Kajsa Dahlberg+Julien Grossmann: Vibrating Revivals+Guillaume Lachapelle: entre-temps+Zuspiel/ Judith Schwinn: planet earth rebirth=29th July-21st Aug

Kajsa Dahlberg

Julien Grossmann: Vibrating Revivals

Guillaume Lachapelle: entre-temps

Zuspiel/ Judith Schwinn: planet earth rebirth

29^th July-21^st August. Künstlerhaus Bethanien gmbh, Kottbusser str. 10, 10999 Berlin, DE, by craniv boyd.

 

When a group exhibition fails to be a group exhibition, it, a stage for the artist's work, fragments, splits apart into four single artist exhibitions, as exemplified by the current exhibition at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, in the just barely Kreuzberg area of Kreuzberg, Berlin. Sad when artists elect to indulge in the maxim of: "just me and my work by its own self in one big room, looks best".  Three of the lone "emerging" artists, art installations are titled by the "emerging talent" themselves, and one artist, leaves her name as title enough.

 

Of planet earth rebirth.

 

Flower arraignments as miniature anthropomorphic figurative micro sculpture. If making it big is not an option for you, than select to make your sculpture truly small and obscenely light, as German, Judith Schwinn does. Carefully glued shaped flora and fauna are Frankenstiened together into dancing monsters that, due to their small stature would most certainly fail in frightening a rat, or large mouse for that matter. The light of foot, figures stand whimsically on thinly gauged, hand formed wire or a narrow above eye-level pedestal. One extra long blue wire is playfully dangled from ceiling water piping tucked behind one structural cross beam. That blue wire dangles downward then culminates upward bound somewhere above waist level with one of the dancing flower creatures hot glued to its novel shaky support.

 

Of entre-temps.

 

Clever scale Model making is driven to a fast paced apotheosis or collision, by Canadian Guillaume Lachapelle, section or rooms of the exhibition. Suggestive Freudian models of libraries and bookshelves that in their chaotic folding in, look both, vulvic and yonic. Knowledge acquisition can be seen as akin to diving into the abyss, learning for the bibliophile a pleasurable experience like chaotic sex, or as for French existentialists like J.P. Sartre for whom knowing and possessing were closely relating.  This digression is unwarranted, for Guillaume Lachapelle, has made technically impeccable decorative objects the look like sets for films never to be filmed. The Vagina or chasm libraries, when set four on a grey wall under high harsh dramatic lighting lead viewers either: into a dark pit, or, down staircases, reminiscent of emergency fire stair for buildings, that end with last step in free floating air. With the aid of hidden smoke machine with timed emissions, a darkened curtain drawn room, a glass vitrine and light emitting diodes in each of the banal north American urban street lamp, Mr. Lachapelle creates an atmosphere for a vague memory of the panic of loneliness in fog covered city nights that the viewer should have.

 

Of Vibrating Revivals

 

Droning sonic angst or meditative ambient sound sculpture is what, French artist, Julien Grossmann's contribution to his own one-person exhibition at the artist house, known as Bethanien, is. As per obsolete magnetic tape, audio recorders and playback systems, placed on the floor, used as sculpture, with white plastic turning parts wall mounted to extend, and make transparent one big loop of magnetic tape that feeds and cycles over, and over, through said obsolete sound playback system. It is a sculpture that makes a lot of sound while it is doing its job of looking like current art. In another room a more seductive and elegant display of mini, disc shaped speakers as minimal geometric sculpture. Four ways of showing an old Peruvian recording, has its charm, gold colored thin circular speakers, a few centimeters in diameter, that look like Incan jewelry resting on a three leveled slate table that would perhaps cause any true modernist furniture designer to cry. Each of the "four ways" looks, visual, enough when contrasted with the dark colored table surface and subdued lighting, to overshadow the sound component of this artwork, the instance where the speaker discs lay flat is the most transparent, where viewers can know what those little shiny circles are. The low decibel sound, emitted from the flat laying speakers, causes small vibrations to shake up those golden speaker discs. Less convincing is the grey-scale photographic pairings of departed German scientists and explorers and a digital imaging or visualization of a sound record they made when alive. As characters they look bizarre enough, dressed up with combed blond hair in Inuit, costume but as art works it falls rather too neatly into the substratæ of Natural History or Science hall display.     

