Overflowing with some of the most important personalities of the contemporary arts community, this top quality exhibition and its subsequent reception in Berlin’s spanking new Soho House mark a decided upgrade for Berlin’s international profile and prowess. Twenty years after reunification, the once poor but sexy capitol has warmed up its profile by successfully straddling the gap between playground for an exclusive international art elite and public hunting ground for the freshest new trendsetters in emerging and experimental arts.

Damien Hirst and Michael Joo are no strangers to Berlin, Hirst himself having spent time here as a DAAD fellow in 1994 and Joo exhibiting at the cities House of World Cultures in 2008. The duo’s collaborative efforts have produced a stunning selection of unique works for this exhibition which blend some new takes on well known Hirst favorites (like his pill laden medicine cabinets, surgical tool display cases, and formaldehyde embalmed animals) with works by Joo that highlight the pairs shared themes of dissection, casting and preservation of animal parts. Particularly impressive are a new black and stainless steel rendition of Hirst’s Medicine cabinet entitled Dark Continent and Joo’s striking segmentation of an Elk Antlers along steel rods in Improved Rack (Elk #18). All the works presented deliver the high polish, hi-impact style we have come to expect from Hirst, with an elegance and style that signals Haunch of Venison Berlin might finally be starting to come into its own since the dynamic international art dealer Anna Erickson joined the branches directorial team earlier this year. All in all a good sign for Berlin’s hard working arts community, which has already turned its attention to preparations for the June eleventh opening of the 6th Berlin Biennial.

What strikes me is the fact that in our society,
art has become something which is only related to objects,
and not to individuals, or to life.
-Michel Foucault

Jonathan Solo
April 2010
By Stephen Riolo

The body is an amalgamation of stories, a history carved into the skin and drawn across the features of the face. As a preeminent draftsman Jonathan Solo uses the play of surface, line and collage to render the depth and contour of candid communicative bodies. Floating in compositions on cream-colored paper, these potent but delicate figures hold a presence that demands their views attention and inspection. Assisted by Solos unique collage techniques, these layered compositions of finely rendered body fragments generate completely new personas that stare back or brood at us like eerily seductive masks. Their dark eyes seem to flirt with us, like the reflections of ones own eyes or face distorted in a pool or fragmented in a broken mirror. As such, the works act to temporarily dislocate and call into question our own sense of self and the masks we also wear to hold our inner questions and conflicts of identity at bay. In Discipline and Punish Michel Foucault said, “(Social) discipline, however, had its own type of ceremony. It was not the triumph, but the review, the ‘parade’, an ostentatious form of the examination. In it the ‘subjects’ were presented as ‘objects’ to the observation of a power that was manifested only by its gaze. They did not receive directly the image of the sovereign power; they only felt its effects – in replica as it were – on their bodies, which had become perversely legible and docile.” (p. 187-188) When subjects are broken down and presented as objects in Solo’s work, they are exhibited to the observation of the sovereign power of public identity or society scrutiny or the art audience. These bodies have become perversely legible and docile in that they express their decent against social norms simply by existing. What we reach here, in Solo’s work is a deeper negotiation of broad social politics. Solo’s work embodies the story of contemporary identity politics, its critical analysis, and that small glimmer of public discourse on the topic that was born and bred in minds of philosophers and writers working in and inspired by time spent in the unique cultural environment of the San Francisco Bay area. Aesthetics, if interpreted as a language, may exist to distract and thereby protect us, if only fleetingly, from a sense of existential intensity which Jacques Lacan termed the real or “that base animal nature which has been severed from us through our adoption of language”. The occasion of jouissance, or contact with the Real, is at once the totality of pleasure and pain. For Lacan this moment of jouissance is like a brief brush with an ultimate truth that the mind and body cannot hope to grasp without perishing from its intensity. But it is precisely Aesthetics, often interpreted as “beauty” or “the gaze”, which is the most seductive force drawing us towards this state of jouissance. Perhaps it is because of arts ability to produce and offer us a very similar sense of complete meaning and ultimate truth, that it is also able to hopelessly seduce our visual sensibilities. Like a moth to the flame of this totality, the totality of the abyss, we attempt to make sense of our reality through the very constellations of desire that draw us closer to death. In this sense the art of Solo is like a projection of the shadows created by the desire for an aesthetic unity of bodily form, the portrait of a complete persona, simultaneously male and female, subject and object, it’s gaze drawing us into this abyss, or as Slavov Zizek states it, into “the desert of the Real”. Solos figures are symbols of the masks we create to conceal the power of this endless aesthetic depth. Like the burial masks of ancient cultures, they are made from the image of the body that have been furnished to preserve the likeness of a living individuals personality, which will then be placed on top of the shell of their body once the individual has departed. Again we see an echoing of this layering technique in Solo’s collage style, one state of identity concealing another. However, we the audience are sensible to this play of masks, we look for the cracks around the edges. It is an obsession to find the truth behind the masks that stirs the potency of Solo’s compositions. There is above all a play of physical distraction, away from the actual form of the concealed body and into the sub context of preserving the bodies’ life essence that is also a key element in reading the content of Solos work. There is an immediate physical distraction there in, wether presented in the form of the aura of sexual arousal, the excitement of the application of physical power over the body, here again as subject made object. But it is most apparent in the indiscernible emotional message of the highly expressive but ultimately unreadable masks of his figures, sporting the flat but fierce stare run way models or the eerily recognizable smirks of porn stars, that corresponds to Solo’s skill at drawing us out of our comfort zone by reflecting our own inner desires to get behind the mask.

