Art Show: Candice Breitz

Music is a universal art form. Most of us like certain music genres or styles over others. We also admire, fancy and love our stars. And some of us go above and beyond, and start looking like their idols and mimicking their behaviour. That's what Candice Breitz has captured in three photographs of monumental scale on the ground floor of The White Cube in Mason's Yard. The three groups of devoted followers are Iron Maiden, Marylin Manson and Abba.

At first, i was taken away by the beautiful arrangement of these group portraits, but when looking at the details it triggered fast-moving thoughts and memories: about my own stint in heavy metal gangs during adolescene as well as saturday night tribes, and our desire to belong to a group in general. More than any other art form, music seems to provide a framework for an identity, as these enthusiatic fans look pretty much like their idols - theme and variation.

Moreover, these sub-cultural identities often define themselves through mutual exclusion and aversion, think mots versus bikers back in the 70s. This phenomenon is mirrored by one beautiful detail in the Iron Maiden work: a woman wearing a typical heavy metal uniform comprised of jeans and leather vest cluttered with stickers and patches of her favourite bands and other attitude-bearing pictograms, and the one on her right arm says "Saufen gegen Goth" which means "Binge drinking against gothics" - these deeply melodramatic-depressed-looking disciples of marylin manson are hung on the opposite wall; what a genius juxtaposition!

Downstairs is a 25-screen video piece, and if the photos haven't already made you smile, this will make your day. Instead of listening to John Lennon himself, you see 25 hardcore fans singing his anthems, but each left to their own devices. They listen to the songs via earplugs, and sing alongside his voice - but you can only hear them, one by one, filling a screen on their own, 25 of them in one row, individual yet synchronized, well almost - what a gigantic and hilarious cacophony. Very funny.

To actually watch people "giving everything" in front of a camera looks like worshipping to their god: some are in pain, some look like they just entered heaven, and all that moving limbs and shaking heads, not to forget the pulling of spectacularly weird faces is comic relief and results in a rare atmosphere for a commercial art gallery - wild laughter, open and loud.

The next moment it makes you think how YOU look when passionately singing in the car at 7am in the morning on the M25...

Until 28 Aug 2007 at White Cube | check a short video on http://tinyurl.com/28dkbg

Art Show: Andrew Bracey - Freianlage

I love animals, preferably in free nature, rather than in a Zoo. That said, the Zoo plays a pivotal role in saving certain species from being extinct (think Panda) as well as educating humans about animals so that we take better care about our little (and big) friends.

Andrew's Freianlage is about Zoos and our relation to it. Just as observing social interaction of monkey tribes in their cages is like being shown the mirror of human behaviour (funny, sad, nasty, cheeky, egotistic, altruistic etc.), this well-curated show in this small space in Hackney exposes the imbalance of power in the battle for living space between our globalized consumer society and the billions of other species around.

His wall installation "Migrate" uses found objects, discarded, binned, thrown away, taken out of the consumer cycle, as a substitute for canvas or paper to paint birds in miniature scale. As a whole, a microcosm juxtaposing icons of nature (kingfisher, flock, robin etc.) with standard leftovers of the waste economy (cigarette boxes, screwed paper, plastic and other usual suspects). Looking at the individual piece, it is a sad yet motivated cry to mankind that battling for habitat is a zero-sum game - that our earthmates are loosing right now.

The monkey in the magnifying glass device, which looks like a robot from a car manufacturing assembly line, reminds me of the safari holiday quest: on the one hand there are the 'bad' types that leave a terrible ecological foodprint, on the other hand there are responsible tourists that understand and respect the animals' need for some remains of privacy, thus, only watching and filming animals from a decent distance with the help of this technological achievement.

My personal favourite is a tiger painted in oil on the tail end of a game dart - penetrated into a corner of the gallery walls. The arrow/dart missile is still the dominating hunting form for indigineous tribes in the rain forest across the globe - silent, efficient and deadly - just like the tiger itself who is known and respected as the king of the jungle, and only killed if attacking a human.

A real discovery! Until 28 January 2007 at Transition Gallery, E8

Art Show: Miniature Worlds

The main reason why I pilgrimaged to this Southbank art space is to see Tessa Farmer's fairy cosmos again. She describes her work as ‘a tool to realise imaginative possibilities that might otherwise linger unseen, just beneath the surface'.
These tiny fairies and hell's angels are created from plant and tree roots and their scale is determined by the insect wings sprouting from their backs. Of course the most natural question is how on earth are human hands capable to produce something that small (we talk milimeters rather than centimeters here. But I guess the most important question is what the hell is going on here? Cute death? Do insects secretely rule the world and Tessa's fairies are the translaters into humanoid information which she in turn scales up through her own person...

I can go back again and again, I have no logical explanation why I am so in love with these pieces - apart from knowing that when she was in the New Contemporaries exhibit in the Barbican in 2004 the then installation cost £4K, and I seriously intended to buy it until I realised that it was (still) to much dosh for someone like me. Today she is worth three times this amount...recently picked up by Uncle Saatchi.

Jerwood Space, until September 2006

Art Show: Fischli & Weiss

Many of us know the 30 minute video 'The way things go' - the most inventive, bizarre and unique domino effect that humans could possibly create, where, based on chemical, mechanical and physical effects, household appliances and other gear sets themselves in motion in an empty factory hall. The sources of inspiration for this Swiss duo are endless, yet their art is shockingly mundane and plain in execution. However, what makes it stand out is this odd combination of aestethics and philosophy by two Alpenlaender Anoraks with a cheeky humour.You have to see it to believe it. However, you also should see this exhibition at Tate Modern, the best I have seen there since the Joseph Beuys Retrospective last year.The only major area of their work I haven't seen immediately turned into one of my favorites: an entire room full of little clay models, mostly left unfinished and unfired, capturing the most inportant events in human history filtered by the duo's own perception of what's important and what not, hence, the title of this microcosm 'And suddenly this overview' couldn't be more poignant. You see moments in technology, fairy tales, civilization, sex, religion, nature and entertainment, and the funniest in the latter category is the clay model of "Mick Jagger and Brian Jones going home satisfied after composing I Can't Get No Satisfaction"

Another room is filled by large scale photographs of flowers/plants and airports, beautiful and stunning. But perhaps the most intriguing room is "Visible World": three flat screens present an archive of 3,00 photos taken by the artists on journeys across the globe. It is not so much the material, but the curation and the way the images are fading into each other. Here is a lake. Now a boat emerges. Then the boat dissapears again, and the lake is joint by mountains in the back. Of course the boat and the mountains are not around the original lake, but another one somewhere else. Better than photoshop and digital imaging effects could ever be...

Don't miss it!

Tate Modern, until 14 January 2007