 

Of the works of Kjasa Dahlberg.

 

The Swedish artist, Kajsa Dahlberg, presents two videos, one pamphlet to take home, and on the upstairs level of Künstlerhaus Bethanien's exhibition spaces, a work of art, about a library book and those who read it that begs for written explanation, for more comprehensive understanding of what, the artwork is exactly, due to the fact that it is made entirely of photocopied sheets of paper under glass panels in pristine white display cases. The two videos on the ground level, are looped video documentation of an un-theatrical project for the theater that, is jam packed full of characters one does not normally see in the theatre, non acting Swedish women between the ages of 35, and 85, and a shorter loop which is an interview with an off camera female Danish language speaker, talking of an underground political lesbian "porno film" with the preconditions of you have to be a woman, in order to see it. All works exhibited, by Dahlberg are resolutely anti retinal, and are in many aspects refusals to see, or to show. The video loop is all sound or all image, silent sun-drenched public square across the street from the Mayors office in winter Copenhagen, is shown or the lens cap is on the camera recording video, recording video as the speaker on audio track says the word platform with a Danish accent. Kajsa Dahlberg, makes a rigid contemporary artwork with the dominant contents of, how north European people talk about what a contemporary work of art is.

 

To rehash:

 

The works in each of these four one-artist exhibitions are of artists who for whatever reason are not working together, who each have their own, based solely upon the character of their current artwork shown, myopic focus on a niche agenda. Broad generalist visually rewarding or big and heavy artwork are absent. Standing up to be-counted are however, the Xerox copy behind glass, the video loop, the extra large photo graph, the sound installation, the flower, the singular gesture; framed as work on paper, and last but not least the exacting scale model. The works all rest on the smaller side of small scale. The fact that they are impeccably lighted displayed and installed, brings the care behind the meticulous presentation, to the fore, emphasizing hallmark of a more practical artistic sensibility, that the installation technician team of Künstlerhaus Bethanien, doubtlessly possesses. By craniv boyd.   

Louise Bourgeois- The Puritan: 8 Triptychen-1990-1997. Galerie Fahnemann: Fasanenstr. 61 10719 Berlin, de, by craniv boyd.

Louise Bourgeois- The Puritan: 8 Triptychen-1990-1997. Galerie Fahnemann: Fasanenstr. 61 10719 Berlin, de, by craniv boyd.

 

All is right in Berlin, when you can see, art works on paper, created by a: productive, late, North American and celebrated, artist Louise Bourgeois.  At gallery Fahnemann, the intimate store front setting on a quiet west Berlin street, is pitch perfect with, the reserved, narrative hand colored, copper plate prints by an artist, who was well past sixty years of age when she made the cycle of 8 etchings titled the Puritan.

 

The structure of the cycle is a cohesive whole and is partitioned into text in the center panel and stereo images of nearly identical geometric abstract forms. The dual images deviate from one another in their details; the hand coloring of the identical plates, the vertical orientation, or where the aqua tint field is, or where ink has been left on the cooper plate for printing.

 

What most could find unapproachable or inaccessible about geometric abstraction, minimal shapes, there on a picture plane, is in this series of mature Louise Bourgeois playfully subverted. Viewers could be, as I was lured into a game of seeing. Where same-ness of minimal imagery, is teased into singularity, uniqueness of the artists hand. The shapes, that bookend the central text in bland san-serif type, take on illustrative meaning, when set against the words of a mysterious story with, first person, third person, and personal pronouns and no familiar names, yet as shapes, Louise Bourgeois, keeps those elements of the art work, resolutely, on a plane of mysterious import.

 

The story of The Puritan takes that terrifying space between prose and poetry. And Louise Bourgeois, in this work has not staked all, on one or other of those absolutes. The roughly eight paragraphs long tale asks if the viewers know the New York Sky, and tells them that: they should know it. The words employed in the tale are both clear and uncomplicated, all self reflective of the title and content of the whole series, Puritan.