Images Courtesy of Catherine Clark Gallery

Don’t pay any attention to what they write about you.
Just measure it in inches.
-Andy Warhol

Hannes Bend
Satellites at the Freies Museum Berlin
14th of March – 9th of April 2010
By Stephen Riolo

A graduate of the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weissensee, Hannes Bend is busy at work transforming his quite Mitte studio into a clandestine art factory, churning out an array of bright geometric spiral paintings, canvases with long flowing hair and glassy replicas of taxidermy stag heads, hares and fauns cast in delicately vanished caramel. These particularly alluring hard candy hunting trophies, are in fact part of a detailed sculptural collection entitled CandY, a series which also features a glistening, neon blue model of Albrecht Durer’s Praying Hands and a lemon drop yellow Venus of Willendorf. Such delectable testaments to German pop-culture and folk identity immediately set one on a careful consideration of the central position consumable industrial objects have held throughout the development of Pop art and their re-emergence in the Neo-pop milieu.

From the first tootsie pop wielding body builder of Richard Hamilton’s Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? to the giant foil wrapped (candy) hearts of Jeff Koons, Pop art masterworks have always had a sweet spot for exposing the underlying aesthetics and cultural signification of mass-produced consumables and commercial commodities. It is their inherent, if not foundational link to the most traditional concepts of art as public practice and folk craft that binds their meaning to unquestionably powerful notions of identity and belonging that are intern communicated through the pervasive symbolic language of mass culture and mass marketing. In our information age, this language of mass culture is ingrained in the visual culture and the aesthetic discourse of the global art audience due to its passive consumption of mass reproduced visual information. These instantly recognized symbols of pop culture re-enforce themselves to an even greater extent in light of the emerging co-authored style of our largely net based youth culture. As such the degree to which the work of an individual artists succeeds in representing this sense of cultural belonging and its values, often rests significantly on the artists fluency in this conversational medium of mass culture. One fascinating element of Neo-pop is its remarkable flexibility in changing its compositional form to keep up with the fluctuating tastes of the communities it represents. In Germany the kitsch icons of wall mounted antlers or stag heads, when altered by the artist and presented in a contemporary art context, are transformed by their reference to this local symbolism of German popular cultural. Once transformed through the activity of the artist they become acceptable and often precious representational forms, and indeed the trophy head is this regions most fundamental, archaic and therefore unifying symbol of belonging. Bend’s use of this technique in the work “DIR” or “Hocus-pocus Hare” shows his sensitivity to this hidden language of cultural symbols coupled with a greatly finessed knowledge of the sculptural materials and visual styles associated with Berlin’s emerging and experimental arts scene.

