundaries between Street-art, vandalism and egomania, so industrial charm mixes with street-art vibes.

Geo: 52.524506 13.443854

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Preview Berlin - Anika Lori

As the lurid and subcultural feel of these very painterly paper collages might betray, Anika Lori has roots in Club-art, making huge murals and interior art installations for clubs, but as she's recently been "discovered" by Influential People, those times might be over... Lori uses stencil graffiti, paper cutouts and trashy applications to effectively spice up her pieces. Dark glazes, often covering highly pornographic imagery, create mysterious painterly areas. At "Miss Lori"'s fan page at My Space, club vibes still set the tone, thank God.

Geo: 52.528877 13.415318

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Carport Art Show

The carport exhibition in Baruth, an large public art project by the Alte Schule Baruth e.V., a local "Kunstverein" set up by artists and curators mainly from Berlin, covers the whole of Baruth with ten witty, utopian or absurd ports chosen from twenty submissions designed by architects, designers and artists. In their own premises in the Alte Schule they present models of all twenty submitted designs. Those design that were executed, or rather executable, were made using local materials.

Geo: 52.045054 13.503310

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Dresden Heimatschutzt Architecture as Party Decor

In translation "Heimatschutz Architektur" would come out as "Homeland Security architecture", suggesting it to be about building bunkers or airy Guantanamo Bay shacks, but instead it has more to do with themes like heritage preservation and the conservation of regional and national building styles and environmentalism. Here, as so often in German thought, we reach the intellectual sphere where the green sentiment borders and mixes with the brown.

Geo: 51.070200 13.716395

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Disco Sucks Again Exhibition 1

Exploring stale Dutch libertinism, Western media's male objectification versus Third Worldish concepts of male honor, Dutch Intifada, religious violence and flowery ornamentation all in one nice undervisited art show: the "Disco Sucks Again" exhibition at the Amsterdam "Gays & Gadgets" gallery.

We lived in a red light brothel near the gallery, quite on display with huge street windows reaching the floor, we could have easily made some quick cash, it soon appeared. In the gallery, we hung the plates and some paintings on relief murals we'd prepared in Berlin, using obscene wallpaper by Berlin-Tapete. Pièce de Resistance of the show turned out to be a mammoth glass cabinet we put to good use. Formerly it was stocked with designer-dildos made out of imaginative materials, now we could fill it with around sixty shiny glittering painted plates. (As the staff is for a large part very muscular, I hope they don't bump into it with their powerful behinds.)

The Netherlands is a place where fundamentalist pressure on art and artist are a reality (they never heard of the German concept of "Wehrhafte Demokratie").

Planned to be a part of the cultural program of the Gay Pride days, it didn't succeed to draw a large audience. The gallery had made grand publicity, so it was kind of sad. At first, I was tempted to argue that drunk and horny people don't go to art openings, but then everybody who ever went to an gallery opening knows that's not true.

Generally speaking, Amsterdam tourism has dropped by 40%, and intolerance and violence against the gltb scene is growing (many people in Holland would link that to misguided multi-culturalism).

At least some of our friends found their way to the opening, and a few days later there was a boost in attendance after the well known local glamour artist Martin de Waal presented footage of Paulus holding a large "Iranian" plate into his VJ set at Paradiso!

More pix from the show art the Club-art Report.
An informal entry about the show can be found at the Club Art Diary.

Or you can just go ahead and download and print the stylish ceramixed pdf in the privacy of your own home.

Geo: 52.369996 4.8899995

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Berlin Expanded Cinema

Sven Gareis is one of Berlin's most experienced club-vj's. He became known in Berlin for his work for clubs and festivals as part of the media art duo monitor.automatique, and has since moved on to work on solo projects and gigs as VJ Telematique.

Of course you know that Telematics is "the (integrated) useof telecommunications and informatics. Specifically it is the science of sending, receiving and storing information via telecommunication devices". As such it is closely linked to mass surveillance. Sounds like an early eighties Kraftwerk, Cabaret Voltaire or even early Human League song doesn'tit? - It's probably intentional.