 

With eight pages Louise Bourgeois, did a similar accomplishment, short rich story in eight pages only, to German playwright, Heiner Muller and his post-modern eight-page adaptation of W. Shakespeare's Hamlet, die Hamletmaschine. Both works rapidly transport their readership with few pages, the densely complicated references and language of H. Muller, more telling of an artists wordy look from divided Germany, jarringly expressionistic. The Puritan takes people to a different cultural vista, that landscape that speaks of social circles of a successful, elderly artist woman, living on the upper east side of Manhattan, and having a warehouse to make her art in Brooklyn, minimal and stable.

 

It is a pity, that given such high caliber minimal works on paper are shown, all etchings respite with magical moments of simple art bliss, that one print, all prints carefully, mounted, framed, behind glass would be damaged, holding a hardcore crease deep in the surface of its archival paper. Minimal art, works on paper, brilliant, for their restrained elegance are unforgiving when damaged. By craniv boyd. 

Ruth Kretzmenn, Insurgency: Opposing the Plasic Law 29.June – 30. Juli 2011, GALERiARTiST,Fasanenstr. 68, 10719 Berlin, by craniv boyd.

Ruth Kretzmann, Insurgency: Opposing the Plastic Law 29.June – 30. Juli 2011, GALERiARTiST,Fasanenstr. 68, 10719 Berlin, by craniv boyd.

 

If as an current art spectator you are in need of a groovy grand tour of the 19th century, romantic and realist french painting, then Ruth Kretzmann, and her recently hanging one person painting exhibition in central, Berlin West, could have fixed your yen. Ten mid scaled fraught, oils on canvass, with colliding subject matter, amounting to, wry visual punning that imbues the general impression of: gifted young north east sea coast American___Kretzmenn, comes from Massachusetts yet part of her artistic training transpired in Bavaria___ overdosing on the cultural painted assets of the good old world.

 

That aside we have poetical titling of the artworks with mild sardonicisms like both Philosophizing Sheep, of 2010, and Welcome to my Mansion, of the same year that ask of the viewer to know their G. Courbet form their E. Manet. The images, crafted by Kretzmann are, bastardized mutants of known and celebrated masterpieces of the second half of the 19th century, cloaked in all-to-terrible and gaudy garb.

 

The nude woman figure in Philosophizing Sheep, which corresponds to the seated staring woman in the now celebrated, and mythical, Manet, placed in the rail terminal turned Museum, Musée d'Orsay, in Paris, smokes a cigarette as she confronts those who behold her. Sheep trample waters in a landscape that would be bucolic were it not for the looks of too much acid rains. Or more literally, day-glo fluorescent blue contour edges delineating both, the wood, and their leaves. A man with a larger than life animal head accompanies her and is seated on a patch of glowing blue grass.

 

Trite processional lines of minivans,summer-vacation-trailers, clutter, and at times obscure, the leg room of the standing figures in Welcome to my Mansion. Supplementary figures who such as: female blond toddler in diapers, and kneeling, pale, grand-mother type wearing pink cardigan, co-populate the painting plain with Courbet him-self who has the head of a black horse, the art patron, Bruyas the art collector, appearing in Kretzmann's version, both dejected and with a case of hydrocephalus, and the character cast in the role of man servant, in Welcome to my Mansion, is naked below the waist, his, unseen fully frontal nudity, reminiscent of the metaphysical Italian G. de Ciricho large masturbatetor.

 

In that the paintings are as much about today as they are other older paintings painted at a minimum age of 100 years, the mid scaled oils, of Ruth Kretzmenn, although eclectic, dis-topic in their soucre imagery, and directed in their acerbic titles, are a far cry from being mutinous. As an art exhibition in Berlin west, just a hop, skip or jump from Ku'damm, Insurgency: Opposing the Plastic Law, proffers neither insurrection nor opposition. The paintings, however attest to, artwork of a good colorist. In particular, River Crossing Cattle, of 2011, a painting with two figures in a Phoenician ship fording a river, makes plain with token means,the mysterious sojourn, that can be art creation. By craniv boyd. 

Richard Hawkins, “Scalps, Dungeon and Salome Paintings” 1 July -27 August 2011, Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Fasanenstraße 30, Berlin 10719, by craniv boy

Richard Hawkins, "Scalps, Dungeon and Salome Paintings" 1 July -27 August 2011, Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Fasanenstraße 30, Berlin 10719, by craniv boyd.