Like the wrapped candy mountains of Felix Gonzles Torres’s Untitled (portrait of Ross), which engaged their audience in shaping an ultimately personal monument to his own departed lover, the machinery of the factory like studios of the contemporary cultural industry strive predominantly to manufacture, not an object per se, but rather a fundamental sense of personal belonging to a greater social identity and a shared history. In Neo-pop, this sense of belonging is not restricted by the historic view of art ownership or production as a pursuit of the elite, but rather as the rule of the mass over the public tastes of the elite. This new interpretation of art, as a form of communication that garners its support and value from the mass as opposed to the few is perhaps exactly the sentiment which the first great figure of Neo-pop, Jeff Koons, referenced when he said, “I believe that my art gets across the point that I’m in this morality theater trying to help the underdog, and I’m speaking socially here, showing concern and making psychological and philosophical statements for the underdog.” Still, controlling this “underdogs” (the masses) visual access to the work of art remains a fundamental principle to Neo-pop’s striking business success. As an entity designed for this public, the production of Neo-pop, its presentation and acquisition has concurrently become a topic of public interest, particularly for those institutions that represent and define the public and public space. One might call this a democratization of art and ascetics, which has also been noted by many art historians and philosophers since the dawn of Pop Art in the second half of the twentieth century. In The Culture Industry, Theodor Adorno states, “The familiarity of the piece (of art) is a surrogate for the quality ascribed to it. To like it is almost the same thing as to recognize it.” From this position, the mere existence of successful Neo-pop art can be attributed to its ability to generate instant recognition through the symbols of mass culture, while becoming a mass cultural symbol itself. Bend’s work is therefore representative of Berlin’s own symbolic capital and greater cultural meaning, mirroring its global image as the center of production for radically new and novel methods of contemporary art production and presentation

It appears that Neo-pop may have been prematurely interpreted as the ultimate form of what Fredric Jameson coined Postmodernism, or “(the) dominant cultural logic of late capitalism”. One of Postmodernism’s most basic positions; its inherent rejection of normative identity politics, cultural unity and communicational clarity central to Modernity, its methods of abstraction and composition, are not rejected by Neo-pop but rather embraced. I would therefore position Neo-pop and the work of Bend as part of this cannon not at the apex of the “dominant cultural logic of late capitalism” but rather as a new investigation into the fundamental properties of Modernity. Central to the idea of Modernity is the concept of the pursuit of innovation or more simply “the new”. While the works of Modernity were linked to a national or regional field, in Neo-pop we see this link expanded to the framework of our global visual culture. At such a scale, one sees this quest for “the new” interpreted in a surprisingly soft and familiar language of public media symbols. From Warhol’s “Campbell’s Soup” to Koon’s “Baloon Animals” these images pop into our minds as friendly symbols from our youth. This is a very powerful associational effect, which one also senses in Bend’s works. The surreal, re-appropriation of the unnaturally colored and artificially flavored rewards and visual styles of our upbringing attract us to his sculptures. In the case of Bend these memories are met with a healthy dose of irony on the romantic notions of kitch, a term invented by the German Dadaist to describe “thrown together,” “instant,” or “readymade” art. Much like the readymade art from Warhol’s DUMBO factory, these objects also represent access to mass luxury and individual taste specialization which the information industry now, like then manufacturing industry before it, uses to add a sense of deeply personal ownership of not only their products but also ownership of the process of production. Bend is obviously no stranger to the subtle, transformative effect the right industrial material or glazing can give one of his objects. His work for Neo-pop master Anslem Reyle and found object revolutionary Stuart Haygarth have infused his own creations with the visual vocabulary of contemporary sculptural practice. A good sign for this young German talent, who has set his sights on developing a new series entitled “Candy CUrTain” in 2010, with one object currently on show at the Freies Museum Berlin.

Photos by Anne Deppe

Posted via email from Stephen’s posterous

The genesis of these remarkable photographic works was in the little town of Kyjov, southern Moravia, where Miroslav Tichý (b.1926) was raised. Dissapointed by the rejection of his works and rising state sensorship, Tichý abandoned his formal studies of drawing and painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague shortly after the Communist take over in 1948. He returned home to live a life of artistic solitude, focusing instead on his favorite motif, women. Over the next thirty years, with homemade cameras in hand, Tichý managed to produce a body of unique mixed media works, that yielded not only his perchant for voyeuristic fantasy, abstraction and embellishment, but also an innate understanding of the painterly potential locked with in the photographic medium.


