Felix Burrichter, the editor and creative director of PIN–UP (“the only biannual magazine for architectural entertainment”) and the curator of the current “Paper Weight — Genre-defining Magazines 2000 to Now” at Haus der Kunst explained his work process for the exhibit quite simply. The present-day print artifacts were chosen to reflect a range of well-known and unknown individuals showcased in magazines defiantly having a post-print life “off the reading table.”
More slickly produced and (seemingly) precisely targeted than Nick Logan’s The Face, which arguably is the forerunner, at least in typographic/photographic style of many of these volumes, the periodicals examined in Paper Weight are densely specific.
Visually, the exhibit at Haus der Kunst depends barely at all on a background knowledge of what are essentially very glossy ‘zines. Architect Andreas Angelidakis was clever to blow up the magazine covers to slightly-smaller-than-billboard sizes but particularly to make the finishes completely matte and impermeably saturated; they recall story boards but make visitors feel as if they are moving about the set of Lars von Trier film. (There are a few unfortunate Tracey Emin-recalling pieces of furniture here and there but nothing too invasive.
My favorite scene was the proximal juxtaposition of what happens to be the cover of the current edition of Fantastic Manfeaturing a stunning portrait of conceptual artist Jeremy Deller in a pink hoodie angled near a 2012 issue of The Gentlewoman featuring Angela Lansbury against a complementary tarama salada background. Fantastic Man of course is obviously trenchant and droll somewhat in the manner of the late Quentin Crisp while The Gentlewoman takes itself quite seriously (the Lansbury cover is somewhat of an anomaly with the usual sitters ranging within Beyonce and Christy Turlington to the same equestrienne-socialites you also don’t know from W and Town & Country. (more…)
Video is a small but strong component of Joëlle Tuerlinckx’s exhibition at Haus der Kunst.
The legendary documentary Degenerate Art: The Nazis vs. Expressionism is available now (and probably not for long, so, Greasemonkey extension for Firefox, if you know what I mean) on youtube. Part of the mythical status of this program that originally aired in 1993 on the BBC is that it was never converted from VHS to DVD or digital download and has thus been difficult to locate and view.
As you might guess from the title this documentary by David Grubin is about the famous 1937 art exhibit held in Munich called Entartete Kunst, intended by the Nazis to show, collected, the most non-enobling effects of “degenerate art.” (Der Turm der blauen Pferde was part of this exhibit in Munich, and then removed when the show traveled to Berlin, beginning its period of being missing and presumed destroyed. I wonder sometimes if it would make Franz Marc scholars more happy or more sad if it is ever recovered…). (more…)
Marcie Carey died on Wednesday, 12 June 2013 in Munich, Germany. She would have been 11 years old in a few more weeks. I never knew her exact date of birth but we always celebrated her birthday on 15 July since that is the anniversary of the day she came to Miami to join Queequeg, Astra, and me.
Marcie began her life in a puppy mill in Georgia, where she had three litters of puppies before she was 15 months old. When the puppy mill was raided and closed, Marcie was for several months in the care of Italian Greyhound Rescue to whom I am grateful for choosing me as Marcie’s permanent parent. Of the 16 IGs seized with Marcie, 11 could not recover from whatever physical and psychological horrors they had been subjected to, and they died. I always knew, intellectually, that because of her past health history (her teeth were so terrible she had to have all of them removed, she had a pronounced heart murmur, and intermittent idiopathic seizures) that Marcie would not have as long a life as her very long-lived sisters, but, really, I didn’t accept this…
Marcie must have used all her resolve to survive the puppy mill. During her life with me, she was always very quiet and introverted, a dog after my own heart. Marcie bonded with her sisters, made friends with a tiny few humans, and having been taught to do so by Astra, was extremely fond of cats. Marcie once adopted and cared for a fragile, days-old kitten until a home could be found for the kitten and I saw during these days what a brave and loving mother dog she must have been under terrible circumstances.
Toward the end of her life Marcie had a spell of difficult fortune and became deaf. She seemed to be recovering and adjusting to this new challenge though, and surprised me by warming quickly and easily to life as a European dog. The intelligence and adaptability of dogs is really incredible; just by watching our neighbor dogs out the window and in the park, Marcie quickly deduced that she no longer needed or was required by society to wear a leash, and without even one trial run about how to do so, figured out how to walk with me on the pedestrian part of the sidewalk and even to pause patiently outside the pretzel store while waiting for her own treat.
As ever she communicated by tapping me with her paw when she wanted something. In her last moments I held her tiny paw while cradling her in my arms and felt her last breath and heartbeat. For such a quiet dog she filled the home with her gentle personality and my heart with love. I know my girls are all together now and wait now myself to be with them again.
There are many other photos and stories about Marcie, Queequeg, and Astra contained in this Website. Marcie was the last connection to the family of dogs I have been in for more than 20 years.
Here is a video of Marcie persistently admiring a cat,
There were opportunities during Isabelle Graw’s presentation this past week at the Lenbachhaus to make some some site-specific comments about the collections at hand, and Graw did make tangential connections to work by Joseph Beuys and Wolfgang Tillmans, thought not those which belongs to the museum’s Kunst Nach 1945 collection.
Intensely and yet breezily theoretical (I have heard Graw speak several times, on one of those occasions dismissing the Adorno-Horkheimer ‘culture industry’ works most art historians spend their lives trying to understand as insufficiently complex for her needs in explaining the reification of art) Graw is an engaging speaker, readily admitting that many of her contentions create oppositional paradoxes which thus cannot be argued against. Graw herself occupies dual roles, as professor for Art Theory and Art History at Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Frankfurt am Main and as an art critic and co-founder of Texte zur Kunst, the respectable but for-profit Berlin art journal. Graw also has a heavy amount of street cred coming from a lengthy association with Martin Kippenberger during Kippenberger’s time in Cologne.
Her talk at the Lenbachhaus, Malerei als indexikalisches Medium in der neuen Ökonomie recasts the idea that paintings are “alive” somehow in the sense that they emanate an autonomous value in terms of the role of Painting with a “P” as both commodity and part of the larger “organism” of the process and documentation of the making of art.
Indexical is a word mostly associated in art history with photography, and photography is important to Graw’s current interest, which expands upon many of the ideas she raised in her recent book High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture in the sense that “documentary indexicality” is all but a de-facto given the ubiquity of record-making technology. Additionally, in the trinity of “icon/index/symbol,” “index” marks a definite place and time by compelling a reaction in the beholder. But I think it is the more abstruse “referential indexicality” that most interests Graw in this sense, as she used Diedrich Diedrichsen’s term “Selbstdarsteller” to describe Kippenberger’s performances of himself as himself (as opposed to performing “the other” or just “being” himself).
Some Anglophones were saying recently how there were no artists neighborhoods left in München, specifically how there were no longer any such enclaves in Schwabing. I think what the person actually meant is that George Maciunas isn’t walking up and down Schellingstraße tossing boxes of junk around, leafleting, or setting up a utopian community in a Hofpfisterei storefront, meaning, there are few obvious visual social interruptions of “bohemian-ness” to the reality that it is very expensive to live or have a gallery space in the center of the city there is sometimes a tremendous, pressured sense of homogeneity in the immediate environment. This is both a true and false perception. (more…)