 

This is an exhibition of bright colored paintings with homosexual iconography.  There are shoe boxes women's shoes in large sizes, drag queen sizes and clippings of hair and colored tags on bands, which interspersed between the paintings, hang on hooks. The work is in Galerie Daniel Buchholz, and for those interested in seeing naïve, clumsy small to mid-scaled oil on canvass with men in bikinis and floating severed heads along with "scalps" that fit into shoe boxes giving new meaning to prêt a porter, then Richard Hawkins, is your artist and his current work shown until 27^th of august would be right for you.

 

 Idle men, in empty spaces that look like nightclubs, standing in doorways, poised at a threshold. The paintings titled Salome paintings with descriptive titles that sound like a punch line in a horror movie "three heads and a thong" have just what they describe, zombie heads (at home perhaps in Hannah Barbara's Scooby Doo) floating and one man wearing a thong.

 

Is the Berlin painting aficionado to "read" paintings seen in eleven years past the turn of the millennium, with a cloying flavor of expressionism collectively named Salome, as reference to the biblical story, or homage to the West Berlin based young wild painter of the nineteen eighties with the artist name Salomé. 

 

Paintings built to hold other, smaller paintings, oddly shaped oil on particle board tableaux, that are perhaps understood as, what late Phillip Guston trying to make a tromp l'oie of a metal dungeon door would do. Each of the dungeon door series has a rectangle cut away that fits snugly one of the smaller Salome line.  The most abstract open ended and flexible of this line is a work sub-titled Venice. Beach or biennial, there are no figures in this painting and if one opens the associative "door" marked biennial one could think of the Icelandic national Pavilion at the 2009 edition of the Venice Biennial, with perfom-ative paintings, or bad painting as performance of the Icelandic artist who has it all, pop music band, art practice and gallery representation on both sides of the Atlantic ocean, Ragnar Kjartanson. Photographs of his performance where he painted on oil on canvass portrait of his pal in a black Speedo, one painting per day. Made the front page of the arts section in the New York Times.  That is if you look at art and paintings with the skeptical eye of a detective on the hunt for associative improbable trails of influence in current painting.

 

Richard Hawkins, a talented pop colorist, has set some pictures with layers patchwork textures that look slightly cartoon esque and decorative with light subject matter and creepy gruesome heads that oddly look like they are checking out the half naked men standing in the doorways of the picture plane. The work is a series. As such individual exemplars appear repetitive. It is a gallery exhibition, and of course all works are for sale each work, each painting, with few exceptions looks as if it is a copy or slight shifting of another painting. The work begs the question of: who would like to have awkward colorful paintings of young half-naked men and rotting flying ghost heads observing those men? By craniv boyd. 

Basic Instincts:Villa Elisabeth Invaliden St. 3, Berlin by craniv boyd.

Basic Instincts: creative direction: José Klap & Sandor Lubbe, artistic curation: Luca Marchettie & Emanuele Quinz, exhibtion design: Henrik Vibskov.  Alexandra Leykauf, Amie Dicke, Anne de Grijff, Anne Holtrop, Ari Versluis & Ellie Uyttenbroek, BCXSY, Blommers/Schumm, Bo Reudler, Daphna Laurens, David Jablonowski, Doeple Strijkers Architicts, Erwin Olaf, Frederike Top, Freudenthal/Verhagen, Georgios Maridakis, Gionata Gatto, Hester Scheurwater, Iris van Herpen, Jo Meesters, Joost Vandebrug, Klavers van Engelen, Lab van Abbema, Lex Pott, Marcel van der Vlugt, Matthias Vriens, Monique van Heist, Morad Bouchakour, Natasja Kensmill, Navid Nuur, Oda Pausma, Pascal Smelik, Paul Kooiker, Paula Arntzenm Petrovsky & Ramone, Pieke Bergmans, Powerhous Company, Sandor Lubbe, Scholten & Baijings, Sharon Geschiere, Siba Sahabi, Stealth Unlimited, Studio Glithero, Whim Architecture,Juli 1- 31. 2011, Villa Elisabeth Invaliden St. 3, Berlin by craniv boyd.

