AS a lifelong fan of Keith Haring, I love stumbling across his ongoing influence, even now that he is long gone from this place. In the past I blogged about the mural in Melbourne that Keith produced in the early eighties and the attempts at conserving it for future generations. Keith made it to rarefied territory for a contemporary artist. His unique view at the world and the way in which he made it accessible to people made him one of the most loved figures of modern popular culture. It didn't hurt that he came up during New York's eighties renaissance. But there's something about Keith's work which has always resonated across the generations and the cultures. And the Keith Haring Foundation continues to spread his message through its partnering with all kinds of initiatives around the world. There have been events in Latin America, Europe, Australia among others that have kept his legacy alive for new generations. That makes me, as a fan of his, happy. So, I was really quite chuffed to see that the local chapter of the Arcigay association, Arcigay Salento, has partnered with the Keith Haring foundation for their second annual Viva La Vida contest. The idea behind the contest is two fold: it is designed to highlight contemporary art and issues which affect the LGBT(QI...) community. This year's theme is tied to Keith: artworks inspired (not necessarily mimicking his style) that highlight the main elements of the project. Selected works will then be voted for via the group's Facebook page and possibly be selected for inclusion at the exhibition which will be staged at the contest's end. I imagine the emphasis is on local artists, but I love the idea of this kind of project. It's inspiring and heartwarming. I'm happy that there will be a little piece of Keith for me to enjoy in the new year, and my little black heart is unexpectedly warmed by the whole thing. Who knew.
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Melbourne's NGV is gearing up for its next blockbuster exhibition. One which will see the pairing of current artistic cause celebre, Ai Weiwei with perennial art world favourite Andy Warhol. You've already been given the heads up on this exhibit due to all the fuss that has been created in the last week or so. For those who have been hiding away from the web, let me help bring you up to speed. Andy Warhol | Ai Weiwei is being billed as a major show which will bring together over 300 works by Warhol and more than 120 by Ai Weiwei, with the aim of exploring their practices side by side. Weiwei, no longer passport less, but ever a parriah in the eyes of the Chinese government, had pitched the idea of creating an installation made of Lego at the space. He said the work would make reference to "Australian activists, advocates and champions of human rights, freedom of expression, freedom of information and the Internet." Presumably, by using a commercially produced object that we immediately associate with childhood and innocence, the symbolism wouldn't be lost on viewers. Problem is that we don't live in a world where freedom of expression is as straightforward as it seems, especially in the commercial realms. There are always bigger factors at play when you're playing in the big leagues. The story has it that Ai Weiwei put in an order to Lego headquarters for Lego pieces, with which he planned to create the installation. Lego, declined to fulfill the order, indicating that they were an organisation that steers clear of having their products used for political purposes. A few days later, the organisation announced that they would be opening one of their flagships in Shanghai. Coincidence? Anyone smell a rat? It seems that Lego toys don't actually build anything despite the old copy lines. There are limits to expression, and not just in using squarish shapes that you have to batter into control with a mallet. Or in quashing expression in general. But this is an age where people mobilize through social media, and picking up on the unpleasant whiffs that the story was offering, and capitalizing on the attention at the same time, Weiwei attracted a lot of support and sympathy. There were stories circulating of how people were sending him their own Lego pieces to use, and his studio in Beijing became an official collection point. Well now the NGV, Melbourne's historic art gallery, has waded in. They've announced that as of today, visitors can pop by and donate lego pieces, by dropping them into the sunroof of a convertible which will be parked in their sculpture garden. Melbournians need to celebrate this. Why? Because it's a way of sidestepping the politics or counteracting them? No. Because it's Springtime in Melbourne, and being able to drop off your Lego pieces at the NGV is a fabbo way to get some more spring cleaning done - and to help a brother out. Just imagine it... you'll be able to go around saying that you have some artwork in the NGV! In the end, Lego's refusal to fulfill the artist's order seems to be a win win. It will render whatever installation Ai Weiwei can fashion from the donated pieces more potent than the simple commercial exchange could ever have done. And, NGV's support of the initiative will go someway in helping them in their quest to be seen as a contemporary venue, and not the stuffy, historical house that they were traditionally seen as. I plan on popping by to inspect the end results when I pop over to Melbourne over the new year. NGV press release here. Sara Goldschmied & Eleonora Chiari are two Milan based artists who have worked together for some time. The Museion space in the North Eastern Italian city (some would argue that