The Pine Float • Miranda Lehman

some moody pics from the folio of Portland based Miranfa Lehman


















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BAZAAR - The Anatomy of the Art Market

On the occasion of the Kunstherbst (art autumn) and due to the variety of fairs in Berlin, Meinblau at the same time plans an exhibition project which analyzes and parodies the mechanisms of the art market however using its presentation forms. Taking the spirit of the age and established market strategies into consideration famous deceased and not as much famous artists alive are presented so that the latter usually profit from the popularity of the first. The main idea of the project is discussed in form and content in the works of the contemporaries’ altogether and sometimes they refer to their deceased colleagues. In the works the ways of the art market are dealt with critical associatively, occasionally cryptic-abstractly and radical striking, too. Thereby the works of the contemporariesremain always market adapted, firm as well as beautiful and are to be bought.

The exhibition consists of a homogenous presentation in six large stands beneath the central high window of the Meinblau hall. Instead of the usual stickers with appropriate information about the work, the video artist Andreas Sachsenmeier shows interviews with all participating artists about their market intentions which can be seen and heard on miniature monitors at the back of the stands. BAZAAR likes to unmask the current art markets’ turbo-capitalism with this group exhibition but attends it at the same time.

(press release)

I am not sure if this is a convincing concept to deal with the art market and fair circus but the participation of Naomi Wonnenberg, Andreas Sachsenmeier and Joachim Seinfeld is reason enough to expect an enthralling exhibition.
opening tomorrow (saturday) 7PM

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artists: Andreas Sachsenmaier, Anna Jakupovic, Arnulf Rainer,
Bernhard Draz, Felice Naomi Wonnenberg, Frank Kästner,
Joachim Seinfeld, Jörg Lange, Matten Vogel, Max Klinger,
Neo Rauch, Nicolas Manenti and Pablo Picasso

OPENING: Saturday, the 29th of September at 7 p.m.

Meinblau | Christinenstr. 18/19 | D-10119 Berlin | Telefon: + 49 (0) 30 44 96 457

The Madagascar Plan - a verbal monument (kabary)

Eric Van Hove, who recently presented his Oracle as part of the Directors Lounge project memory in motion, is now participating in 30 et presque-songes, a group show at the zone zital ankorondrano, Antananarivo, Republic of Madagascar. In the village of Isorana, region of High Matsiatra, Fianarantsoa province, he created a verbal monument (kabary) The Madagascar Plan.



The Madagascar Plan: from 1938 onward, before opting for their extermination, Nazi Germany seriously considered and nearly carried a plan to forcibly relocate the European Jewish population to the African island. In his Reflections on the Treatment of Peoples of Alien Races in the East, Heinrich Himmler declared: "I hope that the concept of Jews will be completely extinguished through the possibility of a large emigration of all Jews to Africa or some other colony." 1
A form of traditional Malagasy oratory, kabary is based on the unhurried telling of ancestral proverbs, metaphors, and riddles, frequently in a dialogue using call and response addressed in high voice to an assembly. Originally used in public gatherings and political assemblies of a pre-literate era, the form has since evolved and been popularized, but it has kept its specific rules. Today, despite the rising literacy rate and the familiarity with different manners of speech, kabary is still considered necessary for communication during ritual events, and is also used widely in regular, day-to-day talk. If one of the main rules of kabary is that the subject or point of the conversation can never be broached directly (and in some instances cannot be stated at all) one of the specificity behind the Holocaust was precisely that it was masterminded as to erase all traces of its occurring as it was taking place: the work is therefore intended as a verbal monument to what didn稚 happened (the arrival of six millions of jews on Madagascar). While the mpikabary (kabary practitioners) of the Petsileo people in central Madagascar are suppose to be the best, there are many types of kabary: ceremony, burial, circumcision, history/memory, exhumation, marriage, engagement, inauguration, apologize, etc.
This verbal monument (3 hours in length once included the important preliminary discussions) therefore gathered 10 Petsileo mpikabary for a Tsiok'afo kabary (litt. "blow on the fire" - revive the fire stands here as a metaphor for reviving the memory), a kabary of memory.
Their names were: The elders: Ndriamasolo Gabriel Pierre, Razafimandimby Daniel, Ralahy Ignace Delphin. The adults: Ramasy Alphonse, Randriamamdimby Alphonse, Rakotonirina Jean-Baptiste Dieu-Donné, Rakotonirina Dieu-Donné. The youngsters: Ratahirinirina Jean-Charles Angelot, Ranirina Nomenjanahary Lidrient, Ratsimbarinony Charles Narcisse.