 

A building in a green square near a church in Invaliden Street, in center city Berlin, is where this multi-floored, exhibition titled Basic Instincts takes place.

 

Artists, photographers, designers, fashion designers, industrial designers, architects and glass blowers all from, educated, or active in the Netherlands are the diverse creators included and exposed in this month long exhibition, that although jam packed with different artworks, scale models, and products, is surprisingly uncluttered and deftly organized. No small feat.

 

Lex Pott has a series of metal shelving that might make a natural scientist or chemist smile. His pallet is of oxidation, there are a few metal panels and the chemistry of the rust inducing reaction is named on the plate of wall-mounted metal, acting like color chip. Directly before it stand shelves made of the respective Zinc, Copper, Aluminum, Bronze or Steel, and their corresponding acids. There is a wondrous array of how metal can change color.

 

Artist Anne de Grijff created a series of irregular shaped wooden triangular puzzle pieces that when tied together with plastic zip ties, form a modular display platform. Taking out the Utopian teeth of Bucky Fuller, and his geodesic and triangle designs. 

 

Jo Meesters, contributes chairs vessels and tables made from reused and cast paper pulp. The chair shown is solid carbon black and sturdy and weighty. The inside of the large basic formed bowls are varnished and have a semi reflective surface.

 

Doeple Strijkers Architects, show a scale model and an animated presentation of a sustainable tequila brewery and community development project. The plan develops further the traditional Hacienda, and in its program and cycle production like proffers other reusable functions for the by products of Agave fibers, for their clients in the Jalisco region of Mexico.

 

Powerhouse Company, in a video coupled with plaster model retrospective of their Villa portfolio, set-forth what both architects dub a pleasure principal. Their interview has an obnoxious funk-music track. Lamentably you cannot hear the architects speak about what that principal might be, because of the blaring background music. Yet Flood house, funnel-shaped with a roof patio with four stair cases in a cross that lead up to a rim looks stunning. Other homes like villa Neo, although with novel settings in the topography look like further, accessible meditations on the Barcelona Pavilion, by that ex Bau-hauser Mies van der Rohe.

 

Fashion designer, Iris van Herpen, has decided to show one of her recent collections by commissioning a short video, by artist Zach Gold. The clothing looks of many black rubber bands creating swishing porous sleeves for knotty, gnarly textured corsets producing an impractical neo baroque underwear look, for clothing that is barely there or easy access. The video has a couple man and woman covered in flour pillow fighting on a bed, their staged battle and grappling suggestive of what the clothing can do. Youthful bodies on a bed, which are barely clothed. Their clothing that is mutable, and shredded paper reminiscent, is one more proof in the sex sells canon.    

 

 

Hester Scheurwater takes black and white photographs both objectifying, and abjectifying her-self that look like a spirit of Japanese photographer Daido Moriama possesses her. She lies in the mud and with a cell phone and large mirror takes an up skirt photograph that, clearly a dirty girl would take. The compressed space and contorted athleticism of the seen camerawoman looks like alcohol fueled Glastonbury, Roskilde, or Woodstock experience gone wrong, but it is also could remind like mystery the unseen sadist, revealed to be drug addled woman chauvinist in the "controversial" prodigy music video of the early 'aughts titled "smack my b?*$% up".

 

There is a funny comprehensive formalistic look at specific types of sub sets or subheadings of people in disparate locations. Ari Versluis & Ellie Uyttenbroek Take pictures of "carry daddies" "formers" "French touch" and "girls of the 7emm Paris" in front of white or neutral backgrounds, presenting the joys of conformity. All people start looking the same and like one another and the clothing it seems would make the man or woman if they chose to be an eco-punk in Rotterdam or a Muslim man past 50 years of age in Rabat.

 

What made this exhibition so lively apart from the wooden platforms on wheels on rails you could lay-back, and roll around on the second level, was an attention to craft and material sensibility that rewards the senses. There was one room with one artwork in it that had so much anise, nutmeg and cumin that you could smell their fragrance on entering. At one point you had to touch the exhibition design elements grey woven elsatine bands over conduit, to pass through the barrier that hundreds of these bands imposed between spectators and the objects. Seeing is what people are accustomed to doing in a situation like this, yet with optical art that, at first look, seems like black and white stripes to give you a migraine headache, contains after staring blankly a hidden image of a three quarter length portrait of a Dutch model wearing a pale gauzy designer blouse. 