it's actually not very Italian) of Balzano commissioned the artists to produce an installation as part of the collateral events for Milan's Expo. Their response? An eighties tribute. And you know how much I love the eighties.Pretty ingenious idea if you ask me. They imagined the Italy of the eighties and managed to tie in their observations and experience with more than just a bit of social commentary. How? By imagining eighties Italy as a party or more precisely, as the remnants of a party. Dove andiamo a ballare questa sera? (Where shall we go dancing tonight) is the resulting work. The snapshot of what began to happen the very morning after the party had ended. You know when the guests have gone, and there's no life left at the party...just the left overs that need to be cleaned up and cleared away. In capturing that moment, Goldschmied and Chiari have effectively acknowledged and paid tribute to the Italy of the eighties that no longer exists today (but whose consequences live on). What they're referring to was the Italy which was experiencing something of an economic boom, and large scale (unfettered?) reevelopment. This coinciding with Italy's notoriety as being one of the centres of Europe's cultural and party scene. It was a party that brought with it a lot of fun, but a socio, economical and political mess which is still being dealt with today. Love the idea, love the concept, and in a way, also love what happened next...and to think I thought it was modern life and not modern art that is rubbish. Check what happens here. A FRIEND once likened my opening of a gallery in an inner city suburb of Melbourne as being a bit like the wholesale import of culture into the area. Given that he is an urban planner, I thought about the remark somewhat. The said suburb already had a reasonably well developed cultural scene, but I think the particular stretch of the high street I opened was regrettably a bit like the no-man's-land my old tennis coach used to warn me about steering clear of on the court. But we live and we learn, but the high cost of rent in the world's major cities dictates. I live in, let's say, an economically challenged area of Rome, many of whose inhabitants are not known for their sophistication. I particularly hate a lot of the people in the neighbour hood if you want me to be honest. Last night, a new nominee for my Dislike campaign received my vote; the woman who lives on the third floor in the building opposite mine. She routinely clears her table each night, and bats her tablecloth out of her window, letting the debris (including paper serviettes) simply fall to the street (our street) below. She watched with the kind of detatched fascination that most people watch snow falling as the grubby bits of paper simply floated down onto the street. These two analagies came to mind when I got to thinking about one of the things that I actually do appreciate about my area. The Wunderkammern, a groovy little artspace that opened on the otherside of the tracks, about a five minute walk from my place. I've seen a few interesting shows there; not an easy feat in a space that has very limited opening hours; but increasingly, I am growing to love the approach and the program that seems to be unfolding. Click on READ MORE to continue the post. Visitors to the FotoGrafia festival at Macro Testaccio would be best advised to visit the international pavillion after the Italian, for it is here that the unfortunate disparity between the local and the international offerings are most evident. Here, photography is again exciting, moving, and artists use it as a medium to tell stories, share experiences and clearly articulate concepts in a way that unfortunately doesn't happen often enough in the adjacent pavillion. Willem Popelier's __and Willem (2010) gets the ball rolling in a complicated, yet visually simplistic style. Here, Popelier constructs a photographic genealogy of twin brothers separated at birth. Relationships become hard to follow, convoluted and impossible to keep track of; its a conceptual process brought to life in a cold, scientific, yet graphic way, augmented by the more thorough accompanying book which further delves into the subjects and takes you beyond the often hilarious headshots that you cling to as you try to follow the upheaval of relationships and family over the years. Mizu no Oto (The Sound of Water), curated by Rinko Kawauchi, features the work of Japanese artists, broadly linked by a tribute to the power and symbolism of water. Beyond the catastrophic potential of water which we have seen the worst of in the past year, Asako Narahashi delves into a world in which sight is still possible, but sound is distorted by submergence in water; images in which the photographer documents the shore from deep water are powerful and atmospheric where the horizon line is no longer relevant, orientation is distorted and our sense of involvement is heightened. Elsewhere, Kawauchi's Illuminescence images seem to be in line with this year's theme at Venice, though thankfully they seem to belong here. Elsewhere The Place Where I Belong, curated by Marc Prust convincingly spells out the dualities and difficulties of those who have grown up in bicultural environments. In particular, Katherine MacDaid and Rania Matar's photo essays on life in the Middle East are beautiful excursions into texture, pattern and design, whilst at the same time offering up intimate portraits of life and the subjects that make up their second worlds. Datascapes by Matthieu Bernard Raymond switches the direction around, using GIFs to integrate our obsession with graphs and charting into