In his hometown, Tichý was considered a mad man. Dazed and dreamy, he walked through the streets taking photographs. Whether strolling through the city, at the public swimming pool, sharing a neighborly chat, shopping, or appearing on TV, the women of Tichýs works were photographed completely unaware of his gaze. Ankles, waists, and faces;Tichý loved to explore the feminine physique. At his own admission these were “just a motif”, a classical form which allowed him to explore and express his own creative voice. Tichý took hundreds of photographs each month, some of which he colorized and retouched, others he inserted into painted paper mats which acted as homemade frames. Each photograph he developed was a one-off original, each complete work a unique elaboration of the underlying image.

For the majority of his life, Tichýs works went completely unnoticed by the public. Though his work was produced in a small town locked behind the iron curtain, it was more Tichýs Diogenian way of life that kept him an outsider artist. As such, his works speak from a shockingly non-postmodern perspective. Unaffected, unabashed and daringly non-self referential, his entire oeuvre is completely unique in terms of concept, atmosphere, and content. There is no comparable category in contemporary photography.
 
The Swiss/Czech psychiatrist Roman Buxbaum, has known Tichý since his own childhood in Kyjov. His introduction of Tichýs works to the curator Harald Szeemann lead to their inclusion in the 2004 Seville Biennale. Having quickly gained an international following their after, subsequent exhibitions of Tichýs works have taken place at Kunsthaus Zurich (2005), Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt (2008) and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2008). This survey exhibition at Jiri Svestka Berlin will present a substantial body of Tichý’s works, a selection of his homemade cameras and accessories, as well as photographic and filmic personal portraits of Tichý that explore his extraordinary character.


The exhibition is held in cooperation with the Tichy Ocean Foundation, Zurich and Kewenig Galerie, Cologne.




We live in an era at the end of time. The information age has brought knowledge to its knees, and sent history through a process of de-constructions and disconnections that have shattered its near holy stability. What we have is no longer history but rather the fragments of such, cut off and fashioned to serve the new politics of information and development. The Afterfuture is a reference to a chronology that starts where this future ends and stops at the beginning of a new primitivism. It is a model of time presented as objects that allows us to unearth the past through the future, a method by which we might consider time as a spiraling helix that interlocks to give a structure to the passage of all ages. It is also an idea which speaks to the core human desire to substantiate a grand continuum of human life, one that can give us access to the timelessness of the “true” human soul (its culture and instinct) while assuring us of its continued persistence. As these questions reach towards the incomprehensible issues, in object form they appear to symbolize the markers that line that near sacred path into the depths of human identity.

Set in four chapters, Relics for the Afterfuture is a series of sculptural events, each of which has been assigned a color relevant to its conceptual local. Brown has been assigned to Romania, White to Greece, Red to America, and Black to Africa. This, the Romanian Brown chapter, begs the question: What has happened to the ritual potential of these traditional objects through their global contextualization as native European, yet inherently exotic folk craft? It is also interesting to consider the history of this transformation and the German experience and participation in this process. In the spiritually bereave age we live in, where do our exhausted Christendom and the persistent Pagan or folk musings of European culture unite to define clear communities, stimulate conflict and resolution on such debated social norms and behaviors across the continent and with in specific member states. What can still be considered traditional and how should we approach the traditional as an object? What is the true cost of loosing the markers of folk identity to globalization or mass cultural hegemony? What is the future of tradition and the traditional in the EU?