 

The venue of Villa Elisabeth, which housed Basic Instincts, is a centrally located largish building with character and charm in its many levels. The Villa looks like it could very-well function as a Municipal arts center or home for a public contemporary art museum collection, although it is a parish, might have the makings of a great smaller museum building. By craniv boyd.    

Making Mirrors: Von Körpern und Blicken (of Body and Gaze) NGBK, Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst e.V. Oranien Str. 25 D-10999 Berlin.by craniv bo

Making Mirrors: Von Körpern und Blicken (of Body and Gaze) NGBK, Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst e.V. Künstler/Artists Sonia Barrett, Jean-Ulrick Désert, Farida Heuck, Wayne Hodge, Rajkamal Kahlon, Wolfram Kastner, Phillip Metz, Oliver Walker/Dave Ball, Serfiraz Vural, Pasquale Rotter, Daniele Dause, Manuela Ritz, Oranien Str. 25 D-10999 Berlin.by craniv boyd.

 

Tucked behind a storefront for a bookshop that appears to have a selection of coffee table books on current art and design, is a non for profit exhibition space, called NGBK, Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst e.V. Currently on view there is a small group exhibition, inclusive of just over a dozen artists, the kind of presentation that non commercial art exhibition venues, for art-made-recently tend to do best.  It is a thematic exhibition that showcases artists who are making societal commentary on the narrowly focused or overtly broad topic depending on your world view of race and prejudice, as felt locally in Berlin, Germany.

 

The artworks, that are saddled with the awareness raising task, which both their creators, and the organizers of this exhibition give them, are of diverse materials, from Text piece to polychromatic plaster sculpture, back to video installtaltion to cordoned off scatter art. Every thing from painting and coloring books to mirrors and collage is on view and all art-works introduced to NGBK's public, are in service of challenging normalising stereo types and bias as it relates to people of color.

 

Visitors are confronted with San serif letter forms scaled at about eight hundred and sixty four points, (big type!) a questionnaire on the wall that poses a series of queries with ostensibly no wrong answer, that in their existence provide German and English speaking visitors with a frame of reference to look at the rest of the art that follows or a cryptic background to form a lens tinted with race related questions. Big letters that ask viewer to reflect on their own self awareness, and position in „Racist" society, should you need more time you can lift and take a photo copy of the questionnaire, provided by NGBK, to think over the „leftist" survey taken from Eske Wollrads book „Weißsein im Widerspruch: Femininistiche Perspectiven auf Rassismuss, Kultur und Religion"

 

If you want to wear on a daily basis a polemical re formulation of sentiments found in the survey questions you can purchase a white cotton tee shirt, by artist Farida Heuck, at the information desk for fifteen Euros. These fashion items, with German words in boxes that look like the European Union advisory labels, on Cigarette packaging that tell people more or less that smoking will kill them. „Seitdem ich weiß bin, muss ich nicht mehr als Putzfrau arbeiten!" reads a message on one cotton tee shirt, and it is quizzical statement. Although it confronts issues surrounding labour and race, the tee-shirt does so with simplistic means.

 

Wayne Hodge paints a neoclassical bust of a woman black and adorns the figure with big plastic or rubber black-person-negroid lips. Idealistic cultural by -product of an era when racialist and nordecist thinking was in its germination stages i.e. the 19th century, and laying some thick oily looking black paint over it. Mr. Hodge has included this work in an oeuvre titled Negerkuss, performances where he kisses statues and objects. The bust on a pedestal, however, looks like a remnant. Despite that it is a statue, its small scale provides this instance of Wayne Hodge's artwork with the character of, thought provoking afterthought.