1/ Christopher R. Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press, 2004.

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Eric Van Hove
Fenenin El-Rahhal (or the "Caravan of Artist-Nomads")

My Dearest, Dearest Creature

Angela Singer explores the atavistic notion of the hunt, and its trophies. While a strident activist against all forms of animal cruelty—including vivisection—much of her recent artwork is made from discarded hunting trophies and other taxidermy that strives to illuminate human exploitive tendencies of the rest of the animal kingdom. It's a chilling effect; these carcasses highlight how grotesque natural beauty can become after suffering at the hands of humanity.
The English-born painter is currently one of nearly 50 artists featured in " Existence: Life According to Art" featured now through 14 October at The Waikato Museum in Hamilton on the North Island of New Zealand.

Existence, the art exhibit, is an exploration of the ancient question of sentient existence; Descarte's "I think therefore I am..." being a jumping off point. Singer's contribution with her investigation of the divide between human and animal life is an intriguing compliment to the art world in the Southern Hemisphere. »

thanks Archibald

more here, here and here

Do not the most moving moments of our lives find us without words?

Born Marcel Mangel in Strasbourg, France, on March 22, 1923, he came from a lively Jewish family with socialist ideals and an artistic bent. His extended family included many musicians and dancers. By the age of 7, Marceau was entertaining neighborhood friends with his comic talent. "I discovered I could make people laugh and cry without speaking," says Marceau, who wasn't "doing mime." He was, in fact, imitating Charlie Chaplin. (Indeed, Marceau's thickly lined eyes and mouth and black-and-white silhouette evoke Chaplin's silent-screen image.)
When Marceau was 15, his life unraveled. On the day France entered World War II, his family was given two hours to pack. Marceau and his older brother, Alain, fled to temporary safety in Limoges. Alain became a leader of the local French underground, and young Marcel joined in. To hide their Jewish origins, the brothers changed their family name to the solidly patriotic Marceau, a famous general in the French Revolution.

Marceau's wartime activities presaged his later artistic role as illusionist. Using red crayons and black ink, he altered the ages of French youths' identity cards, proving them too young to be sent to labor camps. And later, masquerading as a Boy Scout director leading campers on a hike in the Alps, he saved hundreds of Jewish children's lives by smuggling them into Switzerland. No surprise, then, that his most affecting works -- notably "The Trial," "The Cage" and "Bip Remembers," which recounts Marceau's own wartime experiences -- are highly political.
In 1944, his father, a kosher butcher, was arrested by the Gestapo and murdered in Auschwitz concentration camp.
After the war, he enrolled in 1946 as a student in Charles Dullin's School of Dramatic Art in the Sarah Bernhardt Theatre in Paris, where he studied with teachers like Charles Dullin and the great master, Etienne Decroux, who had also taught Jean-Louis Barrault. The latter noticed Marceau's exceptional talent, made him a member of his company, and cast him in the role of Arlequin in the pantomime entitled Baptiste - which Barrault himself had interpreted in the world famous film Les Enfants du Paradis. Marceau's performance won him such acclaim that he was encouraged to present his first "mimodrama", called Praxitele and the Golden Fish, at the Bernhardt Theatre that same year. The acclaim was unanimous and Marceau's career as a mime was firmly established.
In 1947, Marceau created "Bip", the clown, who in his striped pullover and battered, beflowered silk opera hat — signifying the fragility of life — has become his alter-ego, even as Chaplin's "Little Tramp" became that star's major personality. Bip's misadventures with everything from butterflies to lions, on ships and trains, in dance-halls or restaurants, were limitless.
His biggest inspiration was Charlie Chaplin. Marceau, in turn, inspired countless young performers — Michael Jackson borrowed his famous "moonwalk" from a Marceau sketch, "Walking Against the Wind."

Marceau performed tirelessly around the world until late in life, never losing his agility, never going out of style. In one of his most poignant and philosophical acts, "Youth, Maturity, Old Age, Death," he wordlessly showed the passing of an entire life in just minutes.

Single-handedly, Marceau revived the art of mime.

As he aged, Marceau kept on performing at the same level, never losing the agility that made him famous.

"If you stop at all when you are 70 or 80, you cannot go on," he told The AP in an interview in 2003. "You have to keep working."

Marcel Marceau died today in Paris. He was 84.

sources: AP, Wiki, Salon

a summer evening with sheri wills

Amazing musicality and intensity in color are the foremost impressions of Sheri Wills' films. At the same time they speak about the beauty and fragility of the microcosm that surrounds us, and in our daily life, barely catches our attention.