The objects included in this exhibition have been conceptualized by the artist Ioana Nemes and produced by masterful traditional craftsmen from all corners of Romania using techniques that are still preserved in its rural reaches. These techniques, which after Romania’s entrance into the EU have largely begun to loose their once functional ritual role, have begun to be emptied of their essence as potent magical symbols. That is to say the folk functionality of such traditional objects has been replaced by the market potential of an exotic handicraft.
The material substance of Nemes Sculptures are subtle references to and critiques of western modernity; concrete, the main element in eastern block architecture was shunned after the 1989 revolution in Romania, but eventually accepted for its functionality and, when cast and struck with precision, was finally embraced by contemporary Romanian Architects and the artist herself as a marker of refinement. Haled as a miracle substance upon its invention in the mid nineteenth century, the development of synthetic plastics shaped the course of western history. Sticking to a minimalist pallet of hues, the artist incorporates new advanced polymer resins in her work, to produce a massive, manufacturing look that instantly reminds us of the close interlinking of kitsch, neo-pop and mass cultures unsatisfiable hunger for “authenticity”. Bronze as well as a wide array of natural materials such as wood, horsehair, sheepskin, horn, wool, and feathers, communicate forms and textures that speak to the basis of European cultural heritage and mythological identity.
The prototypes for these works are each carved by the artists out of clay, molded and cast. The motifs presented are those of abstracted traditional and shamanistic objects from various historical regions of Romanian such as Brasov, Vrancea, and Maramures as well as details from the traditional costumes of these regions including their decorative elements such as, tassels, strings, seams, knotting and weaving. These traditional shapes are transformed by the unusual material properties of their substance and the formal austerity of the artists’ pallet. Grey tones, blacks, dark wooden hues and the natural pigmentations of hair and skin combine with ultra modern construction technique and materials that transform these shapes into hybridized organisms, their form blending recognizable, traditional, Romanian folkloric entities with objects of a darker, ultimately contemporary yet strikingly modern aesthetic.

Like Brancusi before her, Nemes celebrates the future through the primitive as a hyper stylized neo-primitive or post-primitive. This combination, which in the case of her masterful predecessor lead to the initiation of modernity in sculpture, is grounded in the facility of extreme minimalization and simplification of ancient form, which is used to unearth the substantial or essential semantic communication of the form itself.

The sculptures and paintings in this exhibition try to reconnect, organically and synthetically, the broken bonds between traditional objects and their sacred, ritualistic potential. It is a release of that wild and powerful energy which brings us back to the roots of European cultural identity, a tumultuous force that lies just beneath the surface of contemporary European aesthetic austerity and new formalism. It was in the rawness of Primitivism and the ultimate refinement of Futurism that Giacometti also discovered just such a contradiction strong enough to create the tension to bring his perfectly smooth, luxurious, surrealistic forms to life. Objects which unite their traditional cultural identity and sacredness, that is to say the ritualistic potentiality or the power of an objects to nourish our society, our roots and our need for these roots, with a focused formulative or even calculative content and form, based on the material ideology of contemporary sculpture. This is of course a reflection of the action of our contemporary “object” and “information” society in sculpture, a merger of symbolic meanings that you can find in all of the most successful sculptural works of the past 5 years. Having pushed sculpture in this new direction, masterful works by artist like David Altmejd, Berlinda de Bruyckere, Wim Delvoy, etc, have, like Nemes’ work, been able to merge temporal contexts by synthesizing objects that appear to come from a separate reality that can still manage to incorporate and heal the rather painful extremes of our increasingly dislocated sociological and personal identities.

Torn between the self-construction/deconstruction processes produced through the interaction of the “actual” and the “virtual”, (as described by Gilles Deleuze) we have been able to reconstitute a contemporary form of ritual nourishment through art. This is nourishment for the “soul”, which we need much more than food or water, in order to survive. It should be noted that these are Relics for (not from) the Afterfuture, a linguistic inference that places us a few steps before its arrival. This exhibition is therefore a marker of the coming rebirth of fading cultural identities, which have so far been unable to synthesize their past and present identities simultaneously, through the activity of contemporary art production, focused on the power of persistence and appearance of a timeless future.