 

Rajkamal Kahlon, makes paintings and cynical coloring books, the paintings if you cant afford to by them have the same content of the coloring books and are designed to be one cohesive unit. Coloring Germany has one painting where the 16 federal states of Germany and the state capitals are named after cities in the Middle East and Central Asia. The mid-format painting is purposely evocative of a child's coloring book. Quirky hand writing announces and contradicts the names like Mosul and Kuwait, along with suggestive colorful textile patterns that stay neatly within reunified Germany's current federal frontiers. In another painting, the paid piper, of Teutonic folklore, leads figures in burkas, one, on camel back, the clear juxtaposition is flatfooted, yet totally in line with Hamburg's recent tradition of painting as bad joke or just plain bad.

 

The video installation, with interviews three to eight minutes in length,  where strangers of the educated creative cast in Berlin are invited to a dinner party and participate in a modest artistic experiment, seeking to divorce visual, and auditory hallmarks of a persons character, from content of speech.  Via a system of video surveillance, microphones, ear pieces, and a pairing of actual actor at the dinner table who was obliged to utter and repeated the content of the unseen speaker in another room, who saw what was transpiring via live video feed. The multi player game like work although doubtlessly fun to participate in for the privileged or willing invitees, is, in its current dry incarnation, decidedly not fun to look at. Oliver Walker and Dave Ball pit social networking against, reality television, and even though it is three television monitors six grey seating boxes and one neutral modernist wall diagram. The work Dinner Party looks like a great pilot for a new reality television show about young 20 to 40 somethings in Berlin.

 

Worst in show goes to the artist Sonia Barrett,  her work: Und wie Heissen sie A wie Anton, who with a participatory wheel contraption rimmed with low cost plastic framed mirrors, adjectives and cut out photographs, retains the air of science fair project. The work that requires two or more participants to maneuver and report to one another is awkward in both design, choice of materials and premise. Color computer printouts of black and white people, mirrors on the opposite sides a office chair positioned in front, give a confused, ugly, inelegant, look to „social space" type art installation.

 

For visitors with numismatic inclinations the installation of Jean-Ulrick Désert, could provide significant visual titillation. Many thin coin like objects are pinned on a red velvet background, and there is one gold colored coin amongst the predominant field of silver. It is the most retinally rewarding art in this polemical exhibition, that being said it still is flat.

 

An art exhibition assigned to invoke pre-conceived, ideas of judgement, race, surroundings, or social-standing that viewers may or may not posses. In general: awkwardness, and inelegance of means clutter the treatment of this race polemic. Individual artistic positions in this thematic exhibition, the charged topic: race, are muted and muddled, hot-button issues, that NGBK re-covers, if not exacerbates, in Making Mirrors. by craniv boyd.  

Once Upon A Time: Francis Alÿs, Cao Fei, Pierre Huyghe, Aleksandra Mir, Mika Rottenberg, Janaina Tschape: Fantastic Narratives in Contemporary Video,

Once Upon A Time: Francis Alÿs, Cao Fei, Pierre Huyghe, Aleksandra Mir, Mika Rottenberg, Janaina Tschape: Fantastic Narratives in Contemporary Video, curated by associate curator and Manager of curatorial affairs, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Joan Young: 8.7-9.10, Deutsche + Guggenheim, Unter den Linden 13/15, 101117 Berlin, Germany, by craniv boyd.

 

This exhibition, at the Deutsche+ Guggenheim, is firmly in the here and now, and, its art, soon to be dated or obsolete in appearance. The fact that it is a thematic exhibition, of late Nineteen Nineties and early past millennial art, truly recent Video art in the collections of either the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, or Deutsche Bank, and labeled suggestively in the title as "Fantastic" gives a cue, or false start, to the grouping of the current artists represented in this installation.

 

Fantastic, we hope, is not meant in the qualitative declarative meaning often ascribed to the word in speech. What is meant perhaps, by this usage of the word by, Joan Young, and the exhibition organizers, and confirmed by the art shown, is more of a fairy tale and far-fetched nature. Over the top tongue in cheek temporary land art made for Dutch television in the work of Polish born Aleksandra Mir, second generation Structuralist Film making spliced with post colonial global discourse, and local community volunteer work as landscape design, in the hands of a South American Biennial project by Belgian born artist Francis Alÿs, Out sourced East Asian, Artisan production by Franco American cultural producers, Frenchman Pierre Huyghe, and the late, American Phillip Parenneo, a video art work that needs self decidedly an intellectual property lawyer.  Or fairy tale musings in documentaries tri-part video of an OSRAM light bulb plant, located in China, after the conception of Chinese artist Cao Fei.  Fantastical or Phantasmagorical, an impossible bread factory assembly line manned by women in ripe colored polyester tropical uniforms, the Argentinean Mika Rottenberg. Fable like dancing barefoot in a quizzical costume, until you drop, in your private villa in Wiemar set to a romance era piano forte sonata, by Brazil born Janaina Tschape.