Telematique often uses architectural source material that he films himself on his many travels. Taking the Koyaanisqatsi video school as his starting point, he uses unique self-made digital tools to push that style into very original territory that is all his own: Realist and edgy, but trippy and futuristically so.

If you ever saw the movie DarkCity, with its organically growing skyscrapers, then take that as a point of reference too. Add the "a-day-in-the-life-of-a-city" theme of Symphonie einer Grossstadt, and the futurism of Metropolis &  Casshern, mix it with loads of acid, but keep the look realistic, hard and clean, and not hippie-like at all.

The prestigious Berlin Transmediale festival regularly presents samples of this ongoing collection of city-portraits, and a few have come out as DVD's obtainable from the artist.

There's a currrent online-tv feature on the überhip German Freshmilk web tv station that shows the amazing results made of urban material he collected during his stay in Rotterdam last year (performing at our FunktionDurch Verführung exhibition and "residing" at the V2digital culture institute).

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Making Art Work, Berlin Art and DJ Culture

"Our attitudes toward art are still as rigid as they ever were. We reverence art as something sacred, when we ought to be using it for our enjoyment as we do today with our clothes. Modern art has not succeeded in liberating man from Art with a capital A."

Speaks Mary McCarthy in a career-twilight novel on hijacking fine art.
In the pulpy novel, "Cannibals and Missionaries" the terrorists assume that to the state art is worth even more than hostage's life and in the end blow up a load of Old Masters. It reads like a Stalinist disaster movie, but has interesting thoughts on my hobby horse: dysfunctional art, a bit like wonderful Dave Hickey's views, and very No-Future 1979 cynical. So I grabbed it for an essay I'm working on. It uses some snippets I've used elsewhere already, but most of it is new. I'm looking for more examples of proto-Club-artists by the way (like for instance Kusama is one) and I welcome your comments.

This essay describes how Berlin's special situation allows for exciting new un-academic art forms. Despite recession, (or because?) independent Club-arts blossom that make art enjoyable again. (....) The psychedelic era of the 60's and 70's on the U.S. East coast gave us Club-art as it is most widely recognised today, as "visuals". Earlier experiments combining visual art and music are numerous though, starting with Victorian light organs. In G.B. in 1966 the recently "re-discovered" German Fluxus artist Gustav Metzger showed his liquid crystal projections at rock concerts of the Who and Pink Floyd. In the "cool" late 70's/early 80's Steve Mass invited artists to set up elaborate art installations and performances in his New York City "Mudd Club", giving young artists like Keith Haring and Basquiat a first platform. This example was followed by many larger NY clubs subsequently. The special situation in Berlin after the fall of the wall in 1989 nourished the biggest Club-art boom to date. This reincarnation sports not a psychedelic, but a playful, some critics would say "infantilist" style. It developed out of very different circumstances...

Charity Book Donations for the Blue Diamond Society Nepal

The Nepal NGO Blue Diamond Society (BDS) Kathmandu was founded in 2001 in an effort to address the needs of sexual minorities.

B.D.S. is a community based sexual health, HIV/AIDS, advocacy services for local networks of transgender and bi, gay & lesbian people in Nepal. It provides a drop-in center, outreach work and clinical services to many.

B.D.S. has just begun its campaign for a library and welcomes the donation of queer-oriented books and videos.Books and videos exploring sexualities, genders, and transgressive lifestyles are impossible to obtain in Nepal, due to the fact that issues surrounding sex are not discussed.
Some Book/Video Suggestions to Donate:
Paris is Burning

Tritiya-Prakriti: People of the Third Sex

Hedwig and the Angry Inch

To view the full wishlist of suggested titles for the BDS audio-visual library visit the Amazon Wishlist directly. Thanks.
Geo: 27.709999 85.310001