I am deeply honored to announce my participation in the English translation/redaction of this impressive volume on the Boros Collection housed in the Bunker on 20 Reinhardt Strasse in Berlin Mitte. My heart felt thanks to Annette Schryen, Christian Boros and Karen Lohmann.

courtesy Hatje Cantz

Back to the Future
curated by Carson Chan
The Center for Opinions in Music and Art in Berlin

With the present moment barely ever escaping the lens of a camera or the text of a tweet, we have seen the passing years of our lives recorded into the new form of an “ever-present” indexed and googleable chronology. This information reality, freed from the persistence of time and decay, has become a limitless collection of our contemporary history, while producing an extreme sense of temporal relativity. Though our understanding of this new chonological form of our information age is infantile at best, the time has come to address its first anomalies; their implications for culture and art. Back to the Future, curated by Carson Chan at The Center for Opinions in Music and Art in Berlin, presented just such a selection of contemporary art, focused on the swiftly shifting essence of time. The iridescent metal lozenge of Paolo Chiasera’s “Archivio Zarathustra” (2009), a vessel containing the ashes of the entitled archive was very much in line with his recent virtuosic presentation of luxurious metal sculpture at the MARTA Herford. A slippery stream of conscious, “Versions” (2009) by Oliver Laric, led visitors though a rather graphic analysis of user generated media content and its rising position in socio-political critique. Marooned in the idyllic landscapes of classical etching, the ghostly high rises of Cyprien Gaillard’s “Belief in The Age of Disbelief” (2005), appear as silent warnings against any dream of time travel back to the unraveled utopias of modernity. With the striking appearance of satellite imagery, Warren Neidich’s, tin-type photographs of civil war re-enactments set themselves in a well executed conundrum; their false historical content, in opposition to their true historic medium and purely contemporary (aerial) perspective.

Paolo Chiasera (Image courtesy ArtSlant)

Ignacio Uriarte (Image courtesy COMA Berlin)

Olivier Laric (Image courtesy COMA Belin)

For a sample of my writing for the Reinking Collections exhibition Urban Art at the Weserburg Museum in Bremen, please visit the Hatje Cantz preview page where you can order a copy or Amazon.de. Many thanks to Ingo Clauß, Sotirios Bahtsetzis and Rik Reinking.

At six in the morning, a massive crowd gathered on a quiet stretch of one of Hydra’s coastal roads. Below a crew of divers is investigating the depths just off the cost, a boat with a crane waiting above. With winches creaking an object, which looks to be a deep sea cabinet of curiosities in the form of a glass casket, is freed from its watery grave and hauled up marble steps by superiorly muscled men. Passing the glare of a brilliantly white washed church, the casket is loaded onto the backs of donkeys and paraded back along the coastal road, and followed by this army of contemporary art devotees to an industrial concrete structure where it is interned. This is the Deste Foundations Slaughter house, host to Matthew Barney and Elizabeth Peytons collaborative work “The Blood of Two.” A cloudy eyed shark lies motionless on a bed of ice at the entrance to this little seaside pavilion, watching work men pry the lid from the barnacle encrusted vitrine. It pops open with a burst of sea water and as its lid is removed it offers up its hidden treasure; a series of nautically themed drawings by Elizabeth Peyton. This vessel of contemporary art, patinaed a soft green during its rest at the bottom of the sea, has just been put through a series of rituals usually reserved for the sacred rites of greek orthodox epiphany (like cross diving, the progenerator of the ritual of baptism) or the parade of holy icons on orthodox christmas and easter. It is then perhaps appropriate that this Dakis Ioannou orchestrated procession of a Barney/Peyton iconic object is responsible for generating such a remarkable assemblage of the international high art clergy (a little miracle for the island of hydra, and those of us across Greece that still hold faith in contemporary art.)
The passage of the object from the depths to the slaughter house seems more than a light reference to Christ the fisherman, whose bodily sacrifice precipitated the formation of the christian faith in Greece. The waiting body of the shark, perhaps a symbolic merger of this christian mythology with the actual history of the building, which reminded hydra locals of the times when the smell of fresh blood that flowed from its drains into the sea attracted schools of sharks. With a title like “the blood of two” one can only assume that Barney and Peyton have added this massive shark to the Hydra ritual as a symbol of a prize catch, rather than a lurking danger. On ice, the shark itself was destined to be cooked later that evening and offered to guests during the remarkable going away party of Mr. Ioannou, one which featured an incredibly long, last supper-esque, banquet table that stretched off into the distance.