 

First woman on the moon is a work that in 1999 recreated on a beach in Holland the creater where Neil Armstrong and the Apollo mission landed on the moon. The saturated color of the footage of the video loop, taken by Piotr Uklanski, has a lighthearted fun house beach party flair. Compared with the Hasseblad documentation photographs that in one case have the dual function of, exhibition design element, the high quality photos of women in white that grace: the poster advertising Once Upon a Time, the current edition of the Deutsche +Guggenheim's newsletter, and the events calendar. When you hire a team of construction workers in the Netherlands to recreate a section of the Moon, with bulldozers for you and your pals to walk up, take good documentation photographs with the same camera that NASA used when they went on the lunar expedition. 

 

For an edition of the Lima Biennial in Peru, Francis Alÿs, who is based in Mexico City, went yet further south and got some 500 Peruvian volunteers to "shift " a mountain with metal shovels for one day. The work a three channeled video installation, one low placed television screen and two free hanging "horse-Blinders" of the same mountain back projected, is installed with a preface of the "Making Of" micro documentary. The participants have more to say of how they felt and what they though when making this stiff Formalistic work, so that the voices of the university students in south of the equator Latin America, seem more refreshing than one more stilted work by the Belgian Artist, who took an ice cube or a tin can for a walk in Mexico city, and ended up on the cover of Art forum for a while.

 

Pierre Huyghe is represented first by an invoice to a Japanese animator who drew a cell and developed a character. The invoice is in a frame to make the global nature of the work and just who is the artist that should be credited as "contemporary". Inside an temporary video enclave, a large video projection that really looks in terrible need of de-interlacing, because still images of the work, looked much more crisp in their press photos. A digitally manipulated speech of Neil Armstrong mixed with Jules Verne and a schematic showing a hyper-specific random thread assigned to bind Snæfellsjókjull, to Jules Verne, to Neil Armstrong and space exploration. The glowing Japanese Anime character walks, head downcast through a barren grey field. The Field changes with the utterances on the audio track, it looks like a decibel graph, extruded and rendered in three dimensions. I suspect those who play video games saturated with high quality digital graphics that change rapidly, might be disappointed in the blank, simple and one trick pony nature of Pierre Huyghe's out sourced collaborative video work in this exhibition. 

 

 

The dignity of the changing dreams of Chinese workers is a mood set and sustained in an elegant, with cheapo means, low fidelity standard definition video, by Cao Fei. It is silent no loquacious dialogue, like C. Chaplin's classic film Modern Times, and emphasizes body movement and dance as language of Chinese men and women who despite working as laborers in a light-bulb factory, possess the skills and ability, to dance Peking Opera, emulate a Crane or stand on toes in point shoes. The plant workers are shown in a light at although of harsh neon cast is slightly maudlin, yet as such the people Cao Fei presents in Whose Utopia? are having over the duration of the video triad, an oddly unsentimental bearing. Sensitivity of approach to the people with whom she worked speaks of an author from that region.

 

The far-fetched bread factory which Mika Rottenberg, built for her video parleys in a similar æsthetic of Dr. Suess, the Grinch that stole Christmas might buy this supper long bread, or the partner of the Cat in the Hat might work in this kind of a bread factory with oddly shaped conveyor belt, where she sheds acidic tears that help the yeast rise the dough. The work in its decidedly claustrophobic and cramped presentation method, to inflict a type of temporary intimacy with strange exhibition public, is fun house. The fancy free amusement park way, of displaying a work of video art, is clearly meant to bring smile to the corners of Deutsche + Guggenheim, visitors mouths. By craniv boyd.