environmental settings. Here natural phenomena become living charts plotting everything from productivity to profit; in these modified black and white images we are forced to contemplate our modern life and its often diammetric opposition to the environment and our surroundings. The temptation to fill the large space with an elongated series is resisted; the point is clearly made with the half dozen or so images that are chosen for the exhibition. Leaving this second pavillion with the same friends I left the first with, the conversation became one of confused jubilation. This is what a good international photographic festival should leave you feeling. Here, the objectives of the exibits were clear, their execution sharp, and the images varied and compelling. In short, this half of the festival was a celebration of photography and not an excuse to be self indulgent or to treat audiences with a form of contempt in which its simply enough to plaster walls with images as if they are some kind of wallpaper. Exhibition runs into October, so if you are in Rome, make sure you head there, but follow my advice! FotoGrafia, the International Photography Festival is on again at Macro Testaccio in Rome. This is the tenth edition of the event, presented at one of Rome's most evocative exhibition spaces, Macro being the site of the ex slaughterhouses of the city. As I am an absolute sucker for good photography, I felt I simply had to attend, pushing aside the underlying concerns I have in regards to photographic festivals that seem to be in every city, every town, every village of the world these days. My initial concern that such a spread of events spreads the talent even thinner seemed to be borne out at first when I visited the first of the two pavillions, that being the work with predominantly Italian pieces in them. It was a sense of dejavu that made me recall my visit to the Venice Biennale where the Italian pavillion left me decidedly underwhelmed, and a little frustrated. Here again are works which may be occasionally strong at a technical level, but in terms of aesthetic and ambience are lacking. There are two overwhelming problems in the Italian pavillion; the separately curated exhibits don't sit well with each other and there seems to be no interplay here; the exhibits make for uncomfortable bedfellows. The other problem is editing. Unfortunately, even the curated pieces here are lacking in editing; curators in this section of the festival seem unwilling to help their artists in thinking about what is vital, what fits, what will a viewer need to walk away with visually? In one exhibit, Giorgio De Finis gets so caught up in his concept of the Space Metropoliz that we are left with eighteen (!) images that even in their entirety fail to capture the heart and soul of the project's stated aims. The project instead relies on the didactic text to explain that the photos were taken at a centro sociale on the Casalina, a district in the impoverished Eastern region of Rome, in a bid to document not only the trying conditions in which the immigrant subjects of this piece live, but to also achieve the photographer's aim of bringing the (faded) lustre of space iconography to the commune in order to elevate their spirits. What we are left with are too many large format images on a single wall that are only linked because of their repeated use of the lunar icon and a few well placed astronaut outfits. What's lacking are real studies of the subjects and a visible documentation of the effects of the visit, and what could have been better said with perhaps six images is instead spread too thin across eighteen. Much better in this pavillion is Salvatore by Lorenzo Maccotta (curated by Giovanna Calvenzi). Here, an attempt by Maccotta to better understand his father, with whom he has a strained relationship, takes him on a six month journey to the north of Africa, across Sicily and the southern islands of Italy. At the end of this, Maccotta and Calvenzi choose no more than eight or so images, each striking, simplistic and evoking the dry, arid areas in which Salvatore's life has played out, and the gradual warming of the air between father and son. It's a well thought out and deeply personal project which bears real fruit. An underwhelming series by Pablo Lopez (in Rome) and a hit and (mostly) miss affair by Alec Soth compound that tendency to over populate exhibitions, but the same approach is more successful when adopted by Valentina Vannicola, whose elaborately staged and produced L'inferno di Dante, imaginatively brings to life fifteen of the differing hells espoused in Dante's Inferno, a text with which all Italians are familiar with due to the required reading and study courses that even elementary school students here have to take. Overall that first pavillion is very underwhelming. As I left it with friends, they told me that they didn't know how to feel, given that they normally were accustomed to visiting artist specific exhibitions. I explained, a good collective exhibition should leave you feeling challenged; challenged in the sense that your feelings should be competing with each other to help you determine which works you felt most strongly about, rather than leaving you feeling tired, apathetic and wondering why you mostly bothered when there were a handful of really touching and provocative works in a stable full of otherwise voiceless images. |
Dave
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Dave Di Vito is a writer, teacher and former curator.He's also the author of the Vinyl Tiger series and Replace The Sky.
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