Having started off with super-8 and 16mm films, and the endless possibilities of an optical printer, Sheri Wills still uses photograms as starting point of her films, however, she now also uses found footage, lens-based images and digital technology in combination with this "earliest and simplest photographic technology".

On a closer look, one could also say, the films of Sheri Wills evoke memories, illuminated memories without pointing to a specific time, or reference in the past. Rather, they are passageways in a territory of synthesized memories. If there are (according to Roland Barthes) signifiers without significants in language, one could then say, Sheri Wills' pictography is an artistic mnemonics without significants in the past. The colors and shapes, as abstract as they may appear still maintain a reference to the physical world. Their mere beauty and rhythmical structure, though, give them the quality of unresolved deja-vues. Bergson's view of a simultaneously present existence of the past and the presence comes into mind. In this concept, Sheri Wills' image making would be the presence of memories, which extend into the future while ignoring the logic of a time axis. Her films evoke memories of forgotten dreams, of childlike awe, of the "earliest cinema" of Brakhage, while rubbing your eyes. Even the used found footage does not point to a specific time period, although we can read traces of a timed fashion. Thus, Sheri Wills, in her own genius way, has made the leap from "movement-image" to "time-image" (Deleuze). Memory does not have to talk about past; memory and image associations may as well be about the present or the future. However, they definitively live on in a different time mode.

Sheri Wills deep interest in contemporary music has also led to congenial collaborations with young modern composers. Viewing her films thus becomes a synesthetic experience of color, form, rhythm and music.

The program will consist of 16mm films and digital video projections.


a summer evening with sheri wills
curated by Klaus W. Eisenlohr
Friday, 21 September 2007, 9 pm Z-Bar, Berlin, Bergstr. 2

Xu Yong

from his folio at FotoFest Beijing 2006



















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The Last Duck Race in Singapore

Tens of thousands of rubber ducks take part in the last Great Singapore Duck Race in Singapore September 9, 2007. The race with 85,000 rubber ducks, which raises funds for seven charities in Singapore, will be the last one down the Singapore River before it is turned into a reservoir as part of the Marina barrage project.

Tens of thousands of rubber ducks make their way toward the finish line in the last Great Singapore Duck Race in Singapore September 9, 2007. [Reuters]


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How To Melt My Heart

Carrie Fucile at Artifact + Metafact

Carrie Fucile describes her work How To Melt My Heart as a sound-sculpture. She cast 17 molds in ice from a human-sized heart model - one for every day of the show. Every day, one is hung from the chain in the middle of the gallery and melts onto a new sheet of paper under which is a contact microphone connected to an amplifier. Every time a drip hits the sheet of paper, the sound is amplified throughout the room. By the end of the show, there will be 17 drawings from the 17 hearts.

Artifact + Metafact: artists exploring the transformation of visual symbols

13 artists, working in a variety of mediums, interpret iconic imagery into a contemporary visual dialog with the viewer. Flags, video game imagery, famous artworks, geometric forms, and surreal dream imagery are all subject to critical, yet beautiful, dissections. Specifically, the artists will explore a symbol’s potential to exist both in physical reality (artifact), and in our collective memories (metafact). What are the conditions surrounding this transformation?

Curated by Tamas Veszi and Carla Aspenberg, this exhibition serves as a follow up to the 2006 Brooklyn College MFA show, Plan B, which sparked wide media coverage after it was censored and then improperly shut down by NYC Parks Department (last month the artists were issued a formal apology and cash compensation). Plan B Prevails, was eventually reopened, although greatly changed by the new context of a different venue, and media exposure. Sarah Nicole Phillips turned a Parks Department logo upside-down in quiet protest, and born was the concept that would become Artifact + Metafact, where context dictates the meaning of an image. How can the most widespread of all imagery also be that which is most open to interpretation of meaning?
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September 8 - 30

Repetti is open Wednesday to Sunday from 12 to 5pm, and is located
at 44-02 23rd St. Long Island City, NY, 11101, (718) 670-3226.
Subway:E,V to 23rd st. Ely. 7,G toCourthouse SQ.

memory in motion

MEemory in motion, art in the public space takes place in Munich these days. Unfortunaly I am having much problems to post at all. To give you a little idea about what´s going on in rainy Bavaria I add this feed that should serve some snaps from the show.

TXTual healing hits Munich

Paul Notzold, a well known name for readers of the Katz, did a spontaneous performance of TXTual healing at September 6th. Even so the bubbles enlighted again a rainy Munich it was a vivid event, partly because guests of a nearby club participated with passion from indoor safety.

See a short video of this wonderful evening after the jump